Page 368 of Burn of the Everflame

My arm jerked back.

I stopped. Frowned.

I reached again, leaning toward the Fire.

Wrong.

This is wrong.

I staggered back.

Three clicks of a tongue rattled off from my right, where a man leaned against the base of the Everflame. His head was bowed, his vibrant red hair hanging low and obscuring his face. His fingers wiggled back and forth as a single ember fluttered between them.

“Life for life,” he said in an amused, singsong tune. His voice was a soothing baritone, oddly familiar.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

“We’ve met before.”

I frowned. Surely I would have remembered if I’d ever come across anyone among the living with the same distinctive hair as my mother.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“My name is forgotten to your kind.” He tipped his head toward the opening. “If you want to know it, you’ll have to go through there.”

I looked back at the Flames. So many answers lay on the other side of them, so much happiness and love, and yet every time I told my legs to carry me through, they stubbornly edged away.

But this was what I’d always wanted. Never again another war or heartbreak or death. People of all kinds, living in unity. Infinite joy, an eternity of discovery, all within my grasp.

Why couldn’t I make myself take it?

The man laughed. “You’re not broken, little flame.” He flattened his palm and the ember wobbled unsteadily above it. “You’re unbalanced.”

Unbalanced. That was exactly how I felt.

A little too heavy and a little too light.

Perfectly restored and fundamentally fractured.

So close, and yet so very, very far.

“Such interesting magic, these mating bonds,” the man said. “In the After, there should only be contentment, but a heart without its mate is never at ease. It complicates the crossing over. Even I cannot take what has become one and split it back into two.” The ember floated away from his hand, hovering between us. “Without your heartstone, that magic is unanchored from your world. I could rip it away and ensure that no heart is left unbalanced ever again. What do you think of that?”

I looked down at my mating mark, its once shimmering outline now dull and dark. Whoever this man was, he was right. I would never be content until Luther was back at my side.

In the land of the living, I knew Luther would feel the same. His years ahead would be full of joyful moments, Lily and Taran would ensure it, but without me to share them, his happiness would always be incomplete.

It was exactly what I’d always feared in life, giving so much of my heart away that I was never whole again on my own. What good was this magic if it brought such misery for us both?

But then I thought back on the moment I became his mate. I stood in this very spot and watched Sorae carry him away, dangling from Teller’s grip, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him again.

And still, I’d wanted it. Even believing we’d never get our happily ever after, thinking it would make me a stranded mate, knowing it might mean spending my eternity alone.

And if I had to wait here a thousand years before I felt true happiness again . . . even now, I wanted it still.

The man made a soft, knowing sound. “I asked your Kindred’s mates that question, too. Their hearts answered the same. Taking such powerful magic from the world is its own kind of imbalance, I suppose.”

“They were bound by the mating magic?” I asked. “I thought it didn’t work on mortals.”