Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

“ K ik,” I moaned. I felt like a tarbeast’s asshole after it had eaten too much whip flax. Worse even.

A sigh. “Kik’s not here. His death was regrettable. As much as I hated him, I knew you loved him.”

I opened my eyes a crack. Because that sure as hell had sounded like Andas.

It was Andas.

“You,” I croaked, not able to budge anything aside from my vocal cords and eyelids.

Andas jerked on the hard rock he’d perched on and whipped to look at me. He swallowed once. “You’re awake this time. You’ve muttered Kik’s name more than once…”

And clearly he’d been answering. Had I just heard him say that he regretted Kik’s death because I’d loved him?

I stared at Unbalance.

A soft breeze lifted his dark hair and the unlaced neck of his light tunic. He’d brought me somewhere warm, and I could hear the crash of waves and take in the scent of the sweet and salty ocean air. I couldn’t feel the grittiness of sand on the exposed skin of my arms, but a soft leather that smelled entirely of Aaden and Cormac. Andas’s long coat.

I closed my eyes in a bid to connect how I’d come to be on this beach, laid out on my enemy’s jacket while he whispered lover’s words to me.

“Kraken,” he grunted.

The lovers’ words were gone?

Ah, yes. The kraken. Technically, a kraken wasn’t as bad to fight as a rawmouth, but that was because the kraken’s numbing magic was so diluted in an ocean. As long as you never entered their cave lairs, you’d be fine. But in a lake?

I’d protected myself against the jealous magic of the lake, and my layers of spells had helped somewhat repell the kraken’s power, but I hadn’t even sensed it coming through the cold of the water and the narrowed direction of my thoughts. I’d been too rigid in my plan.

“You’ve taken my kraken,” I said to Unbalance. Because surely this was the kraken from Underhill.

He hummed. “Yes. He didn’t get through your portal in time. He didn’t want to numb the other creatures and prevent their escape.”

My chest squeezed. He’d sacrificed himself. And now look at what he’d become. “You sent him through afterward then. A little trap?”

“A little trap, yes. I sent a few whispers to the Alaskan Court about a sorceress. I knew you would find it impossible not to investigate. I didn’t expect you to throw my— his— sword into the fucking middle of the lake.”

I shrugged a shoulder. “You win some, you lose some. I was trying to lure the creature out, and with how the sword worked against its power, it would have retreated if I’d kept the weapon on me.”

“Exactly,” he said from between clenched teeth.

Andas seemed upset that he couldn’t anticipate my every move. I could’ve sworn his exhale shook.

“What’s the state of your body?” he asked roughly.

I cracked open my eyes again. “You don’t want to ask how I am, yet you do. That must be confusing.” His jaw tightened, and my lips found the energy to smirk. Look at me go. “I’m incapacitated, Andas. You have me. Unbalance will rule unchecked for centuries and maybe millennia. You’ve won. All you need to do is kill me.”

I couldn’t have stopped him. Unless Sigella showed up to drown him in tea, I was on my own. My magic wasn’t answering me, so I couldn’t check where any of them were, but Sigella must’ve seen Andas drag me from peril. She was smart enough to wonder what I was thinking.

“Why didn’t you let the kraken kill me?” I asked him aloud.

I tried to shift my shoulders and grimaced.

He leaned down to help me but stopped himself, curling his hands to fists instead. “I had not yet decided whether to replace you. That is all.”

There was a whisper in my mind, though, something he’d said in what I’d expected to be my last moments. What was it?

I played along. “You’d rather stick with the kelpie you know.”

He frowned. “The devil I know? Yes, that is what I must decide. Forces in the greater universe will always ensure there is both Unbalance and Balance in this collection of realms. Another Balance will exist the moment you are gone. I would need to find this Balance—which would be difficult since your henchmen would use their powers to hide her until the time when the scales might be tipped. So why go to that trouble when I have tipped the scales in my favor already, and now that I have you trapped?” He took a deep breath. “Another Balance would not be you.”

I blinked. Then again. “You don’t want to kill me.”

He clenched his jaw again. “I haven’t decided. It’s time to move.”

Andas stood abruptly, then bent down to scoop up me and his jacket. There was a weight in my hand, and I tightened my grip around the pommel of Cormac’s sword, surprised that I still held it. He hadn’t tried to take it from me.

I exhaled, my head lolling against his chest. I had the perfect view of the strong angle of his jaw and cheekbones. He had Cormac’s skin tone, and grime still covered him from the fight against the kraken. That warmed my blood. My men hadn’t been afraid to get their hands dirty, and I found that attractive considering I could barely recall a time when my hands hadn’t been that way.

He opened a portal that reeked of sulphur and stepped us through.

A tropical oasis, with a waterfall pounding to my left. Andas sat me up against a moss-covered boulder, then lashed out a spear of his magic at a wriggling creature.

The long, thin Earth creature thrashed around for a time before going still, and conversation halted as Andas set to the task of skinning the animal and setting it over a patch of his black fire.

My mind was caught between two states, the sluggishness of near-death and frantic whirling from the bizarreness of this situation.

Andas had saved me from the kraken and his own trap. Andas…was about to feed me. Nurse me back to health. All because he ‘hadn’t decided whether to replace me.’

I had an inkling that Unbalanced felt…unbalanced. Perhaps I’d intended to trap him , but here I was. With him unsettled, I couldn’t have asked for a better chance to learn about him.

“Why did we just move locations?” I unlocked my fingers from the pommel of Cormac’s sword as I asked the question.

Andas focused on the blade. “I couldn’t pry the weapon from your hand. Even a whisper away from death, you held it fast.” He lifted his gaze to mine. “Why?”

I could choose not to give him the truth, but there would be no learning about this fae without a little give. “Because it’s Cormac’s.”

Because the naga king had pressed it into my hands in his last moments.

“It was Cormac’s,” said Andas. “He’s gone.”

The whispering in my mind strengthened, and my brows drew together. “That’s not true. You asked me to live for them.” I didn’t speak the rest because shock gripped my throat as the full memory swam back to me. Unbalance had asked me to live for them and him.

“And the ploy worked,” he sneered. “How pathetic you are. The tiniest speck of hope can motivate you to claw back from death itself.”

“Then there was no point,” I replied. Picking up the blade, I set it against my throat.

His roar filled the waterfall oasis. Birds rocketed into the sky, and the surrounding forest exploded in a flurry of startled animals.

Without breaking our locked gazes—mine calm and his panicked—I lowered the sword to the ground again.

Fury lit Andas’s black-eyed gaze, reminiscent of Cormac’s temper. He opened a portal and stepped through, leaving only the acrid scent of sulphur behind.

I pursed my lips and glanced around. My magic was null for the time being—likely for several days. That meant no portals. “Where the hell am I?”

I could tell this was the earth realm. Beyond that, nothing.

My stomach rumbled, erasing my need to know my location.

I crawled to where the skinned creature was cooking. It looked a lot like the slithering creatures in Underhill that were edible. “Better raw.”

Just like Aaden to overcook something that could be enjoyed cold and bloody. I twisted off a chunk of the flesh and tore off a small bite that I could chew in my weakened state.

I licked my fingers afterward. Not bad. I went back for seconds. Andas shouldn’t have left if he’d wanted half the food.

Instead of crawling back to the rock, I slanted sideways to land in a clump of grass growing beside the pool. The spray of the water was refreshing against the humid temperature.

He’d kissed me.

He’d begged me to live for him.

He’d done something to bring me back from the verge of death. What had he done?

I shifted, then groaned. Not a minute more went by before I tried again. Grimace. Groan. Curse. Moan.

“Fuck.” I curled into a ball against the screaming ache in my body, then I glared at the water. Cold instead of warm, but it would help, clothes and all.

I heaved my body closer, then rolled with pitiful slowness until I could dangle my hand in the water. My fingertips brushed shingles. Shallow. I had a healthy respect for the dangers and unpredictability of water. Andas had also roared any creatures away before he’d left.

How good of him.

I heaved off the bank and landed in the water on my back. Air whooshed from my lungs as I discovered just how shallow it was.

“Ah,” I sighed as the cool liquid ran over my body, sweeping away some of the aching sensation.

I gazed up at the sun, barely visible through the thick tropical canopy. I wasn’t sure I’d enjoyed this much quiet since?—

Sulphur.

“And now you’re trying to drown yourself,” snapped Andas.

I shifted my gaze to find him looming over me. “Still having a tantrum, Cormac?”

There was a flicker of amber in his gaze.

“There is no Cormac.” He entered the water, all the better to loom over me, I supposed.

“Then why are you having a tantrum?”

He crouched by my head. “Remind me why I didn’t kill you.”

I closed my eyes. The sight of him was too much for my heart in this state. “Because you’re in denial. You don’t want to exist this way, apart from me, at odds with me, in danger from me, and in danger of your creatures killing me. You don’t want to be without me either. So do you choose eternal torture? Or do you choose eternal loneliness?”

He was quiet.

So was I.

I’d felt the hopelessness of that choice since the moment Andas had appeared with my men trapped inside of him. I’d wondered how I’d ever find the strength to kill them.

“They are inside of you,” I whispered. “They are .”

“They are, but they are me.”

I opened my eyes and shouted in his face. “Then tell me how I see them!”

He gripped me by the shoulders and pulled me to sitting, kneeling in the water to bring our faces nose-to-nose.

“Tell me,” I screamed. I was hurt, in heart and body. I’d probably been dead for a while. I. Was. Done. I hit his shoulder with all the strength of a newborn alicorn. “Tell me!”

His breath was ragged. “See for yourself.”

He dragged me closer to set my lips against his. I no longer had the strength to deny how much I’d craved his touch in the past weeks. I moved my lips against his, wishing I could press against his mouth more firmly to gain the access I wanted.

Andas broke off the kiss, then gripped my hair to tilt my head back and expose my neck. Black eyes bored into mine before his power hit me. Without my magic, I was defenseless against the onslaught. I screamed, my eyes tightening but never leaving his as I was filled with his black essence.

Darkness filled my body and mind, and I thrashed against the attack.

“Stop panicking,” Andas said.

The calmness of his tone touched my frantic mind and soothed me enough for me to realize his magic wasn’t hurting me. Another’s essence filling me should have felt foreign, but there was a soothing coolness to his presence within me.

There was a?—

I sucked in a breath, then took a closer look at the magic flooding me

“You see at last what I am,” Andas said in a low voice.

I’d never bothered to peer into the black of Andas’s magic. Every creature knew darkness was something to avoid, unless they’d already chosen to embrace Unbalance. But now that his magic wove through me, I could feel it.

There was amber. There was green. Black encased them both, doing its best to press the essences together into one.

And failing.

I swallowed. “You’re?—”

“You see that they are me.” He laughed, cold and dull. “You see that I am them, and that they are me. They are here, but they are not as they were. They will never be as they were.”

I didn’t see that at all.

I’d seen two magics swirling inside of black. Two separate magics.

Andas was breathing hard, still maintaining his tight grip on my hair. His gaze lowered to my lips, then raised again. “Why won’t you forget them? Why won’t you accept that they are changed, that they are me?”

Why wouldn’t I accept it?

Because it wasn’t true. There was a rift in Andas that I wasn’t sure he even saw. Aaden and Cormac were separate within him. They’d refused to merge into one—just as they’d resisted doing anything together in life.

My smile was genuine, even if it had nothing to do with what Andas was saying.

Andas loosened his grip and rested his forehead against mine. “You only smile like that when you’re about to kill something.”

I had no idea what the hell this messed-up thing was between us. I didn’t want Andas, but my body didn’t seem to mind whether I was crushed between Aaden and Cormac or crushed by the master of darkness.

I gripped his tunic tightly, then lowered my gaze to his lips.

His breath stalled, and if I’d been the type of creature that purred, my chest would be rumbling with it. He wanted me. I didn’t have magic, but there was a different kind of power in this.

And I’d wield any weapon at my disposal against him—and enjoy it for good measure.

I flicked out my tongue and traced his bottom lip, enjoying the way his body froze.

There was a rift in Andas.

Driving a wedge into that rift to widen it seemed appropriate.