I would complete what Dawn had set out to do. I just wished I’d been able to say goodbye to her first …
“Isolde!” a familiar voice shouted behind me and with my heart in my throat I spun around, expecting to see a ghost.
What I saw instead was a spectral form of not only Dawn but Aribella as well, and four handsome men with them. I screamed, staggering backward against the wall.
Was she visiting me from the afterlife? Summoned by my thoughts of her? Or was there something more nefarious at work here?
I gripped the blue kyanite blade in my hand and pointed it at all of them.
“You’re not Dawn,” I said, certain I was hallucinating. But even as I shook my head, I stared at her familiar face and the braided plait of long blonde hair that hung over one shoulder. Everything about her was as I remembered. Would my mind even be able to conjure such a perfect likeness of my beloved friend?
She stepped closer to me, ghosting straight through my bed and I yelped.
“Izzy, it’s me. Dawnie,” she pleaded, using our childhood nicknames.“And we have so much to tell you, but I’m not sure how much time we have. These are the Ethereum lords. All four of them.” She pointed around the room and I scanned the handsome men, my gaze falling on one in particular.
He had chin-length dark hair with streaks of gold running through it. He peered at me with a bit of an aloof expression, but even so it stirred something within me. Something I pushed down because this was insane.
“You’re not real. If you were, one of their hearts would be on the tip of your knife.” I knew Dawn too well for this ruse. She was the strongest of us all, lethal, brutal, and there was no way she would have just grabbed that guy’s hand and held it! The Ethereum lords were our enemies!
“Izzy,” Dawn pleaded with me, pulling the dark-haired men beside her forward. “Zander, the Ethereum Northern lord, is my husband. We’re married.” She held up her hand and smiled softly. “And I’m pregnant,” she whispered, but not quietly enough because everyone else heard her.
The other men’s faces showed shock right before they broke into cheers of excitement.
I shook my head. “Lies. Go. Leave me, ghosts!”
I could feel the tears brimming in my eyes, but I pushed them down.
“I’ll prove it,” Dawn said. “You have a birthmark in the shape of a triangle on the back of your left thigh.” I froze at her words. “Your first crush was Tanner Larson, Sir Henrick’s squire. You used to steal sweets from the kitchen and bring them to bed when we had sleepovers at the winter festival.”
I stared at the apparition in disbelief. How did she know those things unless …
“Izzy, it’s me. I know this is hard to believe but … I need you to try.”
Her words practically ripped my soul from my body. It must be her. How else would she know all those details?
I fell to my knees, hands shaking as the dagger dropped onto the carpet of my bedroom.
“How?” I asked, trying and failing not to hyperventilate. She married an evil Ethereum lord? And now she was pregnant? That meant she didn’t come back on purpose. She wasn’t dead … she just gave up on us.
Dawn’s apparition stepped closer, kneeling down before me. “Isolde. They’re our mates. We’ve been lied to and all these years they’ve been preparing us to kill our mates.”
I gasped, looking up at the men present again.
Mates?I could guess at what that meant, but it wasn’t something we believed in here in Faerie. Mates were as much of a fairytale as any other I’d heard, but as I scanned the room I saw that Aribella was now in the arms of one of the dark lords. The scariest-looking one. His longer hair hung loosely over his face but even so I saw the scar on his cheek.
“It’s true,” Aribella confirmed, her mouth curving into a soft smile as she glanced up at the man next to her.
The man I’d been glancing at before, the one who looked like he’d spent too much time in the sun, cleared his throat. “Technically, I’m engaged but Zane could be your mate.”
He gestured to the tall lord next to him who waved awkwardly and looked at me hopefully.He was undoubtedly handsome, I grudgingly admitted they all were, yet I didn’t feel a thing when I looked into his unusual eyes. They were dark blue, with a smudge of brown in one of them.
I glanced back at the lord who’d spoken about being engaged and something uncomfortable flipped in my chest. Leave it to me to think the one unavailable guy was the hottest.
“This is a lot.” I finally stood, taking in a shaky breath. I peered back at Dawn, lowering my voice. “What do you mean we were lied to? Your mother has been training me these past several weeks to kill one of those guys.”
“Please don’t do that,” Dawn said with her hands out in a gesture to calm me. “My mother … means well, but Isolde, you have to be careful around her. She knows we are sent here to kill our mates. That’s why they tell us to never let them speak, to kill them quickly. I think they are afraid of what would happen if we actually got to know them.”
“You’d fall in love,” Aribella said wistfully, and I frowned.
