There never has been.
“What?” I gasped. Angellight burned in my palms at the shock. Fiery red like Ptholenix’s.
“We spoke to her,” Tolek added sternly, his hand squeezing mine despite the flame, as if he felt the frustration and crushing defeat slipping off me and needed to carry the burden with me. “We had a conversation—you saw us here.”
“I did not see you with a Storyteller,” the man corrected. Of course not. He saw us in the other rooms, hands and lips all over each other.
“But she talked to us. Told us things only a Storyteller could know,” I swore, my voice rising. Angellight curled around Tolek’s wrist now, too, spreading from me to him and lacing with inky black as it traveled up his arm. “And I’d seen her before! In an inn. She was sharing legends about the Angels.”
The man shrugged, lips dipping into a frown. “I do not know of whom you speak. There is no Aimee at this nest, nor has there ever been, darling.” His hungry stare returned to Tolek. “But if you two would like to make use of the rooms, I could find one of the madame’s people to join us.”
Jealous growls rumbled from both me and Tolek, seraph magic flaring brighter. The Storyteller laughed, but he left us.
And as we swept through the room asking more Storytellers for confirmation, my frustration only mounted. Until coils of light spun around me, slithering in the wake of my footsteps.
No one here had any recollection of the woman we’d spoken to. It was as if she never existed.
“How does no one know her?”I asked as Tolek and I flew closer to Xenovia.
The sun was nearly risen, pale gold bathing the desert, piercing the morning haze. We’d been discussing it on a loop since we left Lendelli, but no theories seemed plausible enough. Everything was a stretch, an impossible explanation for a senseless experience.
“We talked to her—we’d both seenherbefore,” I said, fingers tangling in Sapphire’s mane to ground me. Soft purple Angellight had been trailing behind us the entire flight—Xenique’s. I’d chosen the Soulguider’s amethyst because it seemed to blend into the night the most, but I needed to expel the frustrated energy and the guilt that wanted to strangle me.
I knew Aimee was the same woman I saw in the Wayward Inn last year when I’d rescued Tolek from Mindshaper Territory. And both he and Aimee had recalled their passing in Bodymelder land.
So how had sheneverexisted?
“Maybe she uses different names?” Tolek suggested, but his words were thick with doubt. We’d described her to a number of Storytellers in vivid detail, and still there was nothing.
“She was Aimee in the Wayward Inn when I first saw her, too,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he conceded. His arms tightened around my waist, and I tried to sink into the comfort. “Fuck, I don’t understand it either, Alabath. They could have been lying to us…”
“But why,” I finished for him, and he nodded.
Xenovia was breaking through the haze in the distance, bronze minarets atop glass domes stretching high from the capital’s most prominent buildings. A chill wrapped through the air, and something crept along my skin. Sapphire shook her head, mist tumbling over her namesake blue mane.
Mist.
I sat up, a bolt of awareness striking through my body as my Angellight snapped back into me. That mist wasn’t the normal haze of early morning. It was denser and snow white.
“Tolek,” I gasped. The icy feeling that had starred in my nightmares sluiced through my veins. His voice in my memory. “Tol, I think?—”
But my words were buried beneath a high-pitched wail as a shadow masked us from above. My head snapped up, Tolek’s arms loosening to grab a blade right as Thorn swooped from the clouds.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Tolek
Thorn’smassive fucking wings eclipsed the morning light as he charged right for us. All I could see was the cavern in the mountains when I’d tried to get to Ophelia and the Angel had thrown me back.
I’d been numb to the impact of it then, mind staked on one thing only, but it rang through my bones now. All I heard was Ophelia screaming my name—screaming for help as Echnid took her. Her distress echoed in my memory as I wrenched my family dagger from my waist and threw it at the Angel.
It tumbled end over end. He was distracted by the Angellight building in Ophelia’s palms, around her wings, crackling with bolts of the Mindshaper’s stormy power. And the blade swiped against the underside of his wing.
But it glided through his feathers without leaving a scratch.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, tightening my legs around Sapphire to stay seated as she dipped.
