Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

S uffering wasn’t new to me, but on this level, on this magnitude, the sensation was like being crushed under Old Man, and I was surprised none of my bones shattered under the weight of what I’d just done.

The choice I’d made was the type of decision my mother might have made. Then again, she would’ve had the power to battle Andas and keep the portal open.

My breath came in great gulps as I released Sigella’s ankle and rolled to my knees, the small portal shutting behind us.

Sigella stood beside me.

I gulped for air, fighting the pain and guilt…because I could feel them dying. I could feel their fear as they ran from Andas. “I thought your body was broken.”

“Sometimes the predator is too powerful for the prey to do anything other than play dead,” she replied.

I screamed and curled in a ball as the pain of thousands hit me wave after wave. There was no reprieve. I couldn’t find the surface to take a breath.

“You must close yourself off, Silver. Those fae belong to him now. Close yourself off before they break you.” Sigella’s words snapped my chin up so I could stare at her.

“They are not his.” I bared my teeth, even though the ache in my bones and heart confirmed she was right. I’d lost some of my family to Unbalance. I’d sacrificed them. But if I fought for them now, I could spare them darkness for a while longer. Maybe I could save them still.

Sigella sighed. “Cut them off.”

Trembling, I staggered upright and peered around. I’d instinctively brought us to the Irish court, where I’d first come earthside. We’d arrived outside the cave where I’d fought Unbalance’s first henchman, the child thief, alongside Cormac and Aaden. Here I’d lost my amber-eyed wolf. Here I’d started to lose my green-eyed, kind-hearted Aaden.

“Why did you bring us here?” Sigella asked. “A place of so much pain for you?”

“Pain births pain, I suppose.” I closed my eyes and saw thousands of tiny filaments that tied me to the creatures I’d left behind, floating through the air like whipping spider silk. I raised my hand and drew power from the world around me, unleashing a burst of flame that turned the filaments to ash, cutting the lost creatures free from me.

I don’t know what I expected, but the backlash that hit me was not it. A thousand souls crying out at once, screaming for a mother and protector. The force of their pain slapped me in the face, and I was catapulted along the rocky ground until a fallen tree stopped me short.

Shaking on the ground, the tree at my back, I let their fear and confusion and panic run through me, water down a hill, and slowly, slowly their screams faded.

But I’d never—not in all my days, however many I had left—forget what I’d just felt, or what I’d done to inspire it.

Sigella walked over and crouched beside me. “Good.”

“Good isn’t the word I’d use.” I pushed back to my feet, my body aching like I’d wrestled with tarbeasts.

Sigella shrugged. “It is what it is. You cannot save them all, nor will you ever be able to. Unbalance will always exist, taking the lives of those just out of your reach.”

“I’ve let them go, but he hasn’t destroyed Underhill…not yet anyway.” I’d certainly feel that.

I ran a hand over my silver braid and looked around as Sigella’s question returned to me. Without the screaming of the lost fae battering me, I had better perspective, and I had to agree with her that my instinct to come here was strange to say the least. Pain births pain.

Something about this place had called me back in a moment of blind instinct. I’d never regretted following my instincts, though, and always regretted when I didn’t.

I picked my way over rocks toward the cave opening. “Something is in here.”

“You don’t say. The question is what?” Sigella drawled, a half step behind.

What was it about difficult souls being drawn to me? Sigella, Kik, even Orry and Peggy at times. They were meant to be my henchmen. They must’ve missed the part about obeying my orders without sarcastic retorts and poor attitudes. They weren’t at all like Andas’s henchman. More like…helpmates.

Helpmates. They were family…and family didn’t follow orders. More like the opposite, which meant I wouldn’t be controlling them any time soon.

“I can feel a spark of laughter in you,” Sigella said.

I kept my eyes forward, searching for something in the cave…“I realized that you are family, in a strange way. That’s why we butt heads like ramming goats.”

I’d reduced her act of murdering my mother to us ‘butting heads,’ and that was almost normal on the scale of my messed-up existence.

Her laughter echoed as we stepped into the cave. “Far more than you know, Silver. Far more than you know.”

I held up my palm and pulled on the heat of the sun to create a flame in it as darkness slipped around us. At my feet, I saw a starburst of threads…no, not threads, roots. They burst from where I stood, climbing over the ground’s surface.

“What are those?” I whispered, staring down at the vibrating cords.

“The roots of the tree of life,” Sigella said. As if that were common knowledge.

I slammed to a stop, and Sigella stepped aside.

“The tree of life is made of death,” I blurted.

“Well, that’s a tad dramatic, don’t you think?” She lifted her hand and helped me to light the space. We’d stopped at the top of a slope that opened to a vista below–the cavern where I’d fought the child thief.

Cormac had died right there. How many times had I replayed that moment in my head? If I’d been faster…If I’d taken the hornless unicorn’s warning about sacrifice more seriously…If I’d done any number of things differently, then Cormac would be alive and Aaden wouldn’t have changed. Unbalance might’ve taken centuries longer to find a strong enough vessel to hold him.

“The cave has changed since I was last here,” I told her.

“This place is alive. You know that better than anyone. Why would the cave remain the same?”

I stepped closer to the edge and peered over. At the bottom of the cavern, in the very center of the floor, was an unexpected sight.

“A sapling,” I breathed.

I leaped from the top of the cavern, landing in a crouch twenty feet from the sapling. The young tree was perfect green with tiny white flowers bursting along the fragile, slender branches. Veins ran under the nearly transparent bark. Veins of darkness? “This sapling is a new beginning. But there’s something wrong with it. There’s darkness in it.”

Sigella hissed from the top of the slope. “We’re not alone.”

I spun and pulled a blade free from my thigh sheath in one smooth motion.

A man stepped from the shadows deeper within the cavern. Fae. He held up both hands, palms facing me. “Peace, young friend, I felt the draw of the tree. I’ve watched it for some time, thinking of how I might move it to the Irish Court where its mother once resided.” His voice was a slow drawl, and I couldn’t place the accent. He sounded similar to Cormac and Aaden, but not quite.

Sigella held the high ground behind me. “Not one more step, or we’ll kill you.”

He froze between one step and the next, his foot hovering in the air. “May I take a step back, or is your stepping ultimatum just for those I take toward you? I’d prefer not to balance in the middle, you see. I might have had a bit of drink this morning and find myself a tad wobbly.” He winked at Sigella, hiccupping as he did.

As if that would work on her.

So the fae was drunk, which was an impressive feat on his own. Fae couldn’t easily get that way.

She snorted. “A charmer then. Take three steps back and turn slowly with your hands raised above your head.”

He did as she asked, reversing three steps from me and the tree and then slowly turned back around and raised his hands. “Satisfied?”

“Hardly,” she said.

Funny. The male fae’s eyes were locked on Sigella, and he seemed to have forgotten that I was even here. The curve to his mouth suggested that he’d like to know her better, and I could only imagine the things Kik would say about that pairing. Probably something about the man’s weak neck and the tangles in his long, black mane. Though he’d approve of the fae’s drunkenness. A soft pang brushed my heart as I thought of my mentor and best friend, followed by a tidal wave of grief.

I snapped my fingers, drawing his attention back to me. “What’s your name?”

He tilted his head. “Keefe. And you are?”

“Of no mind to you,” Sigella snapped. “You need to leave this place, it’s not for you.”

He laughed at her, and I tensed, expecting her to blast him all the way to Alaska.

He said, “If this place is not for me, then what makes you think it’s for you? Beautiful goddess or not, this is a sacred place meant only for Underhill herself.”

Sigella spluttered…fucking spluttered , as if he’d flustered her with the goddess compliment. Could that be? I wasn’t sure, but I wouldn’t have expected a woman whom a man had trapped in a harp, then in another’s body and mind, to be affected by such flattery.

Then again, relationships were not a strong suit of mine.

The tiny sapling wasn’t done with me though. Fragile limbs veined in darkness shot toward the three of us at a speed my eyes couldn’t follow and my reflexes couldn’t dodge. Thin branches wrapped around me like a rain snake, pinning my arms to my sides. My ribs cracked, and my breath stuttered, but it was the tiny thorns digging into my flesh that were the kicker. Deeper and deeper they went, pulsing.

A voice echoed through the chamber, rising and falling in time with the tree’s heartbeat.

I lead you to where you must go.

Could the others hear it too?

The voice didn’t belong to my mother, but a woman much older. It struck me that the impulse to come here hadn’t been my own after all—ancient deities, goddesses long departed the realms, had summoned me. Unless I was wrong, I was speaking to a goddess, maybe even Gaia herself.

“Where?” I asked.

To the realm where all must be decided. To the realm of power between worlds.

Sigella called to me, her voice as close to panic as I’d ever heard it.

“I must fight for the scale realm?” My heart settled into the rhythm of the thorns’ pulsing, and I felt a rush of power as they synced. This entity was pumping me full of the tree’s magic, both light and dark. The tree wasn’t trying to kill me, not as it had done Cormac, nor did I feel any other entity trying to take me over as had happened with Aaden. But I wasn’t meant for darkness. What did she mean by it?

The sapling was strengthening me, and not just with the power of light I’d grown up with in mother’s presence.

To create balance, the voice said.

In a blink, the rock walls in the cave were gone, replaced with black ribbons.

I knew well enough what ribbons meant. I was inside the scale realm. I tensed for the ribbons’ slicing attack before realizing that my body was still within the cave.

He cannot see you here with darkness in your essence, the voice said. Do what you must, mistress of balance. Do what you must.

She’d camouflaged me.

“For how long?” I called, but the ancient voice didn’t answer.

“I thought I’d be more sober for this moment.”

I spun around to find Keefe leaning against the black ribbons of the cave wall.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I stared at him, and it was my turn to splutter.

“What are any of us doing in this Unbalance-ridden place?”

I spun to see Sigella at my other side. “You two got pulled through as well. I don’t understand."

“What is this place?" Keefe waved a hand in the air. “Care to explain?”

“It would take far more time and effort to teach you than you’re worthy of considering your limited cognitive abilities,” Sigella sneered.

He shrugged and looked at me. “Short version, young one?”

“This realm is vital, and we need to take it back from the bad guy,” I said.

“Do we know how?” He tugged at his short goatee. “As in, do you have a plan?”

“There’s no we,” Sigella cut in.

I agreed with her. I had a plan, but no, I wasn’t about to fill a drunk fae in on it.

Sigella slowly walked around the sapling that was still rooted at the center of the cave. “This sapling is the heart of all realms. It’s the new tree of life.”

I nodded. “I heard her voice.”

Her eyes shot to mine. “You don’t mean Underhill, do you?”

“No. The ancient mother. Gaia. She said that we, I , need to fight for balance again. Starting with the scale realm.” The question was how? Andas was stronger than me. He’d already taken over this place. The evidence was all around me. These ribbons used to shine with every color imaginable, each ribbon denoting a living creature of balance. And now so many had been enslaved to Andas, blackened by evil and unbalance.

I shot Keefe a look and told Sigella in an undertone, “What if we could lock him out? I can’t lock him out of Underhill, but perhaps…”

Sigella’s eyebrows rose. “How?”

I paced the cave around the small tree, considering the question as the predator I was, deep down. My emotional turmoil tied to Andas, combined with the swiftness with which I’d lost my mother, Kik, and my men had left me reeling and numbed to my senses. But I knew how to fight. I just had to remember.

What did I have that Andas might want? Besides my defeat. What was his weakness, his motivation? What did he need to survive?

A thought began to form, and as it formed, fire burned brighter in my heart. Was Hope showing its face to me once more? Like a trickster that came and went, Hope was one day faithful and the next fleeing. Maybe this time she’d stick around a while longer and lay the foundations for peace.

“Andas wants me ,” I said. “But I need his eyes elsewhere while I strip the scale realm of darkness.”

Sigella’s eyebrows shot straight to her hairline. “And just how do you plan to do that?”

“Who?” Keefe grunted, hiccupping after. “Sorry, just trying to keep up with you ladies. Wait, do you mean the bad guy? Is he really called Anus?”

My grin caught me off guard, but at Sigella’s scowl, I tucked it away again.

Keefe shrugged. “Look, I didn’t ask to be here. Maybe the tree knew you’d need extra help. Right? So what can I do?”

“Why would you help us?” Sigella narrowed her eyes. “What is in it for you?”

“To help a beautiful woman is a gift in and of itself, I need nothing more.” He scooped up her hand and kissed the back.

She flung her hand away and glared. “I think not.”

“Wait.” I moved between them. “You two can go to the prison realm.”

“W-what did you say?” Sigella dragged her focus away to lock eyes with me.

“To draw him away,” I explained. The fact that I needed to explain showed just how much drunken Keefe was affecting her. I couldn’t have foretold this in a millennia. The possibility that she would embark on a century-long rampage to castrate male fae would’ve occurred to me sooner.

I looked at the little tree at my feet. “I start here, digging out the darkness from the roots of this sapling. This is the heart. If there isn’t any darkness in the heart, then Andas’s hold will weaken elsewhere. It will loosen his grip in the scale realm.”

Sigella grimaced. “You won’t remain hidden from him. Not indefinitely.”

She didn’t know about the camouflage Gaia had given me, but she was right. The darkness in me was already slipping away.

Andas would notice me eventually, but that didn’t mean he would hunt me. Both of us knew the time wasn’t right for a one-on-one battle. Andas had to focus on strengthening his foothold so his darkness could reign unchallenged for hundreds of years. I had to focus on…scrambling to prevent that.

“I’ll protect her,” Keefe said, and we both turned to him.

He grinned. “I mean, you don’t want me here, right?”

“And I don’t want you with me.” Sigella stepped back. Keefe shrugged his lanky shoulders. I enjoyed the contrast between them. One prim and proper without a hair out of place, and the other kind of grubby and uncaring—though with an undeniable charm, as Sigella had discovered.

“I get the feeling you aren’t the boss here, beautiful. But I’ll let you boss me around any time you wish. You can try to fix me, if you like. Women like hopeless projects like that.” He bowed in her direction as he waggled his eyebrows.

She snorted and turned her back, but I caught a hint of high color in her cheeks.

“I will go, and I will allow him to follow me.” Sigella reached out and snatched a long strand of silver hair from my head. She moved so fast, I barely felt the twinge as she plucked the strand free.

With a twist of her wrist, she summoned a teacup and pot from the ether, the pot steaming already. Dropping my hair into the boiling water, she muttered something about stupid men, stupid hopeless projects, and stupid charm, then filled her cup with the tea and drank it down. She snapped her head back to swallow despite the obvious heat of the hairy brew.

“An hour is all you have,” she said as her body changed to mirror mine. Her hair slid into a metallic glimmer that extended down her back. Her eyes became silver, too, and piercing to an unsettling degree. She shone and dazzled, and the muscular lines of her lean body convinced me that she could take on the world and then some.

That was…me.

I was all those things to other people. They looked at me and saw power and capability. They saw a woman who couldn’t be toppled. They saw someone to depend on and pledge their loyalty and lives to.

Shock gripped me at the sight of myself. Could I really be those things? Could it be that everyone wasn’t making a huge mistake appointing me as Underhill and trusting me to save them?

“I was just going to suggest we switched clothing,” I managed to say.

She snorted. “I know.”

I wanted henchmen with better attitudes.

Without another word, Sigella hurried through the ribbon cave toward the entrance, and Keefe followed along.

Which left me alone with the tree of life. I put my shock in a box for later. “I should pull you up by the roots.” This tree had caused me so much pain and confusion.

But then the world, human and fae, would die, the voice said.

I knelt and cupped my hands around the sapling. Drawing magic from the cave and trees and air for miles around, I wove the essences in my hands and gently used them to pry at the veins of darkness on the fragile branches. The darkness was deep, though, woven through every layer of the branches and trunk and every leaf.

But this was how I needed to take the scale realm back, away from Unbalance, no matter how impossible it seemed.

“Gently,” I whispered, stroking my fingers along the edges of the leaves, drawing the darkness to the surface, then flicking it aside. The tree shivered, and at first I thought I’d made progress.

I was ten minutes in when the first twig snapped under my ministrations. The cave shuddered, and I felt the horror of the broken limb in my arm as if I’d broken my own bone.

I fell to my side, breathing hard.

You are doing this wrong, the voice said.

No shit. “Help me do it right then, show me.” Just once, I wanted help from someone who wasn’t a cryptic ancient asshole.

You must create balance.

The twig in my hand turned to dust, coating my fingers in greasy black ash. I peered at the little sapling. “How?”

The slightest scuff of a boot on the hard-packed earth warned me, but I wasn’t quick enough. A hand went to the back of my neck and tightened, holding me still on my knees.

He could break my neck, of that I had no doubt, and that thought alone kept me frozen.

His touch was familiar, as if he were Cormac or Aaden in truth. Part of me wanted to turn my head and rub my cheek against his forearm. Part of me wanted to give up everyone and just go along with his wicked plans because, with all these odds stacked against me, that was likely how things would end anyway.

“I wondered where you might hide, my silver bird. Did you really think she’d fool me?”

“Sigella did fool you,” I answered.

He snorted. “She and that fool of a fae…they went to the prison realm.”

“Yes.”

“Where you’d sent me.” The laughter in his voice wasn’t lost on me.

Fuck. I hadn’t expected him to linger there. I’d expected him to return to Underhill to hunt down the remaining fae in Underhill without delay. An assumption on my part, and a foolish one. He’d simply hunted my sacrificed creatures from his perfect view of the tally of good and evil in the scale realm. Far easier.

Silver, you fool.

He crouched and placed his mouth against the back of my ear, and I shivered at his hot breath against my skin.

“You knew I’d find you, Silver,” Unbalance told me. “I think you very much wanted me to find you here. To cage you and show you how delicious being tamed could be.”

He was right, in part, and I was too far gone in this mess to feel ashamed of that.

His words pulled at me. They whispered at me to give in and lean on him. I turned my cheek so I could feel the comfort of his skin and then bit down hard on his forearm.

Andas howled and let go, but he was stronger than that, really. He’d chosen to let me go. And…I wasn’t sure he was even aware of making that choice. I released a shaking breath.

He stumbled away, touching the bite, cursing under his breath.

Andas didn’t realize Cormac and Aaden were keeping him from harming me. That was the only explanation that made sense.

For the first time I felt that reaching my men might really be possible.

They were still looking out for me, working together within this evil being, and that gave me more strength than the sapling had earlier. A sureness and power returned to me.

He glared across the room. “Don’t look at me like that, silver bird.”

“Like what?” I asked, sliding sideways, keeping him at a distance as if he were a ruby-red on a double eclipse. I tried not to notice the sharp lines of his face, or the fall of his dark hair. Andas was dressed in black from his long coat to his boots, and he was impossibly perfect, even for a fae. Cormac and Aaden had been devastatingly handsome by themselves, let alone combined in one body.

“As if those fools are still in me. They are not.”

I covered my lack of focus with a smile, laying out the next steps of my plan in my mind. “No? Then why do they keep you from harming me?”

He threw back his head and laughed. This was the only opportunity I’d get.

I made my move and bolted for the exit. Scrambling through the tunnels, driven along by my power, I ran out of the cave, Andas right behind me.

He tackled me, and we went down to the shingled ground in a heap, our bodies flush. At the speed with which we rolled down the rocky slope, my senses should have been blinded with the blur, but I was so keenly attuned to Cormac and Aaden that I noted the obvious desire he had for me as his length pressed between my legs. I felt the heat of his skin through our layers of clothing. I drowned in the wild blackness of his eyes and froze at the way his mouth hovered over my own.

I had a flashback of tackling Aaden, of holding Cormac, of being pressed between the two men. Of the taste of their kisses. My eyelids fluttered. I wanted Andas because wanting him was the only way I could reach the two other parts of me.

Do not give in. Balance must be achieved, Gaia boomed for my ears alone.

I slammed my magic into his solar plexus, sending him flying straight into the sky. Black ribbons exploded everywhere, reminding me of where we were. They wove such a tight fabric that there was nothing else around us but writhing blackness.

It was all the reminder I needed that Unbalance had claimed this realm.

He landed about a hundred feet from me, light on his feet. “Ready to bow down to me, Mistress of Underhill?”

Fury shot through me at his mocking tone. “I won’t give up.”

Andas darted toward me and I flipped my hand, driving the earth up in a burst of soil that…floated around us. The scale realm was no longer holding together.

He tossed a rock toward my head, and when I ducked he tried to tackle me again.

I dropped flat onto my belly, and he sailed right over me. I kicked back, catching him in the ribs, feeling the crack of bone under my blow. I wouldn’t feel bad about hurting him. We both knew the way this would go, whether now or in the end.

He grabbed my ankles and dragged me toward him. His magic pinned me to the ground, holding me exactly where he wanted me.

“I will not,” I screamed as he crawled up and over me.

“Oh, I’d never take you that way,” he whispered as he ran a finger down the side of my face. “There’s more power to be had from your submission and self-loathing. But before we are done, you will beg me to touch you, Silver. You will beg to have me between your legs.”

I shivered, his words scaring me more than anything else could have, because…because I couldn’t share much at all with Aaden and Cormac now, but Andas bore the perfect union of their features, and sharing intimacy with him would feel enough like sharing it with them.

“You’ll be the one to beg, for me to let you go,” I growled at him.

He smirked. “I doubt that very much.”

Around us, the world of the scale realm shivered. The air shook and danced and the black ribbons danced with it. Andas leapt to his feet. His magic slid off me instead of killing me, and I scrambled away, pushing distance between us.

He whipped around, rage etching into his face. “What have you done?”

There wasn’t time to answer, the scale realm exploded; heat and cold, color and light, and darkness…so much darkness. I was thrown and only realized I’d been bodily thrown from the scale realm when I once again landed outside the cave where I’d fought the child thief.

I was back on Earth.

Sigella and Keefe stumbled toward me from the cave entrance.

“What happened?” I took in their dishevelled states, the marks on their skin, and the blood dripping from small wounds.

“He…” Sigella looked at Keefe. “This drunken fae closed the scale realm.”

I whipped around to focus on the strange fae man who’d shown up just when we’d needed him. I was supposed to have henchmen…but as far as I’d seen, my henchmen were Orry, Peggy, and Sigella. There had been no silver path belonging to Keefe running parallel to mine in the criss-cross maze of my future as Underhill. What part did he play in this?

“You closed…the scale realm?” I asked. This fae had somehow done what I couldn’t.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just came to me, and honestly, I am not even sure how I did it.”

That was a bit of bullshit right there. But I’d learn the truth in time.

Sigella didn’t budge her gaze from him. “We combined our magic, Silver. We lost control of what was happening, so I can’t say how we managed to shut the realm, but the realm is closed off—maybe for good. Unbalance can no longer travel there to watch and intercept our every move. He’s lost a huge advantage.”

“And I still can’t access it either, I assume.” I could no longer sense the realm, which seemed answer enough.

Sigella finally looked at me. “Not what we’d planned, but this might keep things safer for a little while. We’ll be able to move around without him watching our every step.”

That was a win.

I’d take it for the time being. I drew magic from my surroundings to heal my scrapes and bruises, then took a deep breath. “Right. On to the next disaster.”