Page 78 of Into The Green

"Apparently he and your sister were deeply in love until his... urges got the better of him," she said, telling me things I already knew. "Well, he went to see a Dark witch."

I felt dread pool in my stomach. "What the fuck did she do?"

"She ripped every last shred of nymph out of him. I don't think I need to tell you what that must have felt like."

Like death. Worse. Worse than death. He would have been in the kind of agony that would kill a lesser man.

"So he's just, what, now?"

"He's still fae. His father was something Light. But who knows what." She paused, taking a deep breath. "He did that for her."

I nodded. "He'd do anything for her."

"She deserves that. Especially now," Alex said. "What about you? Where is Celestine?" At my look that I was sure betrayed the depth of anger, guilt, sadness, and confusion I felt swirling inside, she sighed. "Jade is fine here. She has people who love her here. Doyle, especially. And she has women here who understand what she has been through. She will heal here. Slowly but surely. You need to come and see her, but you need to find your girl too, Jasper. You need to do what it takes to make sure she's okay too."

"I've looked..." I said, waving a hand out helplessly.

"Look. Harder." Each word was a sentence. Her tone was steel. It was right then that I saw, despite all her own heartbreak and bitterness, she was still a hopeless romantic. "Bathe," she added with a small smile. "Definitely bathe first. Then look harder."

So that was what I did.

I bathed.

I visited Jade.

I searched through the Light realm. I fucking tore through the Dark. I skirted every human town The Green touched.

I looked for months.

It was goddamn mother fucking months of no leads, no hope, no nothing.

Finally, I went back to Jade's apartment for the third time.

That's when I saw the jasper and I knew that she wasn't being tortured in a redcap dungeon. She had found her way out of the Dark. She had gotten herself back to her town and set herself up, leaving me breadcrumbs.

I almost wanted to laugh when I followed them all the way to a train yard, right to an old iron train that being anywhere near was giving me a wicked fucking migraine.

But all that mattered was I found her.

I found her and she was okay. She was alive. She wasn't hurt.

She was just waiting for me to find her.

But when I pulled that door open and saw her, I decided maybe I had been too quick to think she was okay.

Because she wasn't okay.

She was thin, thin to the point of almost being skeletal. Her hair was less thick. Her eyes were haunted, red, swollen from lack of sleep. She had scars I had never seen before and some kind of invisible weight pressing down on her shoulders, making her slump.

Fuck.

--

Cece

"Jasper?" I heard the disbelief in my own tone, like maybe the isolation was making me see things that weren't there, like maybe there was some kind of fae magic at work. Anything, anything but a real life, flesh and blood Jasper in my doorway calling me honey with sad eyes when I had been mourning his death for weeks.

"Interesting little place you have here."