“Yeah,” Boral says gruffly. “Kymaris is into some really sick shit. Those sex sacrifices she did to summon the original fallen look like Disney World compared to some of the things I’ve seen.”
“Like what?” I ask without thought. Then I think. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say they’re twisted enough that even I’m shocked by them,” Boral says. Knowing the awful things he’s done and his lack of conscience, that says something.
I glance up at Zaid, who is as worried as I am by that proclamation.
“And what’s the purpose of her doing these acts?” Carrick inquires.
“Honestly?” Boral asks, but it’s rhetorical so he doesn’t wait for a response. “I think most of it is she just loves doing sick shit. But some of it has to do with feeding her powers. Human sacrifice is a hot commodity in the accumulation of dark power.”
“She’s sacrificing humans?” I ask, my voice shrill with panic. I turn to look at Carrick. “We can’t let her do that. We have to go shut this down.”
I believe in my heart the Carrick I had first met at the start of this journey wouldn’t have blinked twice at what was going on, not because he’s callous but because he understands and accepts the way the world works.
The Carrick who loves me to the depth of his eternal soul is bothered that I’m bothered. He looks down the kitchen island to Maddox, and they share some sort of look—an unspoken communication.
“You’ll stop it, right?” I ask Carrick, hating to force his hand in anything. But I can’t stand the thought of innocents being slaughtered and Seattle being her buffet line.
Pulling his gaze from Maddox to me, he says, “I’ll see what we can do.”
Those words in and of themselves are ambiguous and could mean a million different things. I get that he doesn’t want to promise me something he can’t deliver. But I know Carrick and my faith in him is absolute.
If he can stop her from doing that, he will.
“Maybe we need to change tactics,” Maddox suggests, and all our eyes go to him. “Maybe we just need to put her down. We have enough power among us to do it.”
Carrick’s expression turns grim. “Onyx told me that Finley is the one who has to take on Kymaris and she needs more practice and time to get used to her power. We need to know the true extent of what she has.”
Carrick had told me of this revelation when he’d returned from his service to Rune. And it’s true I don’t have a handle on what’s inside of me. Carrick and I are practicing every chance we can get, and I’m learning more and more things. But the thought of going one on one with Kymaris right now actually scares me.
Still, I don’t say a word. I don’t want my fear to be the deciding factor.
“There’s something else to consider, too,” Rainey says, garnering the room’s attention. “If Kymaris dies, hypothetically, wouldn’t she return to the Underworld in some form or fashion?”
“Hypothetically,” Carrick agrees.
“If we are going to rescue Zora at some point, I think it’s better to do it while Kymaris is in the Earth realm. Once she returns to the Underworld, it’s a complete unknown what she’ll be and if she’ll have power, but she’d have no use for Zora.”
And that right there decides the issue, as I’m not putting Zora at risk. “We can’t take Kymaris out until we rescue Zora.”
No one says a word, not even Carrick, who has been against this from the start. The tone of my voice is clear I’m not budging on this.
“But,” I add in a somewhat embarrassed voice, “I’m also not sure I’m ready to take on Kymaris just yet. I need more practice.”
Carrick smiles at me in understanding, hand going to the back of my neck as he leans toward me. “We’ll figure a way to protect the humans from Kymaris,” he promises, and I believe him. “And we’ll continue to practice and get you ready to take Kymaris down. I have total faith in you.”
That I don’t believe quite as readily, but I’m willing to accept the possibility he might be right.
“She’s still in the same place, right?” Maddox asks of Boral.
“Yup. Settled into the neighborhood nicely,” he confirms.
“Does she hold humans there?”
“No,” Boral replies. “She has a few extravagant parties a week, and by parties, I mean drugs, orgies, sacrifices. She usually sends one of her fallen out to get a human. Says it’s how they prove their loyalty to her. But they don’t need much of a carrot to do it. It seems all have bought into the dream she’s feeding them.”
My stomach turns and I push my plate away, my brain unable to stop the mental images of what Kymaris is doing. Family fajita night is officially over.
CHAPTER 21
Finley
To contact Zora, I’m going to use a different technique than I did the last time. Our first meeting of the minds, so to speak, was done down in the library. I was able to connect by imagining the maze of caves in the Underworld to somehow project myself there. I called out to her and, thankfully, she heard and responded.
Granted… she didn’t want anything to do with me after a few moments of conversation, and gave me a painful zap that sent me spinning away from our connection, so it wasn’t all that successful.
She made it clear she’s not interested in me, so I don’t expect her to be receptive.
As such, I’m not going in subtly like I did the last time. Instead, I want to try to project right into her body, sort of like I did when I first saw her in a dream. Except it really wasn’t a dream. I was asleep but I believe I was actually inside her and experiencing the Underworld through her eyes.
Yup… going to try to just jump right into her.
Now, there are downfalls to doing away with subtlety.
First, it’s going to be considered pretty damn rude to just show up inside of her rather than asking permission to communicate. She might hold it against me and increase her distrust.
Second, and this is Carrick’s concern, not mine… I might get trapped there somehow. He’s afraid my psyche might get stuck or even held there intentionally. But I seriously doubt Zora wants to share body space with me for the duration of our lives.
Ultimately, I’m still going to do it because I don’t have the time to be subtle or cautious. Within a few weeks, this is all going to be over. In that time frame, I have to figure out how to get Zora out of the Underworld. I know Maddox and Carrick are sort of feeling we have nothing to do but wait for the October new moon and the only priority is protecting the Blood Stone and increasing my skills, but, conversely… I have my biggest and most important mission still ahead of me.
Rescuing my sister.
After our fajita dinner—which most of us just picked at after Boral’s call, except Maddox who can eat anything at any time—Rainey and Myles headed home and Maddox went into the man cave to play video games. He had officially set up residence in the condo in the other guest suite for the foreseeable future, which I love, but it also makes me feel the absence of Lucien all the more.
Zaid and I cleaned up the kitchen, and he left to go to his home. I had learned during Carrick’s time away with Rune that Zaid actually has a small apartment here in the city. He had told me that while he was always welcome to live in Carrick’s home like he had in their early days, he’d been living by himself for the last several hundred years.
“What happened to cause you to move out of Carrick’s home?” I had asked as I dried the pan he’d just rinsed.
Zaid gave me a grim look, but I was touched he trusted me with the information. “It was at the time I’d stopped having impulses to go crucify myself back to a tree. Figured I was independent enough to live away from him.”
And God help him—not me—I was moved to hug the daemon. It was totally awkward, and he sort of patted me on the back before not so subtly shoving me away.
But we had a moment.
When everything was done, the condo settle
d quietly, and we were ready to let me contact Zora, Carrick said, “Let’s do this in our room.”
Our.
It shouldn’t have touched me as much as it did that he referenced it as “our” room. At Carrick’s insistence, I’d moved all my clothes and toiletries into it after he returned from his jaunt with Rune. We’d even gone to my house and retrieved the remainder of all my personal effects. I wasn’t ever going back there to live because I was never leaving Carrick’s side, so it only made sense for me to fully move into the condo.
As for the house, I don’t know what to do with it just now. The thought of selling it is abhorrent and there’s no rush to decide, despite my impending doom either from the prophecy or Rune’s curse. What I did do this week, however, with the assistance of Carrick’s attorney, was finalize the creation of an estate plan that put the house along with One Bean into a trust. When I die, both will go to Rainey and Myles to do with what they want. I felt so much better after signing those papers.
We walk into “our” room, and it’s fitting because we are an “our” in every sense of that inclusive word. Carrick called it “our” room in such a natural and easygoing manner, it sounded as if I’d been living with him in it for years. In a way, I suppose that’s true since he’s had so many variations of me throughout his long life and our relationship is more natural to him. He’s spent far more time with me than I with him, which is weird and confusing. Granted, each of my reincarnations had differences, or so he’s said, but Carrick told me once that—at my core—I’ve been the same person throughout time.
Since this is still somewhat new to me, although I feel a very transcendental type of connection to him, hearing him say “our room” out loud so casually and as if it’s always been that way produced all the feels.
“Where do you want to do it?” I ask as Carrick closes the door behind us. He looks over his shoulder, eyebrow cocked due to my choice of words before turning to me.
“Bed will be fine,” he replies, a slight smirk on his face.
My eyes narrow slightly as I drawl. “Are we talking about Zora or sex?”
Carrick’s expression sobers a little. “If it’s my choice, I would choose sex.”
“Of course you would,” I reply, snickering. “Not just because you love sex, but because you don’t want me to contact Zora.”
“Both true statements,” he says with a shrug, then nods at the two chairs that sit in the corner with a table in between. “But let’s do it—contact Zora, that is—with you sitting up. I don’t want you too comfortable.”
He needn’t say anything more than that. Carrick is tremendously worried I’m somehow going to get sucked away from him and while, with magic, I suppose anything is possible, I think chances of that happening are slim and the goal is well worth the risk.
I move over to the chairs, then plop down into one. Carrick moves the other around and puts it in front of me so when he sits, he’s facing my direction. He then scoots it in until our knees are touching, and he takes my hands in his.
“Going to keep hold of you the entire time,” he says gruffly, and I no longer think his worries are quite so cute anymore.
My heart recognizes he’s not ready to lose me just yet.
“It will be fine,” I assure him. “I promise I’ll be incredibly careful. If I sense anything bad, I’ll pull back right away.”
He sighs, but offers a small smile of encouragement. “Okay… let’s do this.”
I sit up straight in the chair, close my eyes, and give his hands a slight squeeze. He doesn’t squeeze back, merely tightens his grip.
I obviously have no clue what I’m doing. My first contact with Zora, I stumbled upon her during a dream. My second was sheer dumb luck as Zaid had directed me to the same caves I had seen in my dream.
But this time, I want to go straight to Zora.
So, in my mind, I picture what she looks like. It’s my face, which is something I know well, but rather than conjure the image of me as her identical twin, I think back to my dream.
When I saw her in the dirty mirror above that Underworld bar.
Despite the grime covering the reflection, her hair was a shocking snowy white and her skin was shades paler than mine, which says a lot as I’m pretty pale.
But it was her expression and a certain look in her eyes that I focus on. It was flat and unemotional. As I think back to that visage, my stomach tightens because it frankly scares me to consider what type of person she might be, given how she grew up.
I can feel my hands start to sweat against Carrick’s, but I push that aside. I can’t get distracted.
I call forth her face again, studying every plane and angle. Feel the sorrow well up inside of me because of that dead look in her eyes. Even with the same brilliant green, gold, and blue orbs as mine, hers seem dull and lifeless. I try to imagine her pain and wonder if it’s even pain anymore. Has she become so hardened she doesn’t feel? Does she even know kindness or love?
There’s a slight pinching in my heart, and I take a shuddering breath. The pinching gets a little more pronounced as I lock onto my sister in my mind’s eyes. Does her heart feel it?
There’s a tiny tug.
Then a pull.
At first, I resist, my conscience perhaps recognizing danger, then I remember… I want to go.
To Zora.
I open myself up, feel something yank not at my heart, but perhaps my soul.
Then I’m tumbling through a swirling mist of gray, the sensation one of falling from a great height, and even though Carrick eased my fear of heights, my stomach isn’t immune to the sensation. Bile rises in the back of my throat, and I choke it back.
Then I stop.
My eyes snap open, and I’m back in the Underworld. Except this is definitely different than my dream where my physical sensations seemed a bit dulled. Right now, I can feel the wooden chair I’m sitting on and see the grain texture of the wooden table, the mud walls across from me, and a grimy window.
“Carrick?” I say hesitantly to test how far removed from the Earth realm I am.
“I’m here,” he says back, and I hear him incredibly clear from just a few feet from me. When he squeezes my hands, I can feel that, too.
Just as I can feel my hand gripping onto what I think is a crudely forged spoon. Dipping my head, I let my gaze drop.
And yes… there’s a bowl of some food that’s unrecognizable and the consistency of thick oatmeal. The spoon dips, grabs the grayish goop, and then I can feel it slide over my tongue. The taste is incredibly bland, but there’s a hint of some unknown spice.
I reflexively squeeze against Carrick’s hands, and I can still feel them.
Just as I can feel the spoon.
“I’m in both places,” I whisper.
“What do you see?” he asks.
Before I can respond, a sense of unease hits me and then flat-out apprehension.
But those aren’t my feelings. They’re the feelings of whoever I’m inside of because I can feel Carrick’s presence and I’m quite calm.
It’s incredibly confusing.
“Who’s there?” a female voice booms in my head, and my suspicions are confirmed.
I’m inside of Zora as that’s actually my voice, but more hardened.
“Zora?” I ask in my mind, saving my actual voice for Carrick.
“I told you to leave me alone,” she responds so loud that my brain seems to knock around inside my skull. Then she tries to push against me, and I feel like I’m being squeezed all over. I imagine myself digging my heels in and holding on for dear life. The pressure intensifies. I feel my grasp slipping until something pops and everything goes black.
I squeeze Carrick’s hands, and, to my relief, he squeezes back. I try to strain against the darkness to see something, but it’s utterly black without even a glimmer of light. I fight off the feeling of panic as I realize I’ve never been somewhere before that was devoid of any light, and it’s slightly suffocating.
&n
bsp; “Why won’t you leave?” Zora asks in frustration.
I’m startled, because I assumed she pushed me out of her, but I’m starting to think she pushed me somewhere deeper. I can’t see what she’s seeing anymore, and I can feel nothing but Carrick’s hands gripping mine.
“Zora,” I say again, reintroducing myself, which seems silly. “I’m Finley. Your twin sister.”
“Get out,” she screams and I wince, not from the volume but from the anger in her voice.
“Please,” I beg. “Please give me a chance. Please just listen to me. If you do, I’ll never bother you again without an invite.”
There’s silence, but I can still feel her presence. I take that as her assent for me to continue. Hesitantly, I take a big chance that my first words don’t drive her away, but rather help to forge trust.
“I’m no friend of Kymaris,” I say softly. “She’s here in the Earth realm to conquer it, and I’m trying to stop her.”
“What do I care about your Earth realm?” she snarls condescendingly.
I choose my words carefully, trying to be as neutral as possible. “Because it’s where you’re from originally.”
I purposely don’t say, “It’s your home,” because I imagine she had some type of home these last twenty-eight years and I have no clue how she feels about it. If she hates it or loves it or has just become resigned.
Zora doesn’t respond, so I decide to continue talking in a gentle tone. I get the sense she’s like a feral animal, prone to attack or possibly run at any moment.
“Our parents thought they were having fraternal twins, but we were identical,” I say with a small smile I hope she hears in my tone.
“What’s this twin you speak of?” she asks haughtily. “You’ve used that word before, and I don’t understand what it means.”
I’m stunned into inaction. How can she not know what a twin is? Maybe fae don’t have twins so she’s never been exposed to such a thing.
“It means we were born of one egg that split in two,” I reply. “We were carried simultaneously in our mother and were born together. We’re identically the same, except your hair is white and mine is red. I saw your reflection in the mirror and we look the exact same, except for the hair.”
A Battle of Blood and Stone Page 21