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What happened to her? Why won’t she wake up?I wanted to run my hands over her head and check there weren’t any injuries which could have caused her unresponsiveness.
Kaatu held my hands out in front of us, and a portal began forming in the middle of the room.
“What are you doing? We can’t leave Charlie. If her witch dies, so does she.”
“I don’t need him to heal the portal, and I don’t have time.”
I wanted to roar in anger. I’d promised Zaide I wouldn’t harm them. If something happened to Charlie, if it killed him, it would kill her too, and I wouldn’t be able to live with the knowledge I’d destroyed my family before it began.
But I was helpless to stop him.
He charged through the portal, and it disappeared behind us as we fell into a cave. But it wasn’t the one in Ombra. The ground wasn’t black, dusty, and drained of all magic. We must have been at the human realm side of the portal.
It was then that I realized how powerful Kaatu was. The only way he could have been able to portal here was if he’d been here before or seen it in some way. Which meant he’d been here when the portal was functioning. Before the fall. He was as old as my fathers and mother.
Kaatu crouched and pulled Clawdia down from his shoulder and into his arms. She was still unconscious and limp, but that didn’t stop him from closing his eyes and reaching for the tentative bond between us and drawing on her power.
I almost hoped it wouldn’t work, that our bond was too frail to hold the enormous amount of power she held. But that wasn’t the case. As easily as he took from me, he took from her, pulling the power through us.
When he opened his eyes again, threads of red, threads that were so thin and brittle that they looked as though they would snap, appeared across the large boulders of rock cast about the back of the cave. Without a thought to the consequences, he suddenly poured magic into the threads.
Kaatu was not a titan. He probably knew the threads were a very small part of the fabric of the universe. But he didn’t know titans were cursed. Manipulating the threads too much caused drastic imbalances across the realms. And pouring raw power into threads, enough to heal a long-dead portal, as he was doing, would no doubt get the attention of the Fates.
And no one wanted their eyes on them.
Yet I had to question whether this wasn’t exactly what the Fates wanted. To realign the balance in the realms and save Ombra from certain doom. Righting the wrongs caused by my fathers’ mistakes.
He groaned as power poured from us, desperately trying to plump and change the color of those shriveled portal threads.
Even if it killed us all.
CHAPTER29
CHARLIE
“Fafnir,” a voice whimpered.
Fafnir? What’s a Fafnir?I swung my head around, which felt heavier than usual, and squinted my eyes.
Why does my head hurt so much? And why are the colors so fucking weird looking?I had to close my eyes to keep from getting dizzy.
I couldn’t understand what happened. All I knew was that there was a gaping wound somewhere on my person, and I was bleeding out. I could feel it draining my energy, causing me pain I’d never experienced before and utter misery. Whatever was causing the pain had to be bad. I just couldn’t pinpoint exactly where on my body it was. My body felt bigger, stranger … winged? I tried to turn around to investigate, but my feet weren’t cooperating.
“Please don’t hurt me. I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” a voice said again. It sounded familiar but made me irrationally angry, so I must not like the person.
I squinted again as I opened my eyes to look around, disoriented but clearer headed. Everything looked smaller. A blond woman with blue eyes wide with fear and glossy with tears stared up at me.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I tried to ask but made a noise like a roar. She whimpered, and the smell of piss reached my nose.
That’s odd.I usually couldn’t smell for shit. I’d drunk milk that’s been days out of date and only realized when my cereal had lumps in it. I’d never been able to tell anything from smell alone.
My nose couldn’t have picked a worse time to smell things, and I recoiled. I stared at her trembling and scared and couldn’t help but feel a little proud of myself. I’ve never made someone piss themselves with fear before. I’m a badass.
But why is she so afraid? What did she do to me? What have I done?
The door to the fence I stood in opened, and another extremely small blond woman peeped in. She also looked up at me with fear and moved very slowly into the … pen? Am I in a pen?But when her gaze flicked to the other woman, the anger was undisguised.
“Karin. What have you done?” she hissed.
