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“You have your weapons - your army - and now you have your throne,” Kas pointed out, gesturing in the general direction of the throne room.
“All that’s left is claiming the bitch’s head and receiving your lost magic,” Rush added with a triumphant laugh.
My smile slipped, but I covered it with a deep drink of blood. If only it were so simple.
NICOLAS
I stood silently in the corner of the room, unnoticed in the faint swirl of mist.
Kana and her two mates - well, they would be mates soon enough - were doing fantastically working out all the nuances of the prophecies. I wished I could help, but I was no more privy to that information than any of them.
Simply being in the mist didn’t mean I knew all the ancestors knew, unfortunately.
Instead, I drifted closer to Acadian. He needed my help much more than they did. I’d been watching him since he’d awoken from Merden’s spell. He blamed himself for so much of what had happened.
He was too intent on keeping himself distanced from Kana, and there was certainly no time for that. We had barely a month - a single moon cycle - to save Saori Sang from both Merden and the gobbelins.
Everything could still fall apart so easily, if a single one of Kana’s weapons was too weak to strike the blow they would be asked to make.
Sinking down to the floor as nothing but wisps of gray smoke, I curled behind the couch and settled my thoughts into Cade’s mind, where the others wouldn’t know to listen.
It was time I reminded Acadian Landry of why I’d turned him into a vampire, all those years ago.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CADE
“You were the least human of all the humans I’d ever met, Acadian,” Nic whispered in my ear as we sat together on a bright grassy hill in Louisiana, a lifetime ago.
He’d conjured the vision from thin air, inserting it in my mind while Kana and her new men bickered over riddles and weapons. Nic was determined to sharpen my blade, but all I could think was that in the end, I’d be turning it on myself.
“Least human?” I asked him in the dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream. Might as well go along with his games.
“Your mother was an addict, you told me. You never knew the half of it,” Nic went on, despite the anger that surged in my blood when he spoke of my mother. “She was using when she was pregnant with you - did you know that?”
I bit down the harsh words that threatened to spill over. I hadn’t known it, not really. But she’d never been whole and clean, not in my entire childhood. So it made sense that the drugs had already been ravaging her body before pregnancy did.
“But it was never drugs. Not the kind humans make, anyway. She was addicted to gobbelin blood.”
Nic’s words dropped like a bomb in my head, and I must have made some noise. Kana was next to me in an instant, hovering over my tightly closed eyelids. I could feel her anxious energy, but I willed my body to be still, hoping she’d think it was just a dream.
If only itwasa dream, but Nic had never been one to lie.
“Gobbelin blood is more addictive to humans than any drug they’ve ever concocted for themselves,” Nic went on in mymind, still invisible to Kana and the others. “And while we truly thought the gobbelins in Haret were extinct, we always knew it was possible some were left on Earth, locked away when the Path between the worlds crumbled.”
“What does any of this have to do with now?” I managed to think at him, as Kana thankfully drifted away again. Her intoxicating scent lingered, though, and my body ached for the touch I didn’t deserve anymore.
“Now? I haven’t been told. But ten years ago, with Merden? It had everything to do with what happened. Your mother’s addiction passed gobbelin blood to you in her womb. Ten years ago, it was that latent gobbelin blood in your veins that made Merden hesitate to kill you. Piqued her curiosity.”
“Fuckin’ hell.” It was all I could manage. I didn’t know if I’d ever get a handle on reality again. It had changed so many times in my life.
“And that means it wasn’t your fault - my death. I know you blame yourself for surviving, but Merden was always going to kill me. She only stopped with you because she wanted to explore,” he explained, tapping into the fears I hadn’t been able to hide from him.
Despite the hellscape I’d been living in with Merden, at least I’d been alive with hope for redemption and change. Nic was just dead, and I had fucking awful survivor’s guilt.
“That curiosity will be the death of her, “ I replied after a quiet moment. I might not be much on reality, but I knew Kana. And myaimawas going to kill Merden for everything she’d done, and not just to me.
“Allow yourself to heal, Acadian. Don’t be an echo. Be the key that unlocks her power. She deserves that from you, doesn’t she?”
