Page 34 of Raven's Dawn
“How to keep a misunderstanding from happening again?” No matter how hard I tried to remain respectful, my voice came out condescending. “Sometimes, wires get crossed, and?—”
“Your wires got crossed.” He finally met my gaze, and my stomach ached at the look he gave me. His brows were raised, eyes soft; the corners of his mouth quirked down in disappointment. “He had no idea what was going on, Warren. You lashed out at him. You put your hands on him. Don’t minimize that.”
My jaw tightened.
“You’re different,” Jeremy continued, voice softening. “On a fundamental, cellular level, you and Graham are different. You’re gonna handle this shit differently.”
“I get it.” I also hated that my voice came out like an annoyed teenager’s. “Graham’s been on this world before. He’s been in these situations, and I haven’t, so he knows how to handle himself better.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“He’s Fae. You’re a Guardian. You’re made different.” Squinting ahead, he pulled back slightly on the reins. Gradually, the dragon dipped closer to the Earth. “Fae are part of the world they live on. We sit on top of it, and they’re embedded inside it. They’re highly communal, and Guardians are more independent. They fight for survival, and we just fight. It’s what we’re bred for. They’re bred to tend the Earth.”
“I don’t know that we were bred for anything,” I said under my breath.
“Oh, we were.” He glanced my way, giving a half smile. “I was there. Guardians were bred, just like we breed dogs.”
I furrowed my brows. “No shit?”
“No shit,” he said. “And one of the traits that was very important to us was aggression. We created you to fight. So when we’re in that zone, when we’re fighting for our lives, for the lives of the people around us, for our people, we’re volatile. I can’t tell you how many times I have bashed someone’s brains to mush. Then didn’t remember a second of it.”
Gesturing to Laila on the dragon ahead of us, he continued. “Not her. She can shut it off and turn it back on in a second. But me, when that rage comes out, anyone who I perceive as a threat, or who pisses me off, it’s over for them.
“It took me a long time to learn to control myself. Even now, I’m not perfect. It still takes me longer to calm down after a fight than it does for Laila. But when I was young, when I first started doing this shit, it was hard for me to turn it off too. You have to learn, though. If you don’t, all you’ll do is hurt the people who matter most to you.”
Now there was a knot in my throat. Because, like Graham, he was right. He was right, and I was wrong.
Those words felt like pouring peroxide into an open wound. Supposed in an entirely new territory, I’d be saying them a lot.
I just didn’t know how. I didn’t know how I turned it on to begin with. How could I flip a switch when I was in the dark and couldn’t even feel around for it?
Because when they vanished, when I joined the others in the battle, so many emotions rained down on me at once. Terror, and anger, and fear, and somehow, I spun them around into actions. Before I knew it, I was ripping a man’s throat out with my teeth. A moment later, I thrusted my open palm into another’s chest, tore through his ribs, and ripped his heart out.
When the others implied that I was naïve, sheltered, I took offense. Quietly, but I did. All my adult life, I had killed for a living. I knew how to separate my emotions from the job.
But this was different. When I killed for the Chambers, it was calculated. Cold. A routine, a job. By the nature of it, I was detached.
Here, everyone I loved was in danger.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time I had fought in self-defense. Not even the first time I had killed in self-defense. In the fifties, at the party I’d hosted at Copperfield House, the one that’d turned into a bloodbath, I’d killed.
They had been my friends and acquaintances, though. I had always anticipated what would happen if they realized what I was. Like they had that night. No, I hadn’t wanted to kill them, but in a sense, I always knew I might have had to.
On that day, I was prepared. Perhaps I was as cold and detached from those killings as I was with the ones I did for the Chambers.
That was the odd thing. I arrived here knowing I would have to do what I had. It should have been as cold and calculated, as detached, as every other life I had ended in the past. Why wasn’t it?
“You’ve never had an enemy that scared you,” Jeremy said. “Not until today.”
A shiver worked its way up my spine. “I wasn’t afraid for myself.”
“You should be,” he said. “That fear’s fuel. Use it. But you gotta learn how to put your foot on the brake, too.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s a fact, because it is one. You have to learn.” Pulling back on the reins, he lowered our altitude some more. “But it’s gonna be the hardest thing you ever do.”