“The price of magic…” I muttered to myself, hating the truth in those words more than ever.
“Is a motherfucker sometimes.” Knox forced a smile. “And it’s currently kicking my ass, so…”
He gave me a light squeeze, then pulled away. With concerted effort, he started down the hall toward his room. Merc cast me a sympathetic look before turning to join the exhausted werewolf. The soft murmurs of their voices traveled back to me, and I’d never wanted their hypersensitive hearing more in my life. What I would have given to know what they were saying.
Then a pang of dread in my gut made me wonder if it was better that I didn’t.
Kat sidled up to me and draped her arm around my shoulders.
“I’m worried, too,” she said gently.
“I won’t give up on him.”
“We can’t,” she replied before ushering me toward my bedroom.
“He’ll be okay, right?” I asked softly. Her grip on me tightened, but she didn’t answer.
We didn’t stop moving until she sat me down on the bed and lay down next to me. She patted the bed and waited for me to join her, then pulled the blankets up around me and tucked me in.
“Knox is strong and a stubborn piece of shit. He’s not going to let this get him—especially now that he has you to help anchor him.”
“But what if I can’t?” I said, staring up at the ceiling. “What if it isn’t enough?”
She grabbed my face and turned me to look into her piercing blue eyes. Eyes that had softened.
“It has to be.”
She nestled in next to me and closed her eyes, leaving me awake in the darkness with my fears and racing thoughts and the bone-deep tiredness I knew wouldn’t go away until the fey royals were dead. Or I was.
Chapter Seventeen
As I slept, I felt my magic wander, extending out from me as though protecting me in my slumber. It reached and danced in such a calming way. I was barely aware of it, though it seemed so apparent; one of the mysteries of the unconscious mind. So it was no surprise to me that I lost track of it at some point, letting it go wherever it felt necessary.
Until a voice I should not have heard permeated my sleep-addled mind.
“Piper!” Liam shouted, my name escaping between ragged breaths like he had just run into my room. But when I shot awake and flicked on my bedside lamp, there was no winded werewolf bringing tales of doom from Faerie—just me and relative darkness.
“Liam?” I replied, thinking I must have reached peak tiredness if I was trying to talk to my dream.
But when my dream answered, I shot to my feet.
“I can’t open a portal,” Liam said. It was then that I realized that it hadn’t been a dream; that I’d heard his voice inside my mind.
My magic had wandered into Faerie while I slept.
“Holy shit!” I gasped as I looked around the room frantically, as though something there could help me. “What do I do? Should I open one?”
“No!” he roared. “You can’t. It’s too dangerous.”
Panic surged in my chest, and I ran to my bedroom door. I threw it open and shouted for Merc and Knox.
“Where are you?” I asked, focusing on the wall and my breathing to calm myself.
Merc, Jase, and Dean appeared out of nowhere in front of me. Knox, Foust, and Brunton stormed down the hall to join us.
“It’s Liam,” I explained. “He’s in trouble. He can’t open a portal back here.”
“Fuck,” Knox growled. “We have to get him out of there.”
“Liam? Liam, are you still there?”
Silence was all that answered, and the others stared at me, so many questions in their eyes that they knew better than to ask at that moment.
“I am—”
“Do you know of a place called the Ether?” I asked, praying that he did. Hoping that it, like his ability to portal himself back and forth to Faerie, was something he knew about and just hadn’t shared with us because we hadn’t asked.
“Ether? No…”
“Shit. Okay…okay…I want you to try to find a safe place somewhere and call for the Ether—or Etherian.”
“Etherian? But he—”
“Just call for him—search for him. If you tell him I sent you, he should be happy to harbor you until we return.” I left off ‘or at least hold you hostage’.
“Return?”
“No time to explain. You’ll have to trust me on this one, Liam. Now do it!”
Again, my magical line to Faerie went silent, and I held my breath as I waited. The men before me did the same.
“Etherian!” Liam shouted. “Ether...no…I didn’t…no! Piper, leave!”
“But—”
“Go!” he screamed, and I swore he somehow took that magical rope connecting us and threw it at me. I could feel the magic loosen and fall through space until it yanked free of the fey realm and whipped back into me. Unlike last time, when it had felt like I’d been hit by a careening car, this time my magic settled into me without a brutal crash.
“What’s happening?” Knox asked, fear tightening his voice.
“I…I don’t know. Liam did what I asked and called for Etherian, but then—”
“Then what, Piper?”
“It was like something interrupted. He panicked and told me to leave, and when I didn’t, he...threw my magic back to me somehow.”
Worry seeped into Knox’s expression. “What interrupted him?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, but it didn’t sound good.”
“Perhaps the royals have found what they think to be leverage,” Merc noted grimly.
“They’ll torture him,” Foust observed. “There’ll be nothing left—”
“And they’ll expect us to come,” Knox added before his frustrated growl filled the air and his fist smashed through the wall. Everyone went still and stared as he withdrew it. “I’m fine,” he said, voice hoarse. “Just angry.”
“Okay,” I said softly as I placed my hand on his drywall-dusted wrist. “What do we do? How do we get him back?”
“He knew he was potentially sacrificing himself when he left,” Merc said.
“We can’t, Merc,” I pleaded. “I know what we agreed to, but we can’t just leave him to that fate.”
Knox said nothing; he just stared at the vampire king, awaiting his response. Merc’s jaw flexed as he silently mulled over his response.
“Everyone who’s agreed to fight alongside us has already been summoned and is preparing to leave as we speak. The New York wolves are in the lower-level cells for now, given what transpired between them and Knox. Our return to the Ether is imminent. Perhaps Liam will be there. If not, we will stick to our plan to attack the royals. After that, we can search for him.”
I nodded, then scanned the crowd for my father, hoping he’d have some words of wisdom to add, but I didn’t find him.
“Your father has his warlocks with Sherry,” Merc said, having read my thoughts in my expression.
“Will they be done making whatever the fuck they were making?” Brunton asked.