I killed her.
And now I’ll never know if it might have been possible to free her from their body. I’ll never get the chance to fix the mistake I made in forcing Ada and Dani to rejoin. I’ll never really know the woman I called ‘Mom’ for so many years.
Slowly, I lower myself onto the top step, feeling more tears coming. I place the sword on the floor beside me—and notice suddenly that partially dried blood still coats the blade. Horrified, I kick the sword away from me. Why the hell did I even bring it with? Probably because it was in my hand when I ran away from … from …
I turn my head to the side, blinking tears away as I try not to see their dead bodies yet again. Ryn, Vi, Dani.
I don’t know how long I sit there, holding the baluster and watching the foyer as tears stream silently down my cheeks. Hours, I think. Whenever anyone else enters the Guild, I tell them the same thing—get down on the floor, don’t move, and don’t make a sound. At this point, I have no other plan. I know I’ll have to leave soon, though, before the other Guilds find out what’s happened here and storm in with too many guardians for me to command. And I don’t want them withdrawing guardians who are busy fighting Roarke in the human world or the human soldiers in this world. That’s not why I came here.
But right now, I can’t bring myself to move. I don’t want to think about where I should go. I doubt I’ll be welcome at the Griffin rebels’ safe haven. The remainder of my family will never forgive me for what I’ve done to these guardians. This isn’t the way we get things done, Calla said. This is who the Guild thinks we are, but we have to prove them wrong. Well, I definitely screwed that up. It was worth it, though. The Guild might hate us forever, but at least they’ll get rid of their Griffin registry and their tagging system and their experiments. And I suppose I can throw in a command about them liking Griffin Gifted instead of hating them on my way out.
And then … then I’ll go after Roarke. If I can bring an entire Guild to its knees, I should be able to stop an Unseelie prince. And now I don’t have anyone holding me back telling me how dangerous it is.
Eventually, I pull myself to my feet. Beneath the ache in my chest, I feel empty. There’s nothing there. The hope I’ve been clinging to, the promise of a happy future with a family that isn’t broken has vanished into a black hole. I don’t know why I’m so shocked. Haven’t I always known that this is the way the world works? Life’s a bitch and then you die. I just haven’t got to the dying part yet.
I plod downstairs, one step at a time, staring at my dirty boots with eyes burning and raw. I don’t want to look at anyone. I don’t want to see their fear or hatred and end up drowning in my own guilt. These people deserve this, I remind myself. The way they treated Griffin Gifted fae was unacceptable. They destroyed my family. They’ve probably destroyed countless other families.
I stop then, about halfway down the stairs, hearing something … odd. Something like the crackle of electricity. The air feels different all of a sudden, like the charged quiet before a storm. I take another step, and that’s when I see a man standing in the doorway to the foyer. A man I recognize.
Chase.
Twenty-Four
Chase steps through the doorway, and that damn siren goes off again. I tell it to break. I tell it to never make a noise again. In the eerie silence that follows, I let out a bitter laugh. “Have you been sent to bring me in? Is Calla so disgusted by what I did that she can’t face me herself?”
His eyes travel across the foyer. “What have you done, Em?”
My heart breaks just a little bit more at the sight of the shock on his face. I knew he and Calla wouldn’t condone this, but it’s worse seeing his reaction in real life. “No more than they deserve,” I tell him.
He looks at me, and his eyes are as sad as Bandit’s were out in the forest earlier. Then suddenly, inexplicably, it begins to snow. Within seconds, there’s so much snow, I can hardly see the stairs in front of me. I realize it’s Chase who’s doing this, but the next thing I know, my feet are leaving the stairs and I’m flying through endless white. Wind whips at my face. I try to speak, to command something, but the wind snatches my air away so quickly I can barely breathe. Suddenly, darkness surrounds me. But it only lasts seconds before the white storm tosses me through the air again.
Then my feet are on solid ground. The wind dies down, the snow vanishes, and I stumble across the forest floor, breathing heavily. “What the … the hell?” With one hand pressed against my chest, I turn and find Chase behind me. “Was that—a blizzard?”
He grabs hold of both my shoulders and looks directly into my eyes. “We’re out here because we need to have a private conversation without a hundred frozen guardians listening in. Em, you cannot use your power on people like this.”
I shove his hands away. “You gigantic hypocrite. You just used your power on me.”
“Emerson, this is serious,” he exclaims, his eyes wide. “You need to go back there and undo whatever you’ve done.”
“Oh, so you can tell me what to do, but I can’t tell them what to do?”
“Because what you’re doing is wrong!”
“What they’ve been doing is wrong!” I yell back, jabbing my hand toward the right, though I have absolutely no idea which direction the Guild is actually in.
“That doesn’t matter. You’re not in charge of anyone else’s actions. You control your own, and that’s it.”
I do my best to swallow my anger so I can sound reasonable. “Chase, they are going to track down people like us forever. You know that because you’ve been part of this world far longer than I have. That stuff at Reinhold? That’s going to keep happening unless someone stops them.”
“No, it’s going to keep happening unless they decide for themselves that they need to stop.”
“And what’s going to make them decide something like that simply out of the blue?” I demand, throwing my hands up.
“Change is coming. It’s slow, but it’s coming. Those guardians who rescued you from—”
“It’s coming? Well guess what. It’s too damn late for us, isn’t it.” My voice breaks halfway through and my last few words come out sounding like a gasp as I struggle to hold back tears. “And even if we don’t count today, they tried to kill me when I first arrived in this world. Do you remember that? I know you weren’t there, but someone must have told you. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Oh, fantastic. Is this the part where you tell me that you understand me? That making rainbows and snow and wind somehow compares to the kind of power I was trying to figure out when I first discovered my magic?”
“Yes. That is what I’m telling you. I came from the human world too. I also I had no idea what I was. And then I discovered I had incredible power. More power than any normal faerie. Power that people are afraid of. You and I, Em, are a lot more alike than you know.”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” I mutter, turning away. I should be somewhere far from here, mourning Vi, Ryn and Dani, or planning how to get close to Roarke, not discussing Chase’s silly little weather ability and arguing about the things I’ve done. The things I refuse to regret.
“The only difference, Em,” Chase calls after me, “is that you have a group of people—a family—that will do anything for you. You’re not alone like I was, and hopefully, that will keep you from choosing the wrong path the way I did.”
The fact that he’s mentioning family—our broken family that will never be whole again—makes me want to hit him. I spin back around to face him. “I killed someone today!” I yell. “So I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I think I’m on the wrong path already. And it wasn’t just anyone that I killed. It was someone I’ve loved my whole life. Someone I should have been able to save. Is that anything like the wrong path you chose?”
“No,” he says quietly. “What I did was far, far worse than that.”
I shake my head, turn around, and start walking.
I’m not interested in this discussion anymore.
“And if you keep doing the kind of thing you did at the Guild today,” Chase continues, “you’re going to end up exactly where I was nearly thirty years ago. And that is not a position you want to be in.”
I don’t look back. I don’t care what position he was in. I don’t care about anything anymore.
“Emerson,” he calls after me. “Have you heard of Lord Draven?”
I almost don’t respond, but in the end I stop. I look over my shoulder and say, “Of course I’ve heard of him. What the hell does a dead overlord have to do with anything?”
A beat of silence passes before he says, “You’re looking at him.”
I blink. Few things could distract me from the deaths of the people I care about, but this is one of them. I turn to face him fully as a shiver of uncertainty, of fear, passes through me. “You’re lying. Lord Draven died years ago.”
“No.” Chase walks slowly toward me. “Calla projected an illusion onto an island full of people, and everyone believed I died.” As he speaks, I remember Calla saying something about an illusion she did in order to stage someone’s death. Someone the Guild would never stop hunting. But I can’t bring myself to believe that it was Lord Draven she was talking about.
“Calla wouldn’t do that,” I say, a slight tremor to my voice. “She’s honorable and decent and … good.” All the things I’m turning out not to be. “She would never save an evil dictator responsible for loads of death and destruction. Someone who brainwashed thousands and covered the world in … in …” In winter, I realize. That’s Chase’s Griffin Ability. Control over the weather. Only I never knew just how powerful it was. I never connected it to the terrifying magical storms people mention when they speak of Lord Draven.
“You’re right,” Chase says, and he’s close enough now for me to see the infinite sadness in his eyes. “Calla wouldn’t have saved that person. Good thing I stopped being him a long time before she met me.”
I take a shaky step back, my boot snapping twigs and brushing against leaves. The sound is too loud all of a sudden, as if the rest of the forest has become quiet enough to listen in on our conversation. As if all the creatures here can sense Chase’s power. As if they’re bracing themselves for whatever comes next.
“I’m trying to help you understand the seriousness of your situation, Em,” Chase says. He stops a few paces away and doesn’t come any closer. “You only controlled a single Guild today, but what about next time? What happens next time you believe you’re right and another group of people is wrong, and you control them too? What if you get to the point where you decide you need to control every Guild? You know you’ll need to control the Seelies then too, right? And then you may as well control the Unseelies as well. After all, the things they do are wrong. And you want to stop the things in the world that are wrong.”
“No—”
“Do you see where I’m going with this, Em?”
“No, I … I would never go that far. I’m nothing like you. You—you’re evil.”
“I’m not. I’ve done terrible things, but I’m not that person anymore. I haven’t been that person for a very long time. And way back in the beginning, I wasn’t Lord Draven then either. But it all has to start somewhere. For you, Em, it could be starting right now. Or you could undo what you’ve done. You could choose differently.”
I take another fumbling step back. If he really is who he says he is, then I need to get far away from him. I clench my fists, open my mouth, and let power flood into my voice. “Don’t follow—”
His hand twitches. A powerful gust of air almost knocks me down, sucking my words away from me as it goes by. “Please don’t do this,” he says. “I don’t want to fight you—”
“Get down!” I shout at him, and as he hits the ground, birds screech and take flight from the trees above us. “Tell me the truth,” I command him. “Are you Lord Draven?”
“I was,” he grunts as he struggles to lift himself from the ground. “I’m not anymore.”
“You will not—”
A second blast of wind rushes by, and this one lifts me off my feet. Icy white flakes whip around me, spinning and spinning, tossing me in circles before I land on my hands and knees on the ground. “How dare you?” I gasp, my fingers digging into the leaves and dirt.
“Emerson—”
“You will never leave this forest. Your magic will not—”
Lightning strikes right beside me. I shriek and cover my head. The ground shudders, and the crackling boom that rips through the air at the same moment almost deafens me. “I’m not your enemy!” Chase yells through gritted teeth as the echo of thunder fades away and rain beats down around us. “Stop fighting me.”
“You cannot use your Griffin Ability,” I command shakily as I climb to my feet. “You can’t use any magic. You can’t even speak! You can’t use your hands or your feet or your mind. You can’t do anything!”
Finally, he stops struggling and collapses onto his back as the rain stops. His limbs lie useless at his sides. His mouth is open and slack, and his chest twitches. This is Lord Draven, and yet … he’s not Lord Draven anymore.
You can’t do anything.
My words play back at me as I stand there with shaking hands and shuddering breath. Has my command made it so he can’t even breathe? Does it mean his heart can’t beat? Has he become brain-dead? His chest twitches less regularly. He’s almost completely still now. My heart whacks painfully against my ribcage as I consider the fact that he might be dying. And I’m just standing here watching. I’m about to kill a second person.
What the freaking hell is wrong with me?
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, shoving my hands into my hair and tugging at it. “Stop. Stop everything I said to Chase. He can breathe, he can use magic, he’s normal and healthy and alive.”
For several horrifying moments, he doesn’t move at all.
Then his chest slowly rises. His eyes blink, and he moves his head to look at me.
And at that point, everything—everything—crushes down on me with an unbearable weight. I drop to my knees, my heart finally cracking open entirely. A great sob wrenches free of me as my vision becomes so blurred I can hardly see a thing. Leftover rain drips from the leaves above. It falls onto my cheeks, mingling with my tears.
A few feet away, Chase sits up.
“I just … never wanted … any of this,” I sob. I press my hands over my face, but it doesn’t stop the tears. “All I wanted was … a family. And to be … happy. And now they’re … they’re dead.”
He pulls himself closer to me. “What do you mean by ‘they’? I thought it was only … only Daniela.”
I lower my hands and stare at him in disbelief. “Violet and Ryn. Violet and Ryn. They’re dead! They were murdered!”
Chase shakes his head, his eyes wide. “No, they’re not. They were both stabbed, but they’re faeries. They can survive a great deal.”
“They were stabbed straight through their hearts! Are you telling me they can survive that?”
“Yes,” he says simply, as if I should know this.
I scramble away from him, shaking my head and sniffing. “Stop it. Stop lying. I saw them. They weren’t breathing at all. They were—they were dead.”
“I know it might have looked that way, but as long as those blades were removed before all magic vanished from their bodies, then their magic would be able to heal them.”
I stare at him, hardly daring to believe his words. “That’s … actually … possible?”
“Yes. That’s the way it works. Magic assists in the body’s healing process, so if some object is in the way—like a sword or an arrow through the heart—then the magic keeps trying until eventually it’s completely depleted. The more injuries a person has, the less time it will take to deplete their magic. But Vi and Ryn had minimal injuries aside from the blades through their hearts, so they’ll be fine. I was with them before I came here. Violet is th
e one who told me you where to find you.”
“She’s … she’s okay?” I’m still not sure it’s safe to believe him.
“Yes, and so is Ryn. They’re both quite weak, what with all their magic being directed at healing their wounds, so we’ve put them into an enchanted sleep while they finish recovering. A temporary sleep, don’t worry.”
I launch forward and hug Chase tightly. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” I whisper. Then I lurch back and hit his shoulder. “How the hell was I supposed to know that? Why didn’t you say anything when you first arrived at the Guild? I needed to know that!”
“I—I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I thought you’d learned a lot in the time you’ve been in this world.”
“People have said, ‘It’s hard to kill a faerie.’ They didn’t exactly elaborate on all the different situations in which that statement might or might not apply.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“And the others? All the other rebels who were unconscious? Do—do they need my Griffin Ability in order to get them out of the nightmare?” At this point, I’m hesitant to use my Griffin Ability on any other person. The memory of what I did to Chase is horrifying.
“No, they’re okay. They woke up once that magic—the nightmare essence—had worked its way out of their bodies. None of them had been given lethal doses yet.”
“Okay. Good. And … the Guild.” I press my hands over my face. “I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have controlled them. They must think I’m a monster. But the things I said—they were good things—and I’m still so angry about the way they’ve treated us—but …” I slowly lower my hands to my lap. “But I still shouldn’t have done that. I need to undo the things I said.”
Chase stands and holds his hand out to me. “Shall we go now and do that? Then I can fill you in on how we’re all going to bring Roarke down.”
“Okay. That sounds good.” Then I pause as I look at his outstretched hand. “You were really … the Lord Draven?”