“Who is this?”
I frown at her. “We’ve met.”
Her gaze turns distant as if she’s trying to remember. “We have, haven’t we? I believe…you may be the one they are hiding from. Natalya and Iker, I mean.”
“And you’re not hiding with them?”
Engela shakes her head, her expression sad and wise at once. “No. I only escaped once I saw my chance. If I return to them, Natalya will only meddle with my mind until I feel and think nothing, just as I have for the last few centuries. I would much rather spend my last days with the one I truly care for before I finally am taken to the Beyond. If you are who I believe…I accept my fate. I only ask a few more days with my Bertram before you do what you must.”
Well, then.
This is really fucking unexpected.
I glance at the vampire who waits on the bench patiently. If he knows I’m supposed to kill his girlfriend, he doesn’t react. He just watches, giving off that same off-kilter energy that I can’t figure out.
“So, you’re fine with dying?” I reiterate, looking back at Engela. “You expect me to believe you were being mind-controlled by your keeper when you stabbed my dragon shifter with a fucking mountain?”
She studies the twilight sky, which is streaked with even more hints of the aurora borealis. “I apologize if I did injure him, though I do not recall it. But whether you believe it or not, truth is truth. I have not been within my own untarnished mind in so long that I can barely remember when the tarnishing began. I know it was after I met Bertram, at least,” she adds, looking over her shoulder with a small smile. “I thank Arati that he returned to me after losing him for so long.”
She looks back at me. There is still a slight inhuman stilt to the way she speaks, evidence that she is no standard elemental but one from the Nether.
“I have lived hundreds of mortal lifetimes with monsters who made me feel nothing. I have seen atrocities that they made me forget and been forced to do things that I wish theywouldmake me forget. In all the nothingness of my existence, finallyexperiencing mortal love is the only thing that has brought me…this. Serenity. I don’t need lifetimes of it,telum. Mere days would be enough, for it is more than I have hoped for in far too long. And when you deem it time, I shall gladly depart this life.”
I examine her at length. She doesn’t seem to be lying, but just to be safe…
“Prove it. You know what I’ll need.”
Engela’s smile is soft before she pulls something out of one of her dress pockets.
At first glance, it looks like an expensive diamond-encrusted bracelet. But then I sense that one of the decorative beads is made of the glass-like substance I’m looking for.
I was right, then. They all have an etherium anchor.
For a long moment, I stare at the bracelet as I consider everything. Finally, I hand it back to Engela, meeting her dark gaze.
“Tell me where the other two are, and I won’t need this.”
She's surprised, as is the Garnet Wizard. But when I don’t take it back, Engela pockets the etherium bracelet and thinks.
“As I said, my mind has been meddled with for quite a long time. My quintet has many safehouses and may have found new hiding places. I will make you a list of their likeliest whereabouts, as well as their etherium life links, but I warn you that they will be trying to have you killed long before you can find them.”
More fun for me. Let them try.
Engela turns to return to her lover but pauses, looking over her shoulder at me with an almost sad expression. “Your incubus. Somnus’s son.”
“His name isCrypt,” I say pointedly, guarded.
My Nightmare Prince says little about his past, but I’ve deduced that the Immortal Quintet was brutal to him growingup. Still, Engela did deliver those messages from him to us. Maybe that counts for something.
“I ask that you offer Crypt my apologies for any part I may have played in his past,” she says quietly. “I gave up fighting them long before he came to be, or else he would have had someone watching over him. Instead, I’m afraid he abandoned all feeling and became quite twisted just to survive.”
She returns to her lover in the garden, and for a moment, I stare at the koi in the pond.
I became twisted to survive, too. So did the others.
Now, I just need to make sure they keep surviving once this is all over.
I turn back to the Garnet Wizard. “Etherium for knowledge. I accept your deal with one other condition.”
