“Fionn Mór.” The hulking male bowed his head slightly. He had a strange accent. Slightly Irish but not quite. “The Queen of Faerie turned me into fae centuries ago. This is my mate, Rose Kelly.”
“Hi.” Rose nodded and then spoke in a North American accent. “I’m one of the fae-borne too.”
“Kiyo.” The wolf stared blankly at him. “Niamh’s mate.”
“We were on our way to Conall MacLennan to find you,” Echo said to Niamh. “You found us first.”
“I know.” Niamh smiled slightly at Elijah’s confused look. “I have visions. Psychic visions.”
“I’ve told him what I could about fae history and about the fae-borne,” Echo said.
“Good. That’s good.”
“But maybe you can explain to me how a fae-borne The Garm thought was dead, killed by Eirik himself, is still very much alive.” Echo crossed her arms over her chest and then spoke to Elijah. “We knew about Astra. Eirik told us he’d stabbed her in the heart with iron a few years ago.”
“It was an illusion.” Niamh sighed. “She tricked him. Astra … she doesn’t appear to have a conscience. I’ve had visions of you all.” She gestured to Elijah and Rose. “Since as far back as I can remember. I knew when The Garm killed the others. Astra was the only other fae-borne born with the same knowledge of our history as I was. We’re the key to opening the gates to Faerie.”
“Echo told me that already.”
“What she might not know is that if we’re all unwilling, our enemies only need one of us to open that gate. They don’t even need to kill us. Just spill our unwilling blood at the standing stones. But if at leastoneof us is willing to open that gate, then that fae must spillallof our blood on the gates to open it. It's a test of their strength and what they’re willing to do to enter Faerie.”
“Astra knew this?” Echo asked.
“Yes. And it’s her plan to take me, Rose, and Elijah to the gate with her.”
“So why did she try to kill me? And how did she not succeed?”
Elijah shuddered at how close Echo had come to death. Her gaze flew to him like she’d sensed his feelings.
Niamh cleared her throat. “Well, I received visions of how our odds of survival, of all mankind’s survival, depended on the fae-borne finding their true mates. When we have people we love who we want to protect, when we have something worth fighting for, we fight harder. So I nudged things along a bit. I don’t know the exact outcome of things, but I can see what path might lead to the right result. I told Thea to trust Conall because I could see in one of her paths was a future of losing her immortality to werewolfdom with her mate. That’s what happened. It eliminated her as a threat to the gate.
“Then I discovered Fionn, here, was planning to use the fae-borne to open the gates to take revenge on the Faerie queen.” Her tone was dry with amusement for some bizarre reason.
Elijah stared suspiciously at the large male and he felt Echo’s guard rise too.
“Oh, no need for that,” Niamh said as if she sensed their thoughts. “I saw that Rose was his mate and that not only would he not hurt her but that she’d take him off the path of revenge. So, I nudged them together.
“Kiyo and I …” She smoothed a hand over her mate’s chest, her expression tender. “I didn’t see him coming. Fate did all the work there. Thank goodness.”
Her mate’s expression softened ever so slightly as he pulled her a little deeper into his side.
“And you.” Niamh’s head whipped to Elijah, and he stiffened. “The most emotionally stable of us all.”
Elijah pointed to himself as Rose chuckled. “Me?”
“Yes, you. Born with parents who loved and protected you. You already had something worth fighting for, but it wasn’t enough. To defeat Astra, we needed something else.” Her gaze moved to Echo. “We needed to take our other enemies down too. Like The Garm. So, imagine my surprise when I get a vision showing me that your mate was the vampire daughter of William Payne.”
Echo’s gaze flew to Elijah’s as Niamh’s words flowed through him.
He was surprised but not nearly as much as he should have been.
It made sense.
This deep connection, need, for Echo. He felt like he was tethered to her.
What did surprise him was there was no surprise on Echo’s face. “You knew.”
“I suspected,” she whispered.
