“I don’t think they chose to leave, Soren.”
“How the fuck did either of them get out of the garden?”
Brogan just looks at me, shaking his head, clearly as clueless as I am.
Because it. Does. Not. Make. Sense.
So I put a call in to the only person I can think of that can help now that our missing weaver problem has multiplied.
I’ve just hung up the phone when a bundle of blonde hair and energy darts past me, clearly on the way back from Brogan’s apartment.
“You.”
“Me?” She stops and spins around, hair flying wildly around her.
“You can travel in and out of the garden. You’re the only person here that can.”
Brogan growls low in his throat in warning and Echo scoffs like I’m joking, but then seems to recognize that I’m very much not.
“You think I came in here and took Camellia somewhere and then pretended like I knew nothing about it? Jeez Louise, Soren, I know you don’t seem to have the best opinion of me although I’m not sure when exactly I pissed in your bowl of wheat bran or whatever and turned you so grumpy, but that’s something else.”
“What the fuck, Soren?” Brogan glares at me furiously.
I don’t really believe that she did. I don’t have a low opinion of her either, even though I can’t seem to stop the nasty negative shit from spilling out of my mouth when she’s around. She’s so upbeat, it makes me feel physically sick to pull her down to my pathetic level. I should be the one stopping her from getting hurt. Not be the one hurting her.
“All I know is, something strange is happening here.” I turn back to Brogan, who is barely holding himself back from laying me out. “You said she took those souls into the afterlife like it was no effort. No one should be able to deliver souls into the afterlife like that—”
“Unless that’s exactly what they were made to do,” a familiar woman’s voice purrs from behind us.
Madame LaFontaine has apparently answered my call for help.
“What do you mean?”
She looks between us, raises one of her perfectly groomed eyebrows and gives a slow smile. “You three—” She tips her head to the side and amends, ‘—apologies, four.”
I spin around to see that Finn has joined us and is glaring at Madame LaFontaine with nothing but suspicion and judgment in his eyes. He deliberately plants himself between Echo and everyone else, particularly Madame LaFontaine, as though the older woman is going to attack his mate.
“Considering you are all aware of weavers and the influence they can have, I’m a little surprised to hear that you seem to believe that it was by chance that Echo found her way here. To her mates. And you are shocked to discover that she can travel to countless afterlives like no other? Apart from other destiny weavers, tethered to other gardens, of course.”
My throat is dry as my heart rate ratchets up. “What are you saying?”
“Haven’t you felt athomehere, dear? A sense that you belong here?” she asks Echo who nods, her face pale, with her hand wrapped firmly around Finn’s bicep.
“That’s because you are at home here. You belong here.” She pauses and I’m fairly sure she’s doing it just to stroke the dramatic flames a little higher. “A few years ago, Echo decided not to take her placement too seriously, and a few years ago, your garden was formed with no destiny weaver.”
I step back.
Of course, how did I not see that this was the truth straight away?
Echo. Our mate, Echo. The destiny weaver that never showed up, that left us hanging here, that left our garden and all the souls here at risk.
Fuck.
I wonder if she even has plans to stay here, or if she’ll return to her transient life as soon as we find Wren. Of course, there’s the minor matter of her having bonded with Finn, but with two weavers gone AWOL and a third that never wanted to be here in the first place, I don’t see a future here.
They’ll shut us down.
Retire me as a reaper.
