A moment later, he’s back in skin. “You’re certain Fallon’s the one looking,ah’khar?”
“Tà, Cian.” The room wobbles as Bronwen nods.
More Crows in skin crowd around their table. I recognize Colm and Fionn, the mates who protected me, and the tavern owner Connor with his son Reid. And Lazarus! The mammoth Fae healer is also in attendance, worry etched into the wrinkles bracketing his eyes and mouth.
Reid asks something in Crow I don’t grasp.
It’s Gia who answers, “Bronwen knows because Fallon is using her eyes.”
To see her in the Sky Kingdom . . .
To know she’s safe . . .
Oh, Gia.
My friend’s gray eyes move back to Bronwen’s, wide and shiny like silver coins. “Fallon’s watching us.”
Her words suddenly pitch me back to that day when I’d asked Bronwen if she could tell who’d used her sight, and the ancient seer had said no.
Why, Bronwen? Why did you lie?I ask through whatever link is currently binding us.
If she hears me, she doesn’t respond. I’m about to ask more pressing questions, questions about the safety of the people I’ve come to love, when the huddled shifters part around a thick stream of dark smoke.
Smoke that materializes into the shape of a . . . of a . . .
My pulse becomes a mess of beats, punctuated by such longing to crawl through Bronwen’s eyes and into Lorcan’s arms.
“Where is she? Ask her where she is?” Lore pounds his fist against the table. A fist made of flesh and bone.
Dante lied!
Gabriele did not strike down one of Lore’s crows, for the male before me is magnificent and whole.
“You know the Shabbin link does not work like a mating bond. You know that I cannot hear her, Mórrgaht,” Bronwen replies calmly.
“Dante, you’re choking her!” My grandfather’s elevated voice rips me out of Bronwen’s mind and away from Lore.
Gasping, I fight to retrieve the magic that gave me use of Bronwen’s eyes, because I want nothing more than to scramble back to my mate through the many unseen layers of this world, but the delicate vision has slipped through my fingers like sand. I clasp my throat that aches more from grief than from Dante’s abuse.
Over his shoulder, I catch sight of my grandfather’s bulging eyes. I mean, Justus’s. The general is not family. Not in the way the people I’ve just left behind are.
“You must handle her with care, Your Majesty. Fallon’s not immortal.” Justus barely separates his teeth as he delivers this lie.
It is a lie, right? I am immortal, am I not?
“I wasn’t pressing on her larynx hard enough to choke her,” Dante grumbles. “Besides, absence of air doesn’t whiten irises. Why the Cauldron were her eyes white?”
“Because she was trying to reach out to her mate.”
Shock makes everything in my body still.
“Her mate?” Dante spits out the word, making it sound blasphemous.
“Crows have one preordained mate.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Rossi. I bloody know that.” Dante’s nostrils flare and his irises darken, becoming as inky as Mareluce at twilight. “What I didn’t know was that my future bride had one. Who?” His timbre is raucous as though he was the one with the abused airway.
“The Crimson Crow, Maezza.”
