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“Only twice. I never got punished, though. I was a young man with amnesty, and that’s dangerous.” He gets quiet, and I feel his mood plummet.
“What happened next?” I’m almost afraid to ask because I know where the story is headed.
“Eldyra,” he says bitterly, finally putting a name to the beautiful face I saw while I siphoned his memories. “I was twenty—less than a year away from being old enough to join the royal entourage. I had the world at my fingertips. So much potential. Eldyra had grown up in a village near my home, and we’d seen each other in passing while we were growing up. When she pursued me, I was all too willing to accept her advances. I didn’t question her motives. I was so arrogant, I wasn’t even surprised by her interest. After all, I was powerful and had a bright future ahead of me.”
I hate hearing about him with another woman, even if it was so long ago. But I still push on because I want to know everything about him. “And?”
“For months, we talked about a future together. We planned a life. I thought I loved her, and I believed she loved me… but she was using me. Our relationship was all a big ruse to save her sister. Somehow, her sister had gotten tangled up with Vaeront in a bargain, and Eldyra had to offer him someone more valuable. Someone irreplaceable. Me,” he sighs. “She planned it from the start. One day when I was flying to Eldyra’s village, I heard her calling out to me from the forest below. I found her on the side of the road, bleeding from her chest. She’d been stabbed in the heart with iron.”
“That’s fatal, right?”
“Yes. Once iron gets into the heart, it pumps the poison to the rest of the body. It’s a horrible death. Eldyra told me she’d been attacked and that she knew a wizard in hiding who could fix her. I was so desperate to save her, I immediately took us through a vortex to Yelissa’s Peak where Vaeront had a secret lair with his fellow dark fae.”
From the brooding Ellister is doing now, I know the story only gets worse, and I decide to stop prodding so much while he gathers his words.
I clear some weeds away while thinking about how young he was when all of this happened. His life had barely begun before his future got taken from him.
After a minute, he continues, “I had to drink her blood, just as I had to drink yours. Vaeront instructed me on the ritual. I took it from her wrist—a place the iron poisoning hadn’t reached in her body yet, where the blood was still clean. Then I had to wait for her to die. She had to pass away before Vaeront could bring her back. It took four agonizing days. Once she died, he told me he would take her soul as payment for the ritual, but I bartered with mine instead, just as he knew I would. I thought to myself, it doesn’t matter if he takes my soul. I’d love Eldyra with or without it, so I didn’t need it.”
He starts using the crowbar a bit more aggressively as he pries some more rotted boards off the coop, his eyes filled with simmering anger.
I feel his pain through the bond. Maybe being in the Lost Land made him forget some of his past, but I think it’s possible he pushed the memories down on purpose. Who would want to relive an event so awful?
“You don’t have to keep going.” I gently touch his wrist.
The contact seems to snap him out of the dark place he’s in, and he flips his hand to hold onto me.
“When she woke,” he continues, “she laughed. She laughed at me. I was a pathetic fool who’d been tricked by her and Vaeront. What they didn’t tell me before I agreed to his bargain was if he owns my soul, he owns me. In an instant, I found myself a member of a gang I never wanted to be a part of. My future, my plans to join the royal entourage and provide a comfortable life for my family, just… gone. After that, I couldn’t go home. To be honest, without my soul, I didn’t want to. I was too bitter and miserable to rejoin society, and Vaeront offered me something no one else could—an outlet for my hate. I could take my anger out on others without a shred of remorse. And I did. That’s when I started making the bargains in the human realm.”
“How long did you live with Vaeront before you were caught?”
“Only five years. As far as the royals knew, I’d been missing all that time. They thought I was dead. When they found out I was part of the dark fae, I think they felt betrayed. I had made a deal with them back when I was young, and I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain.” Ellister shrugs. “But without my soul to burden me, I didn’t feel the negative effects of breaking the promise—another reason I’d convinced myself Vaeront did me a favor.”
“At what point in time did you realize he was full of shit?” I ask wryly.
“Not nearly soon enough. Not until about twenty-some years ago, when I had my encounter with the Empath princess. When she took my hate from me, I was able to see clearly. For the first time, I could see the truth, and the truth was awful.Iwas awful.”
“Before that, had you been looking forward to collecting the bargain? Collecting me?”
“Truthfully, no. When I made the deal with Waylon, I set up the collection far in the future so that dark fae predecessors would have more humans coming in. It was strategic, scattering bargains throughout time. I never thought I’d have to collect you myself. After I got my conscience back, I was dreading it, and I put it off for as long as possible. I should have come to you sooner. You suffered for longer because of me.”
“Hey.” I pull his gaze to mine. “I thought we weren’t beating ourselves up anymore.”
Ellister affectionately pinches my chin. “Habit.”
“So what happened to Eldyra?”
“She went on with her life. Once she and her sister were released from Vaeront, they left together without even glancing back. I had served my purpose.”
“And here I thought my breakups were bad,” I crack, trying to lighten the moment.
Any lingering pain clears from Ellister’s face as he gazes lovingly at me. “In hindsight, I’m grateful for her. If none of that had happened, I wouldn’t be with you now. I would’ve lived my thirty thousand years, served the monarch, and died without finding my soul mate. I would go through all of it again if it meant being with you.”
“I wouldn’t change any of it either.” I give him a small smile. “It all worked out as it should have.”
Through our bond, I feel the weight of Ellister’s remorse lift. Our conversation acted as a kind of therapy session, and he worked through some shit he’d been mentally holding onto.
Now that the clouds have cleared from his mind, something else pulses from the bond.
