CHAPTER FOUR
Wind whipped my hair about, stinging as it lashed across my face and neck.
I didn’t care.
I could breathe.
Hundreds of miles in every direction, the same scorched, flat land.
A school report I’d done in junior high about the salt flats in Utah reminded me how such landscapes were created. Once a great lake, the salt was all that remained after millions of years of evaporation. Here, however, the barren expanse resulted from too little magic in a realm that relied on it for homeostasis.
And that was exactly what I needed. Dead, magic-less salt flats. No palace to get lost in. No hold whisking me away mid-shimmer, throwing awful images in my mind. And no realm leaders to juggle and placate.
With the distance, my skin stopped crawling. My brain stopped playing the exploding hold behind my eyes and I stopped wiping nonexistent blood from my skin. I sank to the hard, cracked land and breathed deep for the first time since....
Since coming here?
Since before the headaches?
Since before I knew about magic.
I breathed, steadying, full breaths filling my lungs, and sat staring as far into the strange landscape as possible, trying to discern the horizon.
An impossible task.
Last night didn’t go how I’d planned.
I’d wanted to wait. To court each leader separately. I wanted to build relationships with each slowly, getting to know them, building trust and earning respect.
True, I’d already been with Sorin and Callum. But I’d been pining over one for months, and Sorin, well, we needed to get sex out of the way.
And I was making an effort to get to know Verrill but it seemed like too little too late.
My plan went to hell, but the leaders seemed better than ever....
Did I have any right to wish it played out differently?
I’d wanted to make sure there was real affection between us, between all of us, before jumping into bed.
How could I be sure that was the case now? We’d used sex as a mystical Band-Aid. A means to an end and it worked. The Green Realm’s hold sparked back to life, Verrill’s injuries were healed, and the leaders weren’t only working as a team, they seemed to enjoy each other’s company.
The only thing it hadn’t healed was me.
I’d checked.
This morning before anyone woke. Lowering my glamour in the bathroom, hopeful to see myself as I was, only to find my cheeks just as hollow, under eyes still smudged with purple.
I sighed, laying prone, ridges of salt poking into my bones.
If bringing the leaders closer helped us win the fight with the Blood King, helped me get to Emma, then it didn’t matter.
But how did I disentangle feelings from need?
Hell, I wasn’t great at regular relationships. Four at once seemed, well, ridiculous.
Chicken poofed herself directly on my stomach, green eyes peering at me like she wanted to tell me something.
“Hey, you,” I said with a smile, rubbing under her chin and giving her stripy, cocoa-colored back a long stroke. “Did you come all the way out here for me?”
She gave me a single head bob and settled into a roost, purring loud enough to echo in the vast expanse of land. I let sound lull me until my thoughts drifted.
After a time, the wayward thoughts settled on Dex. Treacherous bastard. Dead-eyed and golden-haired, the abomination’s face painted itself like a portrait in my mind.
Monster. I thought as my awareness seeped out of me, to the Blood Prince, trying again to penetrate his mind but as before, I detected no hint of life, no spark of existence on the other side. I shifted focus to Emma, her silky blonde locks and always smiling face, hoping to reach her, knowing if I could tell her we had a plan, that she wasn’t alone, we’d both feel better.
Emptiness. A black and vacuous void.
As if I’d thrown my mind magic into the nothing, the in-between.
I tried harder, pushing more of myself into the connection, pressing against the void where Emma should be, hoping to force my way beyond it. My effort was rewarded with a sharp pain needling behind my eyes and I withdrew, fists uncurling to the sting of eight half-moon indentations.
And a small smile tilted my lips.
Pain served as a warning, a safe measure in place to keep me from poking further.
It was either my body telling me to back off.
Or....
Someone on the other side.
Chances were good it was the latter. As much abuse as I’d put my body through, as stooped and frail as I appeared without a glamour, my body hadn’t yet sent pain as a warning not to proceed further. Maybe I was damaging myself by throwing more power at the barrier between my thoughts and Emma’s but I didn’t think those needles came from me.
And that made me smile.
Because if they didn’t want me prying, if they’d laid traps for anyone trying to reach her, chances were Emma was still alive.
And that was all the motivation I needed.