Not a Star Wars fan, then. I moved a few steps closer. “You’re betting on the wrong horse. I’m just a girl with a messed-up bloodline who keeps rolling around in shit and somehow coming up clean.”
Footsteps were coming up behind me.
Lugh looked over my shoulder and smiled. “You’re about to have company.”
My body shook, the memory of what was about to happen playing in my mind over and over again. “Even if I could help you, I wouldn’t know how,” I said hurriedly.
I took a few steps closer to Lugh. “Please,” I begged. “Please don’t make me relive this.”
Lugh smiled. “You don’t have to. I’ll need help in the future, and it’s the kind of help only someone of your ilk can help with.”
That told me I wanted nothing to do with the favor at all.
The footsteps behind me came to a halt. I looked over my shoulder.
Finn stood there, tall and handsome, moonlight gleaming on his dark hair. “Hey.”
He shoved his hands in his pocket and gave me a sheepish smile.
It had started out so innocently. The way he looked at me that night made me feel like everything was going to be okay, like maybe I was worthy of love, worthy of someone staying with me when things got hard.
I couldn’t…
I couldn’t go through it again. I wasn’t sure I’d survive.
And when the wind shifted and a slight furrow appeared on Finn’s brow, when he inhaled a deep breath and that crimson sheen rolled over his eyes, I knew I’d rather die than experience that night again, even if it was only inside my head.
I threw open all the doors in my mind, power such as I had never known flooding through my body and launched myself at Lugh with such speed the god had no time to react. Even as he blinked out of existence, my hand was locked tight around his wrist, and I thought of the darkest, most dangerous world I could imagine.
I had no idea if it would work, if the image in my head even existed, but that was the theory of the universe, wasn’t it? The theory of the fae, too. Multiple worlds stacked on top of each other. I’d seen it firsthand with my mother.
The bridge opened in my mind, every fae realm and more realms I never could have imagined available to me. All I had to do was reach out and touch them. I could go anywhere, leave my life and start all over in a new world of flowers and forests.
But I had no desire to leave Moira or Ash or Tess or my mother and father. My life was here.
But Lugh’s wasn’t.
The god ripped and scratched and tore at me, trying to loosen himself from my grip. His teeth were pulled away from his lips in a rictus of effort, but I held on like a pitbull on a tire swing.
Magic boomed in my voice, in the air around us. “YOU ARE NOT POWERFUL ENOUGH TO BARGAIN WITH ME.”
Lugh cringed. “I’ll take you out. Just…don’t. Don’t do this.” Real fear flickered over his face, his voice a plaintive whine.
“TOO LATE.”
I chose the coldest, darkest realm, a place of barren stone and monsters, of shadows and hate, and held it in my mind.
“Evie. No.Please.”
A swirling vortex appeared beside us. When Lugh saw the world I’d chosen, he went feral. The god kicked and screamed, tossing out image after image that bounced right off my power. We were no longer in my mind. Where we were, I had no idea, only that I was the one in charge here.
“I’ll do anything,” Lugh begged. “I’ll disappear and never return. I’ll?—”
“You kidnapped my friend. You brought in a woman to tear Caelan and me apart. You manipulated people I loved, and then you tried to manipulate me. You signed your death warrant the second you took me back to that field in Scotland.”
“We can talk this out. You don’t have to do this.”
But I did. With barely a thought, I moved the portal closer.
