What Lurks Between the Fates (Of Flesh & Bone, #3)(89)

A gentle murmur. A reminder of two women, standing side by side to give light in the darkness.

I raised my hand, stroking the end of one of the threads with gentle fingers. Coiling it around my pointer finger, I drew it into my palm. I was all too aware of Mab’s eyes on me, of the way she studied me. My cheeks felt wet with tears. Allowing my magic to touch me, feeling it upon my skin, I realized why it had always felt so hollow.

It was abandoned. Forgotten. Feared.

When all it wanted was love.

But how could I have loved it when I, myself, didn’t understand what that love meant? It wasn’t until Caldris made me see. It wasn’t until Fallon stood by me and made a vow to protect one another. It wasn’t until Imelda confessed the truth of my brother, of her place in my life, and witnessing the way she loved Fallon with everything she had… and feeling that love extend to me.

I closed my palm, pressing my fingers against it slowly. One of the moons disappeared from the sky, vanishing into the darkness as I watched. I reached up with my other hand as Mab gasped, waving it in a circle and gathering the threads into one mass. I pressed them into my palm, forcing the night sky into darkness. The moon vanished.

The sky faded to black.

Only the light of the fires hanging from the doorway to the palace of Tar Mesa illuminated us where we stood.

“Impossible,” Mab whispered, taking a step toward me.

I turned my stare to her, unflinching, when she stopped in front of me and raised her hands to cup my cheeks. She stared down at my eyes in something mixed between horror and awe, running a thumb through the tears on my cheeks.

“And yet here I am,” I murmured, drawing back from her. I released the threads, tossing them back into the sky so that they could reclaim their rightful place. “Did that give you the answers you were so desperate for?”

“You can see the threads of Fate,” Mab said, her voice filled with awe as she stared down at my hands. “That is how you summon.”

I didn’t deny it, my shock at her knowing about them too potent for me to respond. “You see them too?” I asked with a swallow.

“I see... shadows of them. Whispers on the wind occasionally, but I can never grasp them. I’m not—” She paused, clearing her throat as the closest thing to emotion I’d ever seen from her seemed to clog it.

“You’re not what?” I asked, feeling closer than ever to the answers I wasn’t sure I wanted. I swallowed, glancing at Fallon as she took a step closer, hesitating only so she didn’t interrupt the moment.

Mab clenched her jaw, and I could already imagine the strategy working through her head. How she would navigate the new information.

“A Primordial.”





29


Caldris


Estrella stumbled into her chambers. Her face was bewildered, and she appeared half-drunk. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, her exhaustion written into every part of her face.

I abandoned my pacing, rushing toward her to catch her in time for her to collapse. Her emotions were too intense to understand, her confusion and terror potent.

“Estrella, what’s wrong?” I asked, lifting her into my arms. I’d felt her panic—her fear—after she’d been summoned by Mab, but there was never any pain to accompany it. None of Mab’s usual tricks.

I settled her back on the bed, draping my body alongside hers and trying to chase away the chill that seemed to cling to her skin. The iron collar lay against her throat, whatever had happened that night condemning her to the suffering of it once more. She stared up at the ceiling, her eyes almost unseeing. If her chest hadn’t risen and fallen with her strangled breathing, I might have thought she lingered at death’s door.

“Min asteren,” I murmured, cupping her cheek and turning her gaze to mine.

“The threads,” she whispered, her bottom lip trembling as tears gathered in her eyes.

“What about them?” I asked, running my nose along hers.

She sighed, wrapping her arms around me finally as she returned from that cold place that seemed to claim her when things got rough.

“The Primordials used them to create the world. That’s how they channel magic, Caldris,” she said, shaking her head from side to side as her features twisted. “Mab thinks I’m a Primordial.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “That isn’t possible. I spent centuries of life feeling you die. You cannot possibly be a Primordial. When a Primordial leaves this plane, their magic follows. If you were a Primordial, whatever magic you channel would not have returned with you. It would have been lost to this world, because it isn’t channeled from the world around you. It comes from you, and you would not have that magic any longer.”

I leaned over her, begging her to see the truth in my words. The death of a Primordial was a rare, tragic thing, but my mate could not be one of them.

“Then how do I see the threads?” Estrella asked, her voice laced with confusion. She went on to explain how Mab had come to learn of her ability to see the threads, to the choice she’d given my mate.

To be married to a man who was not me… Mab was foolish not to know that I would burn everything to the ground. She would have no choice but to kill me, because there was nothing that would stop me from protecting Estrella from the torment of that.