Kael’s thumb brushes over my knuckles.
“So, we go?” I ask him quietly.
He nods, resolve hardening in his jaw. “We go.”
I wince. My courage wavers. There’s also the other “thing” we need to search for. The whole “who’s responsible and has the power to be creating these rifts in the first place” thing. I look at Kael, wishing he could hear me.
Should we tell them what we discussed last night? Would that complicate shit even further?
But he just looks at me, curiosity in his eyes. Yeah, he can feel my emotions, but we need the whole shebang. Which leads us back to the blood exchange he was reluctant to?—
“Henny will take you.” Iris’s words cleave clean through the swirl of questions spinning through my head.
Kael stiffens beside me. I blink at her. “Henny will—he’ll what now?”
She lifts her chin, unshaken. “He can get you there faster than anyone else. Quietly. Safely.”
I flick my gaze towards the corner, where the black mist is already coalescing like a living shadow. Henny’s presence curls at the edges of the room, cool and terrifying in its stillness.Right. Because nothing says low-key and not alarming to my nervous system like being zipped through space via an eldritch cloud demon with a personality kink for vengeance.
Okay, I tagged that bit on, but he’s got the wholegrr-arghthing going for him.
I open my mouth, shut it again, then offer what I think is a very reasonable question: “How do we get back?”
Henny doesn’t reply—shocker since he’s not fully formed and doesn’t currently have a mouth—and Iris lets out a breath like she’s been holding it since forever. “He’ll leave a mark on you,” she explains. “A tether. When you’re ready, he can follow it back.”
“Follow it?” I repeat, heart stammering.
“It’s like a scent,” Kael adds quietly, his grip tightening slightly around my fingers. “A memory encoded into energy. He’ll find us.”
“And what exactly is there? And where isthereexactly? A hidden library no one can find unless they’re bonded? That sounds… mystical. Is this woo-woo magic or actual science? Or both? Because if you’re expecting me to wave my hand and chant incantations, I have bad news.”
“I don’t know what you’ll find,” Varek says, surprisingly calm. “I only know the stories. That the library holds ancient records, knowledge lost to most of Terrafeara. It’s protected by something only a fully mated pair can pass.”
Yeah, sounds like woo-woo shit to me.
“Protected how?” I ask, then eyeball Kael. He never mentioned any of this shit yesterday.
He shrugs, his confusion pulsing through our bond. It makes me feel mildly better.
But back to my question. I glance around, but no one answers. Of course no one answers.
I rub my forehead, heat prickling at my nape. “You’re asking us to go into some secret, possibly cursed, ancient maze-library—that might be a crock of shit and not actually real—and hope we find a book that says ‘how to save your maybe-dying friends and prevent reality from ripping itself apart for dummies’?”
Varek doesn’t even blink. “Yes.”
Kael murmurs, “I will keep you safe.”
I look at him, my fated, my pain in the arse, the man who literally glows in the dark and somehow still manages to make my stomach flutter with one look.
Yeah. I believe Kael. But does he really believe all this shit? I know he mentioned something similar, which I suppose gives Varek’s words credit, but this is all a lot of what-ifs. Admittedly, I regularly jump in with both feet and without a plan, and this is a sort of plan. Kinda. Or as close to a plan as I can expect to get.
And don’t even get me started on why Varek would have such information in the first place. The big fucker is full of secrets. Arsehole.
I glance again at the prince, lying silent. At Dawson, still unmoving. At Varek, who looks like he hasn’t slept in a week, and Shanae, standing like a sentinel, trying not to show how worried she is.
And then there’s Kael—watching me, the weight of so many unspoken things behind his eyes.
I breathe out slowly. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s get packed and weaponed up. Let your creepy demon-mist boyfriend zap us to a mystery ruin in the middle of nowhere so we can flirt with ancient doom and maybe save the world.”
