I fell to my knees, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Hold on,” I told him, and slipped one arm under his neck and another under his legs.
Now that we were close enough to touch, he reached out and caressed my face with two bloody fingers. “You … look just like … her.”
My body went rigid. “Did you … kill my mother?”
The thought had never crossed my mind until now. He looked up into my eyes and I knew then that if he said yes, I would pull that knife from his stomach and let him bleed out, no matter what my soul thought about that. My mother would be avenged.
He shook his head. “My … father.” He’d barely gotten the words out before his head lolled backward and he passed out.
Relief crashed through me. Not only had my soulmate not killed my mom, I’d just learned who had. Too bad it was his dad. That fucker was going to die.
“Come on. I’m taking him to a healer.” I tried to lift him and fell forward. Jesus, he was like a sack of bricks!
“A healer!” Elle hissed. “In Faerie? Are you crazy?”
I looked up at my best friend, the blue soul light dancing between our chests as his last dying song. “Elle … please.”
“He’s evil,” she hissed.
I frowned. “Has he ever hurt you? Or me?”
She sighed. “No. But he … stole our crystal which gives us life.”
I nodded. “It gives him life too. Indra told me that the Sons of Darkness are … the offspring of Fae and humans. A product of the dark times. Halflings. They need crystals to survive too.”
Elle gasped, looking down at Liam, wide-eyed.
“So that makes him a thief yes, but he’s not evil. How can he be? He’s my soulmate.”
She looked at the blue light swirling and arcing between us and then nodded.
With a lot of effort, we lifted him up and he winced in pain, seemingly regaining consciousness. “The crystal,” he mumbled.
“Where is it?” Elle whispered as we walked him out of the hallway and into the front yard, a trail of blood in our wake. Elle was trying to coat his wound in healing light, but it was doing nothing.
“My … father,” he managed, before he fainted, his weight getting even more heavy and cumbersome.
His father? Damn, he had some daddy issues, but it brought me some measure of comfort that the man I was going to kill for ending my mother’s life wasn’t someone he was close with. What kind of father would steal a crystal from his own son and try to kill him?
“I don’t think three of us will work on a bike. Can you cloak us from normies?” I gritted out to my bestie, straining under his dead weight.
She nodded. “But any Fae in the area…”
“We’ll have to take the chance.” Nursery Fae were especially good at illusions. They worked on small Fae children until they reached the age of seven, when they could see through them. I still remember her mother using an illusion to look like a giant bloated pumpkin with arms and legs, which made all of us giggle like crazy.
“Okay, we’re a helicopter,” she said, chewing her lip in concentration.
My wings snapped from my back and beat madly like a hummingbird’s. Elle’s did the same, and then we were flying. It would take about ten minutes to reach the safe house from here, where Mara would be waiting. I just hoped he had that long and that I could convince the ex-elder to let him pass into Faerie. I wanted to get to know the man I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with—the one my ancestors saw fit to pair me with.
I just couldn’t let him die.
Elle and I didn’t speak, we just flew with the giant, nearly seven-foot-tall Fae in our arms. He’d lost so much blood now that his complexion was pale white, his wings ashy gray.
When we finally set our feet down in front of the safe house cottage, I’d broken a sweat and felt like I was going to collapse. My arms burned and my wings felt like Jell-O, fatigued and weak. It seemed my training regimen needed an upgrade. Dragging him over to the blue door, I placed my blood-coated hand over it and it clicked open.
“That was fast—” Mara cut off as she saw Elle and I carrying the half dead Dark Fae into her laundry room. Reaching behind her, she pulled a shotgun and pointed it at his chest.
“No!” I shouted, throwing myself over him. “He’s my soulmate!”
