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“How is Paris?” he added.

“With Medusa. Safely away from me.”

“He loves you.”

“Which puts him in so much danger.” The vampires watched me expectantly. “I will speak with you soon. I’m glad to have heard your voice again.”

“You too, My King.”

I hung up, sliding the phone back into my pocket.

Paris loves me.

“Is everything well, Your Majesty?” Jemma asked.

Not by any margin. I want to be with the man I love, and sorrow is tearing me apart.

“Help is coming,” I said.

As I spoke, every set of eyes turned gold.

Jemma bared her fangs. “Help is already here. You break our hearts. You sully our name. You drag us into the mire.”

Curse it!

“Your death is the freedom of us all,” Neo said. “We are exhausted by your sins with the elf. No more shame, only⁠—”

He received my fangs in his neck first. I drained Aidan’s rot from his body, then made short work of the others. I’d caught them off guard, leaving a pile of sleeping vampires around me before they so much as laid a finger on me.

“Curse you into oblivion,” I spoke into the darkness, aiming it at Aidan.

I expected him to appear to mock me in some way. But he didn’t.

Medusa, Vaughn, and Declan arrived soon after.

“The Carving Glade is gone,” the snake shifter announced as she threw her arms around me.

I rubbed her back. “I know. I felt them die there.”

“There is no safe place for us in the world,” Vaughn lamented. “And Caer’s not on our side anymore according to Paris.”

History repeated itself. First, we were driven out of Selene Haven, only to be rejected by this world because of deities.

Should we burrow again? Maybe discover another world pressing against this one? I had considered it, although where would we begin to burrow? What if we found more frostbrood?

Let them come, a darker voice whispered. Let this world fall as yours did.

Lucius would have.

Ignoring my inner shadows, I folded my arms tightly across my chest. “Where is Paris?”

The three of them looked at each other, before Medusa decided to speak up. “He’s safe for now. Waiting for you.” She told me about an underwater forge where the mer deity Melusine made the Knife of Fractured Rapture. “You should have seen how much his eyes lit up with hope, sugar.”

It could be unmade?

She went on to give me a brief outline of the truth Paris found in the river. “He’ll fill you in properly,” she added. “But breaking the dagger gets the good things flowing.”

Hope flooded me. Possibilities started to unfurl, to run wild with my imagination.