Free Elemental Flame by Phaedra Weldon Page B

shaking, but she wasn't leaving. Instead she leaned into the table, bent forward and slammed her hands down. "Now it's your turn to listen to me!" Her face flushed red and I actually straightened up. "I am not here as a Cleric. I am not here to spy on you and report back to Parliament. In fact, if Dryden even knew I was dating Ivan—" she glanced at him and smiled. "I'm not sure he'd approve. Because he thinks, just like all of them think, that Ivan's a Dianic Witch and nothing more. I would never betray his confidence in me, and I would not and will not betray you."
    Kyle leaned back in his chair. "Did you make an oath to the Cleric position?"
    "Yes."
    "And are you right now, breaking any of that oath by being witness to a Witch who is infected with Arcane?"
    She didn't have a ready answer for that. Dharma licked her lips. "Yes, I am breaking my oath."
    I shot her a fake smile, but it faded just as fast. "Then why should we believe you now? You're breaking a sacred oath with Parliament. Who's to say you wouldn't betray me or Ivan later on when it suited your needs? Let's say you two break up?"
    She and Ivan looked at each other for a long time before Dharma broke eye contact and looked at me. "Because I know what they're doing to Circe. And I…I can't condone that. I can't…I can't let them do that to you, because you're special to Ivan. And I can't even imagine what they'd do to him."
    My thoughts and speculations on what Parliament would do to me and to Ivan had always been just that. Speculation. I had no idea about what they'd do to Ivan and his new power. I just assumed he'd disappear in some Witch government run building and be experimented on. And when it came to Arcane users, I always thought they were hunted and killed. I thought that was what happened to Circe.
    Kyle and I exchanged looks as Grey came to sit at my feet. She leaned against me and I reached down to scratch her neck. "They didn't terminate Circe?"
    "Hell no," she looked wounded. "They're using her. Testing her. Seeing what her power can and can't do."
    "What the hell for?" Kyle asked.
    It was Ivan that answered. "Because they want to develop some kind of protection against Arcane. Develop something that would neutralize it. So she's a guinea pig under the care of the Parliament. In secret."
    I watched him. "You've seen this place."
    "I've broken in and looked—"
    "Ivan!" Dharma whirled on him and smacked his arm. "I told you not to do that! They could catch you doing that."
    "How? Present day cyber surveillance isn't even all that good when it comes to hard keying information. How can they find soft key intrusions?"
    Assuming he meant hard key was manual inputting like keyboards and point and click, and soft keying meant with the mind, like he did, I followed his defense. But I also liked the way she smacked him. Jumped on his ass just like I would, and her tone and reaction had been genuine. She really cared for him.
    Of course she does. If you opened up you could feel how much she loves him.
    You like her too? I sent this to Grey.
    I do. She balances him.
    Well, she had my mom's approval. "Okay fine. Look, everyone sit down." I waited for Dharma to sit. "Since you all know what happened at Crwys's, the real problem here is if Blackwood tells Dryden or any other Cleric."
    "Or worse, if he recorded you going all Arcane and creepy," Ivan said. "I'd already cleared the place of any signals when I unlocked that door. But if he had some kind of hand camera that wasn't Wi-Fi enabled and recorded you, I wouldn't have seen it."
    So much for the obsoleteness of older tech. "Can you make a program or something that'll like…I don't know…sit out on the web and look for something like that? Just in case he uploads it to a cloud?"
    Ivan blinked a few times and then gave me a crooked smile. "I—I guess I could. I don't know. I haven't tried to do that."
    "Try it. Can you access his phone?"
    "I'd need his phone number. If he's got a burner then it makes it