I hugged myself into his side, holding on as tightly as I could. “Thank you. For everything. For you.”
It was a weird thing to say, but I just felt this overwhelming gratitude to know Shadow. To have him in my life. To share parts of him that no one else did. My need to express that burst from me, but he handled it smoothly.
“You’re my Sunshine, and I protect that with all of my power.”
Swoon again. My mate had moves today.
As we strolled along the white hall, my eyes were drawn to the doorways. “Are my shadow creatures still here?” I asked, slowing. “The ones I pulled to Earth?”
“They are,” he said, “safe from my mother’s wrath.”
A terrible thought occurred to me and I had to ask it. “Can we use their energy in this fight?”
Shadow’s eyes darkened to a deep, burning ember, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like his response. But then again, what else was new?
28
“We can use their energy,” Shadow said, “as it has the potential to power our own in the fight. But… wouldn’t that go against everything you stand for? Do you think you’ll be able to handle the fallout of what might occur if their energy is used up?”
Fallout if their energy is used up…
I knew what that meant, and since I’d intimately felt the death of many creatures when I’d been bonded to them, I knew I’d react very badly to it happening again. But we were talking about the end of the worlds here.
“I don’t think we have a choice. Dannie issomuch stronger than any being we’ve ever faced, right?” This question was more relevant to him since he was a few thousand years old and immensely powerful. My history was with the Torma, who were basically worms on the totem pole of power.
Shadow nodded. “I haven’t truly feared another in two thousand years, not since coming into my powers and bonding with Inky, but my mother… She has me very aware of her presence. I don’t enjoy this new awareness.”
Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t used to being the underdog.
“What happened to you in those first few moments after Dannie manipulated all of our memories?” I asked him. He’d told me bits and pieces, but there were a lot of missing details.
All the sex had kind of gotten in the way of the talking.
No. Regrets.
Despite the well-lit hallway, his face was awash in shadowy planes. “After we left you down in the caverns, I ended up in the castle, trying to figure out friend from foe. Most of my family was gone, but that didn’t mean there weren’t a ton of messes to clean up. In the midst of that, there…” His brow furrowed. “It was a swift wind that expelled everyone from the castle except me. The wind entered my mind, and maybe if I’d reacted faster, or had been more prepared, I could have fought her mind manipulation.”
He shook his head. “She took me by surprise, and everything went dark. When I came to, the sort of rage I’d never experienced before slammed into me. I vaguely remember burning buildings down and leveling mountains until my friends got to me. We were all confused, remembering each other but knowing that we’d been messed with. After that, my beast took over, and I destroyed everything I touched, including parts of the worlds and the Solaris System.”
My throat was tight, and even though I’d been the one to ask, I almost wished I hadn’t. Thinking about that time made me feel sick and broken. “Dannie was clever,” I rasped. “She didn’t take it all away; she just changed the narrative enough to get what she needed from us. I mean, Torin was waiting for me in Torma, and I was his true mate, so it was easy to slide me right into that life, leaving you free to rule the Shadow Realm, as you were meant to.”
If the cut of his jaw was any indication, he was not a fan of this reasoning. “She wasn’t that clever. She should have expected that neither of us would roll over into our new lives. You had no true history with Torin, and then to cover it all up by pretending that all of Torma had been locked in a stasis—”
“Which almost worked because you literally did have them locked in stasis for a while when we were in the Shadow Realm,” I reminded him.
And why the fuck was I defending Dannie right now? We weren’t in a school debate where I had to prove my point. Dannie had fucked us hard, sans lube, and we had every right to be angry as hell at her.
“What happened to your true mate?” There’d been no mention of Ixana and I wanted to know where that bitch currently was.
Shadow met my gaze, the gold in his eyes bleeding into red flames. “She had her memory wiped and ended up in Torma.”
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what he meant. And it wasn’t like he’d spoken in code or anything. It was just… fuck.
“What?”
He shook his head at me. “I won’t say it again, Sunshine. You heard me the first time.”
“You consider me to be your true mate now.” My words were slow and confused.
