A part of me wants to put it back where I found it and pretend none of this ever happened.
E moves closer. “I don’t like it. I don’t know what that thing is, but you shouldn’t be touching it.”
I swallow hard. “What do you mean?”
He pauses, then his bite of power ripples across the room. “What is it made for? You never said.”
“It’s leverage. That’s what it is,” Nick answers in my stead. “And if we didn’t come looking for it, hoping to get it out of this world before the Mist King comes for Max again, we’d be fools.” His voice hardens. “She’ll never be safe here as long as he’s lurking. And we can’t give it to him.”
The spindle shimmers in the early morning light, and icicles of guilt spear through my chest. E doesn’t know what the spindle is for.
A colder thought slips in, uninvited. Would E still recoil from it if he knew what the spindle was for? If he understood what it could offer him?
Flesh. Breath. A heartbeat of his own.
Would he crave it?
Would it whisper to him the same way it does to me, promising more than shadows and borrowed warmth? I hate myself for wondering whether that knowledge would change him—or worse, if he would choose it over me.
“We should put it back in the crate before we move it,” I say at last. “At least until we figure out what we’re doing.”
Nick exhales, his victorious grin fading into a thin line. “Yes. Something that powerful has to give off a spike of magic.” He eyes the spindle with a frown. “Best not to announce to every god and monster within range that we found it.”
He retrieves the crate from the wardrobe and sets it down beside me. I tuck the spindle back into its rowan bed and rest my hands on the sides of the crate for a moment.
Nick’s emerald-green eyes burn with excitement. “It’s time to plan our departure, Maxie. To go to Faerie and fight our battles ourselves.”
I knew this was what we were building toward, but the prospect of actually packing for Faerie riles up my anxieties.
My knee-jerk instinct is to deny him. “I can’t just pack up and leave. I have patients, responsibilities…”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Your mortal friends will be happier with you gone than with you dead, Maxie. And right now, those look to be our only two options.”
He rubs the stubble on his chin, and a spark of sadness shrouds his face. For a second, I wonder if he’s about to offer to go without me—as though I would ever agree to that—but then he sighs.
“This life was never ours, was it?”
It hurts, but I know exactly what he means. “No.”
I thought my efforts to fit in made a difference, that I belonged with mortals through sheer effort—something Nicklacked, hence his unhappiness—but I was only better at pretending.
My gaze lingers on the pointed end of the spindle in its cradle, so fine it looks fated to prick a finger. I imagine how easily it could pierce skin, and the brief sting that would follow.
A bead of blood would be such a small offering for something that promises so much in return. The choice whether or not to bring that priceless artifact to life could be reduced to one careless moment, one drop given without fully understanding the cost.
I tell myself I’m only studying it, only being cautious of sharp edges, but a part of me longs to cut myself on its needle, to see what kind of peace it would bring.
Could I use it to spin a thread strong enough to tie a soul back to its body, if said body could be found? My mind flashes beyond E, to Aunt Kerri, then my mother…
I can picture the moment perfectly, when a wheel begins to turn, when the fabric of life yields, and the gods themselves hold their breath, waiting to see which way destiny will break.
I close the lid of the crate, the hinges whining before the wooden box seals with a resounding clunk. “Enough dawdling.” I stand and brush the dust from my pants. “Let’s go to Faerie.”
Chapter 24
Brother Bear
E
