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“Who the hell are you?” Wally demands.
“Rainey Astor,” she replies.
Ridley gestures to her. “She’s a hunter I brought in to help.”
“Asshole, I volunteered,” she punches Ridley in the arm, and he smiles softly at her. “Can’t have you dying. We need you around.”
“Have you talked to Rafferty?” I question. Surely they spoke to him. Surely someone has been able to talk some sense into them.
“Of course.” Ridley raises his shirt and shows off a huge scar that spans nearly the length of his ribbed abdomen. “Gave me this as a present when I tried to take him into Pixie Thicket so we could see if the wards would shove his magic to the side.”
“It didn’t work?” I croak out.
“No. In fact, he nearly slaughtered all of us before the wards expelled him. Been trying to break in ever since.”
“I don’t understand. What happened? How did this happen?”
“When you died, he lost it,” Ridley explains. “The dark magic—he stopped fighting it.”
Rainey steps forward. “Rafferty has no emotions,” she tells me. “No feelings. For all we know, he doesn’t even feel pain anymore.”
“I need to see him.” I close my eyes and try like hell to focus on him, just like I did when I first dematerialized, but when I open them again, I’m still standing in the same cavern. Directly across from Ridley.
“It’s no use,” he says softly. “Rafferty is in the castle. There’s no dematerializing to him, and you can’t get close to him without going through the ancients guarding the place. Trust me. We’ve tried.”
“More than once,” Rainey adds.
“I came here, though. I thought of him, and it brought me to you.”
“Likely because your magic could not take you to him, and we share the same blood,” he explains, though it all sounds muted.
Everything feels muted.
As if the world was once in color and now it’s black and white.
Somewhere behind me, they begin talking again, voices discussing something I cannot care to focus on because the only thing that matters in the entire world—in any world—is once again out of reach.
This time, though, it’s not death keeping us apart—even though it was death that pushed Rafferty off the edge of the cliff he’d been standing on for longer than I can comprehend.
And if it was my death that destroyed him.
Can my love set him free?
* * *
