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I take his offered hand and stand. “This is going to get really fucking old.”
Walter throws his head back and laughs. “Tell me about it. Shall we?” he asks, gesturing for us to begin walking.
“Yes.”
Ironically, adrenaline still pulsates through my body, making my legs feel much heavier than they should. Apparently, dying does not purge the system—interesting.
“Are you all right?” he questions, gaze darting left and right as though searching for something.
“With dying?”
“And coming back.”
“Honestly? Not really. It all feels like a video game to me with the respawn set in the fucking Sahara."
Walter chuckles again, and I’m reminded of the one time I convinced him to play Halo with me when I’d been too tired to go anywhere. He’d been so confused by the controller I’d spent most of the time teaching him.
But it was one of my best memories.
“Did you mean all of it?”
He casts a curious glance at me. “Did I mean what?”
“All the time we spent together.”
Walter stops and takes my hands before I can pull them back. “You are the only thing that mattered to me once we lost your mother. I knew that I couldn’t remain too close, or I’d risk pulling you into this horrific life, too. But I also knew I could not stay away forever. The time we spent together—specifically when you knew me as Wally—are my favorite moments.”
A tear slips down my cheek, and I nod. “Thank you for telling me the truth.”
“I will never lie to you again.”
We start walking again, another long journey toward yet another potential death. “What the hell was that thing?”
“The ancients refer to it asBas an iolair,” he explains. “Which loosely translates to Death Eagle.”
“I’d say that’s a pretty accurate description,” I reply, a shiver running through me.
“They were banished to the Veil alongside the ancients.”
I stop. “In the same prison?”
Walter nods. “The fae are not kind people,” he tells me. “Though mine certainly deserved punishment, the fae are nearly just as unredeemable. They feared the ancients—rightfully so—but it was also jealousy that drove them to exterminate us.”
“From what I hear, the ancients tormented the fae.”
“Some did,” he replies. “Not all were so unfeeling, and yet they were punished just as sternly. Women. Children. The fae did not discriminate. It was all of us or none of us.”
A part of me actually feels for the race of fae banished from their own worlds. If there’s anything history has taught me, it’s that war rarely spares the innocent, I believe what he’s saying. After all, it’s hard to believe a man as seemingly kind as Walter has always been evil.
Even if he did admit to killing innocents in an attempt to free his world.
“What happened to your kind when they were imprisoned?”
“Truthfully, I do not know. At least, not firsthand. According to an ancient I tortured for information on you—they stopped mating. Stopped allowing children to be born, and used their imprisonment to become a force that could not be locked away.”
Horror turns my stomach. “What the hell do you mean they stopped allowing children to be born?”
“I truly do not believe you wish to know.” With that, he turns and continues walking.
We remain in silence, me processing all of this new information while Walter seemingly keeps an eye out for any other unwelcome visitors.
“There it is,” he finally says.
Where I looked at the shimmering spot between the two worlds with excitement before, now I cannot help but eye it with fear. If I remember correctly, Rafferty told me that time between all the worlds moved differently. Is it possible more time has passed there than I realize? And if we’re forced back to the prison yet again, we’ll be set back even longer.
Then again, the longer we linger here, the more time passes. I turn to Wally and hold out my hand. “Let’s go, then.”
