I’d always wanted to know what the Advenian Kingdoms looked like. I heard countless stories from my friends, but seeing it in person was something else. It was eerily similar to the mortal world—well, Lux was. Tennebris seemed more like a fancier version of the Middle Ages. But for the most part, everything was the same. The same but different. You couldn’t distinguish between the Advenian electric user’s lights versus ours. The buildings were similar. The furniture looked identical.
And Arcane’s room—I felt like I was walking into the most luxurious hotel I’d ever seen. He had floor-to-ceiling windows encompassing the entire back wall overlooking the ocean. And his bed was so tempting, I wanted to surrender to it. I wanted to forget everything that happened today.
I should be dead, not my father…
“This is it,” Arcane said as he grabbed a black swirling liquid off a test tube rack. Leave it to my brother’s ex lover to have a mini lab set up in the corner of his room.
“It’s liquid,” I said, stating the obvious.
Arcane looked at me. “What did you expect?”
“I assumed it would be another vapor or something.”
“Vapors are unpredictable and unstable. This is safer.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, walking over to him and inspecting it myself. “So what do we need to do? Get him to drink this?”
I didn’t see how this was going to work if that was the case. It wasn’t like we could ask this Athler person to have a drink with us, and I highly doubted either of us were going to get close enough to shove it down his throat.
“No,” he scoffed. “It’s transdermal. We just need it to touch his skin.” He then poured the black liquid into another, larger vial that had a grayish tint to it.
“What are you doing?”
“Mixing it with Alluse,” he said, not looking at me and concentrating on what he was doing. “We need to take him out. I came up with this a while ago. I figured we’d need a way to getrid of his powers. I originally planned to use it on my father…” His voice grew softer as he focused on the task.
The only word I heard was father…
It kept repeating over and over again in my head.
Father. Father. Father.
My father was only fighting because he found out I snuck into Lux. He wasn’t even supposed to be here—
Arcane finished mixing the liquids and pocketed the vial. “Do you still keep those sedatives on you?”
I pulled out one of my needles, already filled with a dose heavy enough to knock out ten people. “You mean this?”
“Yes. Think you can stab him with it if I make you invisible?”
I grinned. “I could probably do it even if I wasn’t invisible.”
SEVENTY-EIGHT
GREYLAND
Peter shifted back into a bear,ripping into the soldiers who got too close to us, but without Arcane’s powers, we were slowly becoming overwhelmed. He had been using his air ability to push the soldiers back so we weren’t swarmed by them. But now that he was off with the mortal girl, we were slowly being surrounded. I could feel them closing in on us.
“Fuck,” I growled as Lilia just managed to dodge an axe being thrown at her. I stormed to her side, gripping her bicep, and pulled her toward me. “Stop running away from me.”
“Why? So you can use your powers on me again?” she snapped. Her chest heaved as she turned to face me, and her rage was undeniable.
“So I can keep you alive!”
Her hazel eyes narrowed. “You made me fight nothing. Everyone saw me—”
I was glaring down at her. “I don’t fucking care if you become the laughing stock in both kingdoms. It’s better than being dead. You can hate me for it all you want, but stop being so fucking stupid.”
I entered the minds of twenty or so Luxian soldiers,changing their perception to make it look like Lilia and I weren’t standing in the middle of the courtyard having a verbal sparring match. I knew it was dumb to waste my reserves on this, but I didn’t want to be interrupted, and Ineededher to understand.
