Page 82 of In Your Light

“Yes,” Bre said.

One of the sprites nodded. “Agreed.”

Ciaran nodded back. “That’s why we’re here.”

“We need a plan,” Pax said.

“I have one,” Sawyer said. “Kind of. It’s a long game, but against these mining giants, there’s only one way to stop them. Or to buy us some time, anyway.”

The truth was, Sawyer wasn’t sure this would work at all, but he had to try. As a cop, he had access to resources and information, and he damn well intended to use it.

He couldn’t morph into octo-form. He couldn’t swim in the cove with the others. He wasn’t a faun, and he certainly wasn’t a forest sprite. He couldn’t do a lot of things.

But he could do this.

“I’ve already implemented some inquiries into the legalities of this proposal through the media. It will hit the papers and the news, and it should get the forest conservationists involved and create a lot of public outrage. They were trying to start this quietly so the damage would be done before anyone could stop them.” He looked at each of them. “And I’m going to open police investigations into the owner of the mining company and the politicians who approved it.”

HADEOM

Time had dissolved into something cruel and endless. There was only regret folding over itself, twisting and turning, until he no longer remembered where it had begun.

Perhaps this was justice.

Perhaps this was all he had earned.

He lowered himself to his knees in the endless black, his fingers sinking into ground that felt like ash and water all at once.

“I know,” he whispered to the darkness.

The darkness answered with silence.

Then a single note.

Soft and clear.

His head snapped upward.

Another note followed, gentle as falling snow, floating through the abyss with impossible warmth. Calling to him, to his heart. So unfathomable, but it lingered in the darkness like a whisp of smoke.

A flute.

His breath caught in his throat. The melody got louder, and hope crashed through him with such force, it hurt. The beautiful sound, wistful and everything good in the world, could only be from one person.

Fyn. It couldn't be anyone else.

He called out for him, but his voice echoed into nothing, swallowed by the void.

The flute continued. A song so gentle and beckoning, enticing him to keep going. Urging him to come back. It became a thread of silver through the suffocating black, weaving between the lies the darkness whispered. Every note peeled another layer of despair away.

Hadeom stumbled toward it, and it felt as if the ground fought him.

As if guilt reached for his ankles and remorse grabbed at him, trying to pull him down.

But the melody played on, haunting and lovely.

Hadeom laughed out a broken, ragged sound he barely recognized as his own.

But the flute kept calling him. Come back to me. Come back.