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Groaning, he took three paces to the right. “Her soul is damned? By your claiming?”
“No. She beat me to it. She is the human who brought me back from Ex Nihilo.”
Exhaling a sharp breath, he lowered his gaze and paced three steps in the other direction. “What is her name?”
“Farryn Ravenshaw.”
With arms akimbo, he shook his head. “Fuck.”
I didn’t like the expression on his face, which told me whoever owned Farryn’s soul was unfavorable. “Who is it?”
“Telling you puts me at tremendous risk.”
“I would not ask, were it not her.”
Rubbing a hand down his face, he groaned again.
“Tell me. I’m losing my mind over it. You recognize her name, correct?”
“Oh, I recognize it, all right.” He let out a mirthless laugh and resumed his pacing back and forth. “The council spent all evening discussing her name.”
My pulse pounded in my throat, the anticipation scratching at my lungs as I waited for him to reveal the name.
“The one who’s laid claim to her soul is your father.”
The words repeated on an endless loop inside my head, their meaning lost to the rage simmering in the very depths of my bones. I balled my hands into fists at my sides, my muscles hardening, breaths hastening with every increased thud of my heart. “My father,” I said past the tight clench of my jaw.
“I’m sorry, my friend.”
“Is there nothing that can be done?”
His brow flickered, and he turned away. “If we weren’t talking of your father? Yes. But the council’s hands are tied on this. Hespecificallyrequested her, Jericho.”
Body shaking with fury, I turned away from him and hammered my fist into the nearby tree. The impact sent it crashing to the ground on a thunderous crack of splintered wood, and a plume of black ash rose into the air. “I will hunt him and kill him.”
“You know you can’t do that.”
I did know the consequences. I’d been told my whole life that killing him was not an option, due to the power he wielded. Unfortunately, the detriment of all five realms wasn’t enough of a deterrent to keep me from doing it, anyway. Not when Farryn stood to become his slave. Every creature could perish, as far as I was concerned, so long as Claudius Van Croix failed to get his filthy hands on her.
Of course, I had no intentions of voicing those thoughts to Trezhyr. Instead, I forced myself to calm, in spite of every muscle in my body spoiling for blood. My father’s blood.
In my current state, he would be far too powerful to overcome.
I needed to restore my wings, replenish the vitaeilem that my body could no longer produce, and begin my hunt before the baby arrived. “So, I have no other option. You, for example, couldn’t claim her soul on my behalf?” I, of course, already knew the answer to that. It was only for the sake of making him believe I had lost all hope that I bothered to ask.
“While I may be a respected member of the council, I am, by no means, an ancient lord, like your father. I would be inviting war upon my name to even suggest such a thing.”
“And there is no other option.”
He snorted, turning away from me. “Of course there is. Close the portal to Eradye, and everyone’s problems will be solved.”
I was glad that he stood with his back to me, so he couldn’t see the flicker of intrigue he’d just lit within my mind. Closing the portal to Eradye was no easy task. Centuries of angels and demons alike perishing under the weight of the barren realm had proven as such.
But I possessed something other angels did not–the ability to walk through that hell without succumbing to its insatiable hunger to feed on my vitaeilem. Only my father and I were capable of surviving the realm long-term, due to the creatures inhabiting it. Ones that could infect any breed of demon, or angel, outside of our kind and wreak havoc.
But again, it would’ve required far more power than I had at my disposal right then. So the task of tracking down Farryn’s father to help restore my wings had just become paramount.
“Aside from pulling a miracle out of my ass, let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
