Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(52)

And then what I’m looking at finally clicks. “What the hell, Kai? Your face. It’s perfect!”

“It’s about time you admitted you find me attractive.” A joke, but his voice is tight and careful and he sounds held together by hope and prayer more than skin and bone.

“Don’t be a smartass. How do you look so good?”

“Genes?” And there’s that brilliant smile. Well, a version of the smile, markedly dimmed.

“Kai, start talking. You’re healed. Completely.” Which isn’t exactly true. I can see the echo of bruises below his slightly swollen eye, a light line of yellow and green that looks days old instead of hours.

“Not completely. My ribs still hurt if I breathe in too hard, and I feel the need to projectile vomit if I stand up too fast. Found that out the hard way.”

“Did Grace’s twins do this?” My hand reaches out involuntarily, almost touching his cheek. I stop short and pull my hand back to my lap. “I saw you. You looked like, well, like you took a beating. I saw you take a serious beating.”

He looks down when he says, “?‘Azee’tsoh Dine’é, remember? Medicine People clan.”

I do remember. “Tah said your prayers were strong. I thought that would make the prayers you did for other people strong. But it makes you strong.”

“It does both,” he acknowledges. “Guess I’m indestructible.” Another joke, but there’s something in his voice, something not so lighthearted, that suggests that he understands how close he came to dying. “Don’t think I want to test it, though,” he adds quietly.

“No,” I agree, wondering if prayers could have saved him if Longarm had managed to put a bullet in his head.

We’re both silent, letting the night simmer. After a while, Kai starts to talk.

“Back in the Burque.” He scrubs a hand over his face and starts again. “Back in the Burque, there was this girl. Her name was Lachryma. It means ‘tears.’ She was beautiful. An Urioste family princess, a water baroness in the making. Her family hosted these huge Fiesta de Burque galas, masked balls up at their compound in the mountains. Pageant kings and queens, Spanish reenactments. The whole old-school thing. Me and Alvaro, we had these costumes. His was a conquistador and I was the King of Storms, and I talked our way into this party. That’s where she and I met. And it was . . .” He grins weakly. “Oldest story in the book, right? And I’m the fool.”

I’m not sure where he’s going with this story, but I can guess how it ends. A land-grant princess, a poor Indian boy. “Not if you loved her . . .”

“A romantic,” he says with a little nod. He picks at a loose thread in his shirt. “I didn’t love her, Mags. I wanted to—” He makes a crude gesture with his hands. “We were hot and heavy from the beginning. But a few weeks later when we were caught, she left me to the wolves. I wasn’t worth alienating her family over. That kind of wealth and power . . . well, you don’t toss that to the wind over a couple of good nights slumming it with a dirty Navajo.”

“What happened?”

“Sentenced to a public beating. And banishment.”

“For dating a girl?”

“For deflowering a princess, although to suggest I was the first to visit her garden was comedy. But the Uriostes are powerful and old. If they want to insist their princess was a virgin and use me to make a point, who’s going to stop them?” He swallows. “Broke both my legs.” He lifts an arm and touches his elbow. “And here.” Lays a long finger against his cheek. “Shattered my jaw. After that, I wasn’t so pretty anymore. Hard to believe, right?” His smile is small and sad. “But it was more than that. It was the humiliation. My friends, my father, everyone we knew witnessed it.” He rips the thread out of his shirt, a quick jerk. “I had until sundown the next day to get out of the Burque. Alvaro paid a guy to drive me to my cheii. He was the only person we knew who might take me in. A cripple. Deformed. And he was a medicine man, so we thought if anyone could help with the pain . . .” His voice trails off, his eyes full of memories. “We didn’t think I’d ever walk again. Only I wake up after my first night at Tah’s and there is no pain. My legs work, my arm feels fine. And my eyes turn silver.”

I knew I didn’t imagine it. “Clan powers,” I breathe. “Your prayers aren’t just strong. You have clan powers that manifested as healing.”

He nods. “I don’t know what the eye color has to do with it, but it seems to get worse, the more I use my powers.”

I rock back in my chair, slightly stunned. The eye color is strange, definitely unsettling, but now that I know it’s a side effect of his clan powers, it makes more sense. “Is that why you thought you could talk to Longarm? You weren’t worried about getting hurt because you figured you would heal?”

He hesitates. “Something like that,” he admits. “But he jumped me from behind before I could even say much. Got me in a chokehold where I couldn’t speak. Started yelling about . . .” He hesitates, waves whatever he was going to say away. “It was dumb. I was dumb. I should have seen it coming. I just thought what I said to him yesterday would last a little longer.”

“You can’t reason with guys like Longarm. All the Dogs are that way.”