Released (The Eternal Balance #3)(53)

If I weren’t so absorbed in my own grief, I might have paid more attention to the fact that Van was horrified by my request. I might have wondered why she’d taken a step back, away from Jax and me.

I might have questioned where Heckle, now standing over us, had come from.

“You two have made quite a mess of things,” he said, frowning. “Never in all my time on this earth have I seen two humans cause so many ripples.”

At the sound of his voice, the sorrow that filled me overflowed and turned to rage. “You,” I said, pushing to my feet. I pointed back to Jax. “Fix this. Make it right. It’s your damn fault. All of this!”

His gaze fell to Jax and he sighed. “On the contrary, Sam, this is all his fault.”

“His—”

All-powerful being or not, my mind broke. I threw myself at him. There was no plan of attack, no one goal. All I saw in that moment was red.

He peeled me off him like I was nothing more than paper flapping in the wind. “I’m not going to hold that against you,” he said, a warning buried beneath his calming tone. “But I do have to ask that you not try it again.”

Livid, all I could do was stand there.

“As I told you once before, humans have, for the most part, free will. The caveat, though, is that some, the special ones, generally have a small nudge from the higher powers to keep things in check.”

“And Jax is one of those special ones?”

“No. You are.” He frowned again. “You’re not supposed to be here, Sam. Everything that’s happened since Jax came back to town—it was never supposed to be.”

“What do—”

“The day Jax came back to Harlow… You were never supposed to come out of the water. I marked you to die that day.”

All the air rushed from my lungs and left me numb. I wanted to say something, to ask questions, but the words just wouldn’t form.

“I can see it in your eyes. You feel betrayed.”

Damn right I felt betrayed. I found my voice. “You tried to kill me?”

“Yes,” he said. “And no… It is, like all other things in my line of work, more complicated than that. Your death would have corrected a pending imbalance. I would have been there to collect your soul as you passed, safely expelling the Pure energy and allowing you to rest peacefully for eternity.”

“A pending imbalance?” My voice cracked and everything came snapping back in a painful blow. I was sore and freezing. And angry. Very angry. “You tried to kill me for something I hadn’t done yet?”

“No. Not you. The imbalance dealt with someone else.”

It shouldn’t have surprised me, really. Heckle was, well, Heckle. But for some reason, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “That’s a hundred times worse!”

“I’ve explained this all to you. Several times.” He sighed. “Anyway, obviously you didn’t die. You lived—and Jax stayed in Harlow. It caused a ripple, a fairly large one that couldn’t be ignored. But I had a plan. I marked you again. When Chase took you from the Viking that night in order to get Jax’s attention, you were supposed to die. Again he saved you, and the ripple continued, growing even bigger.”

“If this is all true, then why not let me die when Jax and Chase first faced off in the woods? All you had to do was not bring me back.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but this whole thing was giving me a headache.

He flashed me a grin. “After the second time, I learned my lesson. I hadn’t realized in the beginning that you and Jax were fragments. It was a foolish oversight on my part—one not easily remedied.”

“Fragments?”

“A split soul. It happens every once in a while. A soul will fragment over the centuries, split off and form two halves that are irrevocably drawn to each other.” He leaned forward and winked. “I believe you humans call it ‘soul mates.’”

I’d forgotten she was there, but Van came up beside me, watching Heckle with awe.

“I could have kept trying to mark you,” he said, “but I’ll admit it—I’ve always been a sucker for love—not to mention the ripple would probably just have continued to get bigger and bigger. Jax wasn’t going to let you die. It’s ingrained, literally, in his soul. So I had to get creative to fix the imbalance—which of course caused more problems.”

“So activating me wasn’t your intention?”

“Of course not. I truly believed the energy would reset.”

“Then why make the deal you did with Jax? Making us stay apart?”

A look of shame crossed his expression. “Because it was the worst possible thing I could have done to him. To keep fragments apart… Let’s just say it’s a terrible thing to do and I felt truly horrible about it. But by then the ripple was huge, and it needed a drastic fix. Except I didn’t fix it. I made it a hundred times worse by allowing Pure energy to walk the earth in human form.”

The explanation was all well and good, but he hadn’t answered the most important question. I glanced back at Jax. “And now? Is your precious balance restored?”

Heckle stepped up beside me. “His death fixed most of it.”

“Then that’s it?” I choked back a sob. “You can’t—you won’t—help him?”