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“Why not?”
“Because I killed him.”
He said it so quietly, a confession—the thing he’d done, the life he’d taken in the Between. Only Vic had known. There, he’d given voice to a secret, and hoped it hid the other truth, hoped it hid Ian, because Silver had only proven what he fear most: the elves would go to any length to save their world, and he could not blame them, any more than he could blame the knight for trying to make a better world for her child.
“Prophecy is strange,” Silver said. “Time bends.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?” Adam asked. “I killed someone. It wasn’t White. It wasn’t in self-defense. I faced him in the Between. I saw what he was going to do. He told me, and then I ran him through.”
“And what was he going to do?”
“Lead the Lost Ones into Alfheimr, start a war between the mortals and immortals. He brought me to the Between so I could get him out, give him a ride when I escaped. I . . .” Adam lowered his head. “All those people. I couldn’t let him escape.”
“You did the right thing.”
“I took two lives.”
“Because you had to.”
“Then why am I on probation?”
“Because the Between has been opened. You have walked there. You have heard its song and seen the banshees, her furies, her wrath. Mortals are dying. They will keep dying unless we find a means of closing the way.”
“Because the Between is a prison.”
“Yes. My father made it to hold her. When they crafted Alfheimr together, they wanted perfection. They wanted paradise, but in every forging there is dross, refuse, so they cast it into a place outside of time, beyond the planes and inescapable until you found a way out.”
“Who is she, Silver? Who is this creator goddess that your father locked away?”
Adam knew the answer. He could have guessed it with or without his Sight. This time, just this once, he wasn’t an idiot.
“My father was many things, many terrible things, but he set us on a course to revere life. I took his when he betrayed that promise. Before him, there were powers and beings who answered only to themselves. You fought against something akin to them.”
“Mercy.”
“Yes.”
Adam had turned warlock to bind the spirit in a body which he’d then shot with arrows. Even though the target had survived, it remained one of the hardest things he’d done. Killing his torturer wasn’t. Killing the Wolf was. That, maybe, was what was splitting him in two, the truth that he could regret the death of one and not the other, or maybe it was the fact that he could kill when he had to, not just in self-defense, but by choice.
“She’s worse than Mercy. She’s indifferent. If my sire was the blizzard, she was the glacier. The first winter, the longest night.”
“Who is she?” Adam repeated.
Silver surprised him with a sad smile.
“You met my father, Adam. You know he was a terror. Did you expect my mother to be anything less?”
Adam let the answer hang in the air for a long while.
“You never mentioned her.”
“You never asked.”
A twinge of something barbed stabbed at Adam’s heart.
They’d been kids, teens, but he should have asked more questions. He should have wanted to know what Silver’s family was like, how he’d grown up—but Adam had been in love, or at least so deeply infatuated that he’d confused the two. He’d only looked at the moment, at them, and seen nothing he didn’t want to see.
“My father, for all his faults, especially at the end, believed in life. She does not.”
