I looked back at Ariyon, wondering if his body was truly here or just his soul, which looked like a body down here. Either way, I had totally screwed up somehow because he wasn’t breathing, and the axe was still embedded in his chest.
“I need you to heal him. I’m not leaving without him being healed. Please. Take whatever you want from me.” I held my hands out to him and stepped closer.
He shook his head in anger. “This is not the way it’s done. You’re not a blessed Maven, you don’t get to bargain with me!” he roared, and the force of his voice threw me backward.
My feet skidded across the grass, and I fell to my knees, a sob forming in my throat. “Butheis! He’s a blessed Maven who heals people and his life was cut too short. Please, have mercy.”
He peered at the tops of my hands and the markings that spun there and frowned. Then he tipped his chin up, looking to the sky as if waiting for some judgment to be passed down from the clouds. At this angle I could see he was actually a handsome fellow. A man in his early fifties with a strong jaw, dark brown skin, and kind eyes the color of the sky.
“Mercy comes from the Light. I just follow rules and right now, rules say you can’t be here,” he told me. “I’ll take your request up for consideration and keep him safe until a decision has been made.”
He slammed his sickle on a flat rock in the ground beside him and two things happened simultaneously.
One: Ariyon gasped, sitting up as the axe fell from his chest to reveal he had been fully healed.
Two: I was ejected from the Realm of Eternity and found myself back in the burning foyer, now filled with smoke.
Ayden was unconscious before me and I spun in a wild circle, finding no sign of Ariyon or his body. Only the streak of blood from where I’d helped drag him.
Was he stuck in the Realm of Eternity? Could that be?
“Fallon!” Eden cried from the open doorway. I reached down, grabbing Ayden’s ankles, and pulled him backward with tremendous effort. The roof was caving in at the ballroom and my mind raced wildly. Was it possible? Had I somehow transported Ariyon to the Realm of Eternity? Like his physical body?
When he’d healed my father, his body had stayed in the room the entire time. This wasn’t possible, right? Yet the two silver wheels on the tops of my hands said it was. I’d somehow used Ariyon’s Maven magic to save him and now I was stuck with it.
Two royal guards rushed in to help drag Ayden out of the building and a healer began to attend to him.
I stumbled out, bleary-eyed and in shock, and then suddenly the queen was there, in my face with more rage than I’d ever seen on a person.
“Where is Ariyon? What have you done?” She stared at the burning building.
Tears filled my eyes; I blinked them away and showed her the tops of my hands and the marks there. “He’s with the Grim—”
I barely got the words out when she smacked the side of my head so hard that everything went black, and I welcomed the darkness.
NINETEEN
I stared at the iron bars of the jail cell with resignation. This was where I deserved to be. I was dangerous. I’d burned down the mansion where the school dance was being held and… My throat caught as I thought of Ariyon.
I lost Ariyon.
No.
How was it possible that I’d somehow dragged his lifeless body into the Realm of Eternity? Now everyone hated me, they thought he was dead and that Ikilled him. The queen surely wanted me dead. I stared at the healer marks on the tops of my hands with complete and total disbelief. It wasn’t possible. They were Ariyon’s marks, master marks.
The sound of footsteps had me sitting erect as the queen barreled down the hallway with a dozen guards in her wake. I’d been in here several hours alone, unable to sleep while I worried about my fate. Did they take my father for questioning? Was he in a cell too? Would I lose a hand? Or worse?
The guard wrenched the door open, and Queen Solana rushed at me with venom in her gaze.
“He’s alive!” I screamed, because I knew how this looked. It looked like I’d killed her heir and stolen his powers but that wasn’t what happened.
The queen reached out and wrapped a bare hand around my throat, causing pain to erupt all over my skin. I felt her magic lay over me like a net, trapping me in its ropes. I hissed, breathless, while she kept her hand on my throat, squeezing my windpipe. She wasn’t letting go. She was intentionally hurting me.
I pulled for my magic in response, only to feel the well of power was empty. There was another power there, a foreign one, not mine. Ariyon’s? What the fae was going on! Where was my power?
The room suddenly filled with shadows, they curled along the ground like snakes and the queen’s eyes widened.
‘Don’t let her know you lost your magic,’Yanric said.
