I closed my eyes. I was so sure he was about to finally cast the spell that would end me. But he didn’t. He just remained standing there, holding me in place. I dared open my eyes and look at his face.
I was taken aback by the look in his eyes. Gone was the fury I’d seen in them only a few moments before. In its place was… Longing? Regret? Sadness?
“We could have been so good together, Mona,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I never wanted it to end this way.”
“You decided our fate the day you took off with your aunt. You knew enslavement was never the life I wanted to live.”
His gaze lowered once again to the ring on my finger. Melancholy flickered across his face. “That ring,” he said. “It’s similar to the one I gave you.”
I breathed out impatiently. “Where are you going with this, Rhys?”
He paused, the softness fading from his expression and leaving it once again stoic and unreadable.
“Nowhere, I suppose,” he said, his voice several tones deeper. His grip tightened around my wrists. “Which is exactly where you’re going.”
A current of energy burst from Rhys’ palms and flowed into my body. Before I knew it, my legs had given way beneath me. I would have fallen from the tree had Rhys not gripped my waist and flung me over his shoulder. He began deftly climbing up the tree, higher and higher until he’d reached the top. Sliding me off him, he laid me down on my back along a branch. A rope shot from his right arm and snaked around me, holding me down so tightly I could barely breathe.
I opened my mouth to scream, but no noise came out.
Why is he doing this? Why doesn’t he just kill me?
As if he’d just read my mind, he looked down at me and said, “I don’t need to end you to accomplish what we came for.”
He lowered his palm to my forehand and pressed it against my skin, causing my eyelids to droop. When he withdrew his hand, I lost the battle to keep them open.
As I drifted toward unconsciousness, my last coherent thought was:
How is The Shade ever going to cope without me?
Chapter 25: Rose
When the boundary gave way and witches flooded toward the beach, I was sure that I would go insane with worry before I was ever reunited with Caleb and my parents again. I was probably some kind of masochist for doing it, but I couldn’t help myself; I inched as close to the edge of the cliff as I could without risking falling off and stared down as the horrifying battle scene began to unfold.
The beach was quite far away from where I stood, but I could hear the gunshots and there were some figures I could make out distinctly even from this distance… like my grandfather being lifted out of the sea and carried toward the beach.
I almost fell from the cliffside as a tall curly-haired man I couldn’t not recognize as Rhys grabbed hold of a vampire I suspected very much to be Caleb. My blood pounding in my ears, I stared in horror as the vampire writhed beneath the warlock’s grasp.
What is he doing to him?
I squinted, straining to see more clearly, but then a blaze of fire shot out from the entrance of the forest and both the warlock and Caleb disappeared from sight as flames and smoke engulfed the area.
What the hell…
When the smoke cleared enough for me to see again, Rhys had been flung dozens of feet away against a tree, while an armored figure towered over Caleb. The man lifted his helmet to reveal dark hair… and although I wasn’t nearly close enough to make out the details of his features, something about the way he carried himself told me that this was my father. A suspicion that was confirmed as I caught sight of my mother’s red hair approaching behind him.
Dad.
On seeing him race toward the warlock, I would have screamed out had my voice not caught in my throat. My eyeballs bulged in their sockets as fire burst from his hands. What? How? He turned back into a human?
Although I was aware that my father had had supernatural abilities even as a human, thanks to the late witch Cora, I’d never seen him in action. Or, if I had, I’d been far too young to remember it.
Now that I saw him shooting fire like some kind of superhero, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. It felt like a dream.
I was quickly snapped back to reality, however, as my father fell to the ground. My mother and two other females—a blonde and a brunette, I guessed Mona and Corrine—rushed to his side. A few seconds later, Corrine, my mother and my father had vanished, leaving only Mona and Rhys.
The two of them moved away from my view, moving closer into the trees, but I remained gaping at the spot my father had just disappeared from.
Wow. My dad… he’s a real badass.
I just wished I’d inherited some of those powers. Being able to turn into a fire-spurting dragon woman myself would have really come in handy right now…
I stopped short in my train of thought.
Dragons.
They’d called me something during my visit to their realm. What was it?
Maiden of fire. That was it.
I recalled the way they’d been so convinced that there was something special about me, so much so that they’d bowed to my almost every whim to keep me from being “displeased”. I’d thought that the strangeness of my arrival—falling from the roof of their cave during a meeting into a vat of blood—had been enough to persuade their superstitious minds. But perhaps they’d noticed something more about me than they’d let on at the time…
Could they have sensed that I was the daughter of a fire-wielder?