The Price of Knowing
I stare at Spencer. The air feels heavy, stifling. Or maybe it’s just me, unable to breathe through my anxiety.
Petition the Sleeping God, Daegan.
Hearing His name aloud is one thing, but in the confines of my mind, it reverberates differently—deeper. Alive. Lord Daegan is no ordinary god. He is dormant power, sealed into the crown chakra of the newest initiated male priest. If He wakes before the apocalypse, it could unravel the fragile weave of time and fate. According to what I was taught, reality would buckle.
I’ve studied the history of the Last Priest of the Order of Daegan. Priests have gone mad just by speaking to Him, trying to wake our God before He is ready. Stupid priests, that is.
The honor of hosting Lord Daegan is passed from Last Priest to Last Priest. Someday, the final Last Priest will ascend, sacrificing himself to become one with our God. It’s said that Lord Daegan is truly the Archangel Michael, and in His most fearsome form, the human lack of comprehension would destroy the human mind.
“You wanted a way,” Spencer says calmly. “This is the only one I’ve found. I tracked the reference in a priestess’ journal in Prague last month—”
My fingers curl into fists, nails digging into my palms.
“You’re serious?”
“Are you?”
“Spence! You actually want me to wake the Sleeping God?” My voice stays low—sharp and cutting but barely above a whisper. Just in case. Just in case Veronica is awake, her little head peeking through her window at us. “Are you trying to kill me?”
My joke falls flat.
Spencer’s jaw tightens, and I catch the telltale twitch in his right eyebrow. “Of course not, Maeve.” The weight of my name when Spencer says it presses against me like a firm hand on my chest.
I could scream. I could call him reckless or selfish, accuse him of false hope—but I don’t. The hope that there’s an answer, any answer at all, pulls at me too strongly. He’s exasperated with me. I know he is. Every conversation we’ve had for months has revolved around the same subject. I just can’t let it go.
“What did the journal say?” I try to keep my tone inquisitive and unexasperating. Like I’m asking for ingredients to some outrageous recipe rather than instructions for summoning an apocalypse. Or my own death.
Spencer exhales sharply and looks away. He frowns at the candles near the far wall. “Yeah, um, she never updated her last entry.”
I gulp. “Maybe it’s not the best idea after all.”
He shrugs and stuffs his hands into his coat pockets. “You’re right—it’s a terrible idea. You could get yourself killed.”
“Then why did you suggest it?”
His eyes meet mine sharply, locking me into the honesty of what he says next. “Three reasons, Maeve. Number one: I’ve seen across my whole lifetime in this incarnation, and you die an old woman in my arms. And you’re quite sane when it happens.”
I swallow hard against the knot in my throat. Spencer doesn’t show me my future unless it’s absolutely necessary, which means he’s sparing me something. Something important.
“Number two,” he continues, “I do know you found a way to keep Veronica safe as a child. I wasn’t present, so I don’t know how, Maeve. But you did it. You.”
I take in his reasons, both of which betray how much more relaxed he is about Veronica’s safety because he already knows, and I’m just being an over-anxious mommy. “And number three?”
“Because I love you and would give you anything I could.” He leans forward until his forehead nearly brushes mine. “If there’s a chance I can help you, I’m more than willing to talk it through with you. No matter how tired I get of this argument.”
“Oh.”
“And,” he adds, softening his tone with a shrug, “since I know for a fact that you didn’t go insane or die when you did whatever you did, I’m extra-willing to help.”
“Or,” I quip in another attempt at lightening the mood, “maybe I did find a way to be offered the gift of knowing a second time, and you never knew.”
“Hmmm, I doubt that.” Spencer shoots me a wry smile but shakes his head all the same. “Knowing the future changes a person in ways you don’t expect. It can make you apathetic, detached. If there’s a disheartening event close at hand, you can find it hard to enjoy the present. With you?” He smiles. “It’s not something I could miss.”
I smooth my hands over my cardigan—a nervous habit—and take a grounding breath. “Petitioning Him would require someone alive to facilitate, wouldn’t it?”
His eyes narrow. Spencer steps back just slightly. “Like who?”
The list of names is heavy on my tongue. A roll call of all the ghosts in my past and present. Most of them should remain that way. But one rises to my lips like acid.
“Lady Moira.”
I expect Spencer’s eye roll or even indignity, not his anger. “Have you forgotten what she did to us? Do you honestly think she’d help you after everything? After all, I’ve done to keep you and Veronica off her radar?”
A deep nausea twists through me at the memory of Moira’s reign. How she dismissed Spencer and replaced him as Last Priest in her hunger to salvage Siobhan’s future rule over the priesthood. How she exiled Spencer and sent Siobhan—her own daughter—to train as her heir-apparent in Europe. And how she dismissed Veronica—her own flesh and blood—in a heartbeat when she thought the baby was ordinary. Until she learned the truth about Veronica’s soul. Royalty, reincarnated. The once great Wolf Queen meant to rule after Siobhan during the pole shift.
“Are you forgetting, Maeve? Moira died long ago. Around 1980, if I remember correctly. To ask her for help—even if she were willing to give it—would require portaling back to after you and Veronica disappeared from under her nose.”
“Or. . . I could ask Siobhan.”
He flinches, and I hate that I spoke it. Words have power. Especially names.
Siobhan, my former “best friend.”
The one who talked me out of taking the gift of knowing at my initiation, only to take everything else from me—my trust, my home, my future as the primary astrologer and advisor to the High Council. Spencer.
But here in this time, in the early twenty-first century, she’s the Ranking High Priestess, training her second daughter to take her place, just as she took Lady Moira’s. Here in this time, Siobhan is growing old and even more desperate than she’d been at sixteen.
“She’d kill you on sight,” Spencer says flatly.
He’s not wrong. She thinks Spencer and I died along with her child, even though it was her mother’s idea. After everything Siobhan’s done as the Ranking High Priestess, approaching her would be suicide. If Siobhan knew Veronica still lived, she’d tear through time itself to find us.
“Then. . . her daughter.” I force the words out before I can reconsider. “The other one. Aoife. You said she takes over only a few years into the future. That’s an easy portal trip—”
Spencer shakes his head. “You never knew her daughter as a High Priestess. Aoife was worse than her mother and grandmother combined. The things she did once she became the Ranking High Priestess? Probably the most ambitious leader the Order of Daegan has ever had, and its biggest failure when needed most. She abandoned—will abandon—the people she was meant to lead to save herself. She will fail Lord Daegan when it matters most.”
I close my eyes and push my fists against my stomach. The sheer conviction in his voice steels something inside me. I sink onto the edge of the chair and lower my face into my hands. Every path stretches out before me, lined with curses I don’t dare speak into being. No Moira. No Siobhan. No Aoife.
“Spencer?” I jump to my feet. “What about. . . Veronica?” The suggestion feels absurd, but I can’t shake it. “After the pole shift. After she becomes the Ranking High Priestess.”
His hands settle lightly on my shoulders as he faces me directly. “You know we can’t,” Spencer says quietly. “I can’t portal past the pole shift. You know this. It’s sealed. Even my scrying fails there. We can’t travel past the coming disaster. The only way to see the other side is by living through it.
The knot in my chest tightens, constricting around the hope I try so desperately to nurture. The pole shift looms over us—a collapse so vast, so catastrophic that even time itself recoils. Spencer has described its contours, its aftermath, but beyond it? Only silence. Still, he believes. He knows. Veronica will rise. She’ll lead whatever fragments of humanity remain, while her half-sister Aoife abandons Earth for Mars with her billionaire friends.
Somehow, I have to make sure Veronica survives long enough to see that future. Some people follow riches into fallout shelters or colonies among the stars. Veronica steps into the ashes and rebuilds. I haven’t seen it, nor has Spencer. But Veronica has.
She has to make it that far. My little girl—my greatest love, my greatest fear. If protecting her means bartering with the God Himself, how can I refuse?
“There’s no one else,” Spencer murmurs. “Just Him.”
The name I’ve been taught my entire life to fear rises unspoken between us.
Lord Daegan.
The Sleeping God.
Archangel Michael.
I feel Spencer’s hand gently squeeze my shoulder, willing warmth into me. “You don’t have to decide right now, Maeve,” he says softly.
But the truth is, I already know the answer.
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