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“What exactly is a halfling?” They’d been throwing the term around, but I still didn’t quite understand the meaning of it.
“Exactly what it sounds like,” he told me. “Born of both a Fae and a being from your realm. Halflings are often very strong, with some of the most powerful beings in our history being of mixed heritage.”
“You said vampires? TheNosferatukind or the sparkle-in-the-sunlight bullshit?”
“A little bit of both,” Oliver said with a twitch of his lips. A frown split Nia’s brow as she looked between the two of us. “I’ve been around a long time, Rowan. Nearly eight hundred years. Tantaii was always power-hungry—that’s never been a question—but she crossed a line after your father.”
“You knew my father?” My mind raced with the possibilities. I peeked at Nia, who was silently eating her thorny grapes. She was focused on Oliver, just as curious as I was. “Who was he? Was he . . . a king?” I didn’t know exactly how Fae hierarchy worked, but something told me a shifter sitting on the throne of the Fae would be a no-go.
“No, dear. We never met, but I knew of him. I think everyone probably did.” His somber tone ate at me, dread filling me as his words hung heavy over my head. I’d never been this close to knowing the truth about my parents, and as much as I didn’t think I would like what he had to say, I needed to hear it. I had to. “Tantaii already had a husband when she met your father. King Castiel, Casimir’s father. She had an affair. I don’t know how long they were together, but shortly after she had you, your father disappeared. No one ever heard from him again.”
“He’s dead?” My voice was hard to match the walls I had built around my heart. I didn’t know this man and would never know him, but that didn’t stop the sadness from slithering around, searching for a weakness in the foundation so it could slip its way through and constrict. I refused to let it.
“I assume so. No one has seen him since, and that would be a very long time for a shifter to live. The oldest shifter I’ve ever met lived to be five hundred before his mind buckled and had to be put down. Their mortal minds just aren’t equipped to withstand so much time.” Oliver was matter of fact, not like he was telling a child their father was dead and never coming back. “She tracked down as many halflings as she could after that. She killed most of them, even the babies. But she kept a select few.”
“Why keep some but not all?”
“Besides the monarch, only halflings can create portals between the worlds because they are made of magic that runs through both realms. She destroyed the open portals, destroyed anything living that resided in the in-between. It was horrifying. Adults, family members, newborns. She killed them all. Except for a few. Like you and me.”
I choked on the bite of banana I was eating, swallowing hard to try and clear it from my throat before I was ready to talk again. Nia saved me from having to talk as she echoed the question in my brain. “You’re a halfling too?”
“Yes, half fire-witch. Most witches have a special affinity for something. I believe that’s why Tantaii kept me alive. I’m not from a royal family, but my mother was a very powerful fire-witch in the mortal realm. And as you’ve probably seen, I’m an excellent portal-maker." He only looked slightly cocky as he said it, but I couldn’t argue with him. I’d only seen impressive magic from him so far. “She’s the reason you had so many magical blocks on you. She was ashamed of you and never wanted you to be a contender for power, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill you. So she had your shifter powers sealed at birth instead. It’s no wonder you have issues triggering them.”
I thumbed another grape in my mouth, the new delicacy still not enough to diminish the dark cloud over my head. Oliver’s revelation had me reeling, but it also made sense, and at this moment, I believed him. Rage built inside me at the pain my former self must have gone through. Unwanted. Alone. Powerless.
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I asked them, drawing my usual snark to me and welcoming it like an old friend. “She’s going to come for her revenge. I know you want me to kill her and all, but I’m sure it’s not that easy. I barely even know how to use my abilities.”
“She wants more than revenge,” Oliver said darkly, his hooded gaze pinned on me, a look of scrutiny in his eyes. “I don’t have all the information; I wish that I did. I spent hundreds of years in a cell before you set me free. My life is yours, and I have and will do everything that I can to keep you safe. But you kept a lot of secrets, even from me. As much as she wanted to, the Queen didn’t hold the sheer power it would take to destroy the mortal realm on her own. She sought to find the most powerful object in Faerie existence, Oberon’s ring, which no one has seen in millennia. The father of all realms. With the ring, he created the realms. And with the ring, they can be taken back.”
“Since both realms are intact, she must not have found it. That’s good, right?” If the Queen didn’t have the ring she needed to destroy the world, then that was in our favor, especially if no one had seen it for thousands of years.
“She didn’t find it, but you did. I don’t know how you did it, but you used it and cursed her into the ground. It was an ancient curse, one you probably didn’t understand fully and could only be lifted with a combination of innocent blood and the free will of the one who put her there.” I cringed at his words. I’d completely fallen into their trap to free Tantaii; they'd been playing us the entire time. How could I have been so stupid?
“The Queen liked to punish you in the dungeon beneath the royal castle. She left you there for days, sometimes months at a time. That’s where we met. I was the only halfling still left, or so I’d thought.” Pain creased his face, making him look older than I'd ever seen him. “After you cursed her, you set me free. You saved my life. I had no one to go back to, so I stayed with you. Against my urging, we ran. For so many years, but Casimir always caught up to us in one way or another. You made the choice to jump into the mortal realm, thinking he wouldn’t be able to get to you if there were no halflings left to open a portal.”
“Well, that was fucking stupid,” I commented, inwardly berating myself. Casimir wasn’t a halfling, as far as I knew, so there must have been someone else who allowed them to get through the portal. I should have just killed the Queen. If I had killed her when I had an all-powerful ring and the chance, none of this would have happened. My memories would be intact, and Evie would still be alive.Evie. My heart wrenched as I remembered the young girl who would never get to go to a mating party or become a permanent member of the pack. All because of my mistakes.
I blew out a shaky breath, pushing the long-eaten grape carcasses around my plate aimlessly.
“You couldn’t let your mother or Casimir ever get their hands on the ring, so we visited the First Goddess, Prim, in the Temple of Primoris. I don’t know what was said, but you were with her for days. I was beginning to think she’d killed you for even attempting to visit her; she is not known for her generosity. The night before we were reunited, I dreamt of her. Of Prim. She warned me you would return different and that I was to take you to the mortal realm and never come back. When you finally reemerged, you were no longer Olette. You were Rowan, with a fabricated past already in place, thinking you were eighteen, and I whisked you away through a portal. I followed you around the country, and every ten years like clockwork, your memory reset automatically, and I moved you to a new city every time.”
“I never told you where the ring was? Not once in the, what, four hundred years we traveled together?” I wanted to believe that everything he told me was true. He seemed sincere, but I was skeptical. If we’d been companions for so long, I should have learned how to trust him. Why hadn’t I?
“No. You said the more I knew, the faster I would die. I stopped asking after the first fifty years.” Nia snorted a laugh, and Oliver shot her a sharp glance, but she paid him no mind. If I wasn’t so shell-shocked, I might have found it funny. It definitely sounded like something I would say. But instead, my chest was heavy, haunted by the ghosts of my past that I couldn’t escape.
I stared around the room without really seeing, lost in thought. As ludicrous as it sounded, I wanted to run. Oliver was right. It was always my first instinct. I’d run when Chad cheated on me. I’d wanted to run when I found out about the Clover pack. And if what Oliver said was true, I ran from . . . everything. My home, my people. I hadn’t done what they really needed from me, which was to protect them. I’d left them and had been running for the last five hundred years. The Queen would never stop coming for me, not as long as that ring stayed hidden away from her grasp.
Not only did I have the survival of the Faerie realm on my shoulders, but also the mortal realm. The Clover pack. I had people I cared about,trulycared about, and they’d done nothing to deserve what was coming if the Queen got her hands on the ring. Cas knew I cared about them. If he couldn’t get what they wanted from me, he’d go for them.
I couldn’t let that happen.
“Rowan?” Nia’s austere voice penetrated the haze that plagued me, her brows pinched with concern. “Are you alright?”
I stood up from the table, my chair pushing back with a screech at the abrupt move as I stood tall and looked down at them. “No, no, I’m not. I’m angry. I’m confused. I'm hurt." Oliver’s surprise was palpable at my words, his mouth dropping open slightly as he watched me. “But more than anything, Nia? I’mreallyfucking exhausted.”
“Then what do you want to do?” Oliver asked me, his expression unreadable. He deferred to me, I could see it now. He probably always had. It was why he didn’t question me when I wanted to unlock my powers, why he’d never interfered with my decisions thus far. Everything he’d posed to me had been a choice for me to make, to a fault. I wondered if he hadn’t stopped asking, would I have eventually told him where the ring was?
“We are going to go see this goddess and get my memories back.” I stopped, knowing what I needed to say but not quite sure that I could make the right choice.
