I had to look away or I was going to jump the beast, and now was not the time. Not after being near-floored by all the truth bombs dropped on me today.
“Do you understand, Darkor?” Dannie asked her son. Her expression one of a mother desperate to connect with the child who had been out of her reach for an eternity. A son she had spent thousands of years trying to save.
“I go by ‘Shadow’ now,” he told her, less bite in his words than before. “And I do understand. I’m not sure I’m happy about it, but I’m old enough now to see the sacrifice you’ve made. And I might actually owe you…” He looked at me but didn’t finish the sentence. I was desperate to know if it was about me, but there was no way to ask and not sound completely narcissistic.
Dannie stepped closer to him, and it was almost painful how awkward they were. It must have hit them at the same time that this was their chance for healing. He wrapped his arms around her, and it was the sort of hug that usually destroyed me on the rare occasions he handed them out.
His hugs were A-game material.
“Two questions,” he said when they pulled apart. “How come you couldn’t break the spell on the door, being as powerful as you are?”
Dannie didn’t like this, her brow furrowing as a dark expression crossed her features. “I was weakened when I had you, Shadow. My power is yours now, and I’m nothing more than a figurehead, still here trying to keep the balance.”
I sensed that she hadn’t expected to lose part of herself to a child.
She reached up and touched his cheek. “I don’t regret any of it, I promise. But I definitely don’t command the power I used to.”
He thought on this, his expression unreadable.
“What’s your second question?” she pushed.
This time, there was a chink in his armor. “If you were on Earth for years, why did you never try to find me? I thought the entire aim was to get me home. To see me again.”
He’d missed his mother, and fuck, if that vulnerability didn’t make him seem—for a moment in time—like someone much less jaded and alphahole-ish.
She swallowed roughly. “I’m weakened in the human realm, away from the Nexus. It’s why Mera’s much stronger than me. She doesn’t have my limitations, in either land.”
Shadow focused on me, looking for a moment longer than was polite. “She is extraordinary.”
Slaying me as always. “She is sitting right here,” I added, forcing normalcy to return. I didn’t want to think about being a mist-born creature of power. I just wanted to be Mera. Me. That was enough.
They both just smiled at me and I wondered how the fuck I’d ever missed the similarities between them. “How exactly do royals have children?”
The question was out before I thought about the intricacies of it. Was I about to get the Shadow Realm’s equivalent of the birds and bees talk?
Dannie’s grin was knowing. “It’s a joining of body and power. It requires you to exist in the head of your mate, and it’s intense to the degree that many can’t handle. Pleasure beyond what you can imagine, but it’s also how I lost energy to give to Shadow. So be aware of this.”
That part didn’t bother me as much as the thought of allowing anyone to exist in my head. My messy, messy head.
“What is our next step then?” Angel asked. She’d been quiet, taking in all the new information. There was nothing she loved more than discovering new facts about the worlds. She took her role as the quiet observer very seriously, cataloguing it all away, her super-brain never forgetting a thing.
“Now we must correct the power balance in this world,” Dannie said, dusting her robes off. “Mera and Shadow are the two able to return the royal rule to its correct position. Cristell, I’ve been trying to keep an eye on her, but her energy keeps morphing and changing. I don’t know what you’ll find when you return to the compound.”
It was clear she hadn’t been back there since the day her son had been stolen, too weak to do much more than search for a way to return him. She’d said it had taken near two thousand years to get the Nexus to produce my energy, and honestly… that was dedication. A true mother’s love for a child.
“Where the fuck is Ixana?” Shadow asked suddenly. “She’s disappeared and she has my bloodstone.”
Dannie’s eyes turned murky, which was always a bad sign. “She is gone. And…” She focused on me. “Can you feel your creatures, Mera?”
Flames licked across Shadow’s arms, his face set in angry lines. Ignoring this, I tried to feel the creatures in my bond, and… they were still there, but it was weak. Much weaker than I’d expected. “The connection is fading,” I choked out. The power of this Nexus had hidden it, but now that I was focusing my attention on the bonds, it was obvious.
Shadow rumbled. “Wait here,” he said to me. “I’ll look into it.” He disappeared into a blur of shadows, and I tried not to freak out.
“Can you ever forgive me, Mera?” Dannie asked, her voice flat. “I dragged you into this war. Without your permission.”
“You did it to save Shadow,” I said, keeping my true feelings hidden away. I got it, but it stung that the one adult I’d thought had given a shit about me had only been interested in what she could use me for.
“At first, yes.” She surprised me with her honesty. “But all too quickly, I loved you. I even contemplated figuring out a way to stop you from taking this journey. Risking you didn’t feel worth it, even to save the realm from its ultimate end.”
“It’s dying?” Angel cut in, surprised. “There has been no talk of that.”
Dannie snorted, and it was so ungoddess-like that she once again reminded me of Earth Dannie. My weird, eccentric friend. “Since the door was barred, all of the realm’s drama has remained internal. No one would know, and it’s only those who live here who see the suffering. The balance is so far skewed, I’m not sure it can ever be righted.” She gestured out to the dead lands again. “This is not only happening here. It’s happening everywhere.”
We’d seen it in the lava fields, where the decay had been so much more widespread than Shadow and Angel had expected.
“They need Shadow to take his place,” Angel mused. “It has to be one of the biggest factors in this imbalance. Cristell not only sucked up ten times her share of power to fill his role, but that much again to keep the spell on the door. She’s killing this world.”
“She is,” Dannie confirmed. “But her power, or the balance of power as you’ve noted, is so far tilted her way, I’m afraid it might be too late.”
“And what happens if this world falls?”
Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. We could evacuate as many as we could and then let the assholes suffer in the destruction of their own creation.
“It’s an essential part of the Solaris System,” Angel told me. “To lose one could result in the loss of all. There would be a long-reaching impact that we have no idea of.”
Dannie nodded. “Oh yes, not to mention that any creature born of the energy here, including you and your mists, would perish. We cannot survive without this realm.”
“Okay, we must do this,” I said, slumping as more energy seeped from me.
Something was going on with my creatures; I needed to get to them and figure out what was wrong, but I would wait for Shadow to return.
Dannie clapped her hands. “My child deserves his birthright. I lost so much when we were betrayed, and my mate…”
My chest tightened as I finally figured out why she’d bailed on the compound and never returned. “Shadow’s father is dead?”
She nodded. “Yes. Cristell forged the bloodstone into a weapon, this long staff. She used it to destroy any who stood in her way. None of us were ready.”
A staff? Angel and I exchanged a glance. Ixana had said she’d taken the stone as soon as Shadow had been betrayed, so how had Cristell used it as a weapon?
I was about to ask Dannie more about the day Shadow was betrayed, but before I could, the beast himself burst into the clearing. “She’s gone,” he roared. “And she took the creatures.”
It had been what I feared, even as I’d held onto a weak hope that there was another explanation. Dannie was on her feet in an instant, and as her fury grew to match her son’s, flames spun out of control from them both. “I knew it,” she seethed. “I never liked or agreed with their pairing, but my mate insisted that it was a solid match. A strong union between royal families.”
Shadow didn’t seem surprised by this. “She’s no match for me. I saw that from the first moment we reconnected here.”
“What is she doing with my creatures?” I snapped, needing them to get to the point.
“She betrayed us,” Shadow said softly. “She’s either working for Cristell or planning to use the creatures to take her down. Either way, she used our power to get what she wanted, and now she’s gone.”
I took off, sprinting toward the entrance, crossing that soft meadow before I skidded out of the stone archway. I stared across the barren, empty land, my knees near-buckling under me.
They were gone. The desert lands empty.
My scream was long and guttural, and I called the creatures to me, but there was no response. “How?” I sobbed. “How did she command them?”
Shadow was there, as he always was. “She’s been siphoning your energy. I’ve been so focused on you that I missed the obvious signs. She kept touching you, and I thought she was trying to break the ice, but it was betrayal.” He was pissed. So fucking pissed that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a forest fire of his making rage across this land. If there was anything left to burn, that was. “They’re too far away for you to reach them. We have to follow.”
Siphoning. My. Energy.
That was why I’d felt so drained the closer we’d gotten to the Nexus. Fuck that bitch. I was going to rip her hair out when I caught up with her.
Dannie appeared in the archway but didn’t step out into The Grey Lands. “You must go after her. If she destroys the last of the creatures here, the Nexus will fall.”
Shadow spat out. “Bet that was Cristell’s plan all along. She is so narrow-minded, thinking that she’ll be the strongest once this land is gone.”
“We have to follow her!” I demanded. “I won’t let my creatures be used to win this war.” I took a step forward, but my legs crumbled under me. I almost hit the ground, but Shadow was too fast for that; he caught me, hauling me up into his arms.
“What’s happening?” I asked, the weakness in my legs extending to the rest of me as I hung limply against him.
“You have bonded thousands of creatures to you,” Dannie said in a rush. “And now they’re being stolen away. Stolen away to destroy. Which will destroy you. You must catch up to her now.”
Shadow threw his head back and roared, his expression a combination of fury and fear. I’d never seen that look on his face before, and as much as I hated to see it now because it meant I was dying, there was something about seeing the man you loved lose his shit like this.
I’d have been turned on if I wasn’t actively dying.
Wasn’t that always the way.
