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“Are you okay?” Foster’s voice yanks me from my mortification. He crouches down in front of me, his lightning blue gaze inspecting me over and leaving trails of heat along my skin.
“Yeah, I think so.” I rub the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Wait, am I awake?” Part of me hopes that I’m not, that this is all a dream. That what happened with Porter was just a dream. And while we’re at it, I wish that finding out I killed Brody was just a dream too.
Foster nods, observing me closely as I lower my hands from my eyes. “You’re awake.” He reaches for me but then pulls back. “How do you feel?”
My mind immediately snaps to Porter, but my eyes stay focused on Foster. “A little bit lightheaded.” And completely and utterly mortified. “But other than that, I think I feel okay.” I lift my arms up then breathe in relief. “Darkness isn’t in me anymore.”
Smashing his lips together, Foster nods, then takes my hand and pulls me up so I’m sitting. The room spins like a cracked out merry-go-round, but a couple of blinks forces the dizziness from my head.
“How long was I out?” I peer around at the stone fireplace where a fire is crackling then at the windowless, branch-like walls. “And why does it look like we’re inside a big ass tree?”
That gets a couple of the Portersons to chuckle.
“We’re in a room in a hotel located in the Fey world.” Foster sweeps a strand of my hair out of my eyes. “And it looks like we’re in a big ass tree because we are.” His hand falls to his side. “Most faeries live in trees.”
“But I don’t understand how. I mean, I thought we had to stay in Enchantment?” Again, confusion is my middle name.
“When darkness took you over, we had to make a choice,” Foster explains. “We could either let it completely consume you, which is something that can happen with elemental enchanters if they unleash their power of darkness. Or, we could risk taking you out of Enchantment so Porter could temporarily get darkness out of you. But it’s not a permanent solution.”
I mull over what he said. “So when we went through the portal to the fey world, everything was fine? The god of darkness didn’t try to get me?”
Foster exchanges a look with Easton then returns his attention to me.
“He did show up when we were going through the portal,” Foster says in a quiet tone. “And he tried to get you, but for some reason, he couldn’t.” His throat muscles work as he swallows hard. “When one of his tendrils of darkness tried to touch you, it was like you burnt it and it withered away.”
I shake my head in confusion. “But that doesn’t make sense. At the school, he almost got a hold of me.”
“Almost,” Foster stresses. “But if you think about it, none of his tendrils, which are his power, were able to touch you. And it was weird that I was able to simply smack them away when they got close. He’s a god—that shouldn’t have been able to happen. I think I was just too distracted with everything else going on that I didn’t think about it as much as I probably should’ve.”
In typical Foster form, he’s probably blaming himself.
“This isn’t your fault,” I try to assure him. “None of this is.”
He doesn’t answer, but I can tell through the link that he doesn’t agree with me. I make a mental note to talk to him privately so I can convince him otherwise. Sure, he didn’t tell me about the kiss with Brody, but other than that everything that happened was because of me.
“Is it because I’m a power source?” I ask. “Is that why the god of darkness can’t touch me?”
“We honestly have no idea. It could be, but since we know very little about power sources, it’s hard to say for sure.” Foster places a hand against my cheek, his palm warm against my skin. “It might take some time, but I promise we’ll find out more. My parents and some of the more trustworthy creatures working for the agency are looking into it and hopefully they’ll find out something soon.”
I nod, but worry ravels through me. There’s so much we still need to find out about me, so much unknown things. “What do we do until we find out more? Are we going to go back to Enchantment?”
“I want to say yes because I like it there—plus it’s safe—but it was sort of a freak accident we ended up there at all, so I’m not even sure we could even get back to it even if we tried. Eventually, though, we probably should attempt to since it’s our world and when we’re there, the world grows.”
“I completely agree.” Although, I don’t actually want to be trapped in the world again.
It sometimes made me feel claustrophobic and I constantly worried I’d never get to leave, that I’d spend the rest of my life there. Not that it’d be an awful place to permanently live, but I want to travel and have adventures like I’d planned with Nina and Gage, and then with Foster after I found out I was an elemental enchanter and probably couldn’t do stuff like that with my friends.
But now that I’m a power source is any of that possible anymore? Even if we manage to stop the god of darkness from getting ahold of me, what happens to me after that? Foster mentioned that I might be able to rebuild the shrinking world of Elemental, but what does that require? That I stay there like I did in Enchantment?
“You need to relax,” Foster says. “Whatever has you worried, just tell me and I’ll try to fix it.”
“It’s nothing,” I reply with a dismissive shrug. “I was just thinking about where my life is going to go now that I know I’m a power source. Am I going to be able to travel? And what about my mom? No one knows where she is and if it stays that way eventually, I want to go look for her.”
He tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. “No matter what happens, I promise we’ll find your mom.”
“That’s a really big promise to make,” I point out. “Especially when no one even knows where the hell she is.”
His hand falls to his side. “That’s actually not true.”
