This was all making a perverted sick sense. “Why are you lying about the drink? I know you gave that to me, you had to have.”
“I swear.” She shook her hands. “It wasn’t me. What did the drink look like?”
His jaw clenched. “It was green and thick and tasted like pure sugar.”
She grimaced and clutched her stomach. “I know what that is. It’s a very powerful fairy tonic; Danika would feed it to me as a child when the voices in my head grew too loud. It’s called Dragon Piss.”
“Piss? Tell me that wasn’t—”
“I’m afraid so. But its purpose isn’t to harm, its purpose is to open your senses. And if you were forced to drink it, then I’d imagine you should ask Danika about that.”
“Danika? What does she have to do with any of this?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and grabbed her skull, taking a moment to breathe deep before answering, “she’s my godmother, I don’t know any more than that. It’s just a guess.”
Her voice shook, but he didn’t trust her. For all he knew she was just working herself up to trick him again.
But if she were telling the truth, and it’d been Danika who’d paid off Pillar to get him to drink the potion, why? Why would she do it? And most importantly, if she’d been following his quest, then she had to have known the truth of Lissa and Chrysalis. Why wouldn’t she stop by to warn him? Not once since showing up in Wonderland had she made herself known.
“Why would Danika want my senses to be opened?” He looked at her.
Her skin looked paler than before. “Tell me, man, after you drank it, did Lissa seem more real to you?”
Aeric was just about to say no, that she’d been real all along, but he realized that after drinking it was when Lissa had stopped being invisible, she’d become solid. She’d even wondered aloud how he’d been able to see her as a woman when she should have been in cat form, but if the drink was meant to open his eyes to see the truth, had there been more to it than just feeding him a drink so he could see all of Lissa?
“Yes. Why?”
There were small pinch lines around the corners of her mouth. Chrysalis really didn’t look well at all. “Because like my father I can’t always tell whether I’m spinning reality or illusion in this place. Maybe she wanted you to really see me. Or maybe she wanted you to believe me.”
Her blue eyes were huge. “I kept you safe, I led you out. Every trap laid for you, it was done by reflection. The sinkholes, the troll bridge… all of it, I fixed it, made it right. It was why I had Lissa find you, because I knew if she could sense that inside of you too, then she’d help me to guard you, could thwart reflection’s plan. You had to see. You had to, Aeric. You had to.”
His heart fluttered in his throat. “Why?”
The silence between them in that moment was so absolute it was thick and intense. She blinked.
“Because when we first met you saw me. You saw the real me, not reflection and I knew you could save me. You hesitated to kill me. And I can’t explain it now, but in that moment I knew with all my heart that you would save me.”
He shook his head, because those were the exact words spoken to him when he’d been debating his decision to accept Rumple’s offer or not. “Lissa didn’t need to tag along. In fact, I never even needed to meet her, did I? So why did you make her stay?”
“I told you, Lissa and I aren’t the same person. I can’t control her. I can only guide her. Nudge her. The day she saw you wrestle my spirit, she grew curious, as all proper cats do. But Lissa was free to leave if she really wanted to.”
“So why didn’t she?”
“You really don’t see?” she whispered. When he didn’t acknowledge her question, she answered it herself. “Lissa loves you.”
The moment the words left her lips she screamed, clutched onto her stomach and began convulsing violently.
Aeric ran to her, dropping to his knees, he grabbed onto the net, ready to rip it away from her, but she turned bloodshot eyes to him and gave a forceful shake of her head. “No,” she groaned, “not… want.”
And then there was only a swirling madness lingering behind that gaze, but even as he stared at her he recognized immediately that the eyes did not belong to Chrysalis. They were still the vivid electric blue he’d come to associate with the woman of many souls, but they were different too.
Hard. Violent. Crazy.
“She thinks I didn’t know. Thinks I didn’t plan this!” A horrible laughter ripped from her mouth, the sound guttural and full of throaty inflections. Chrysalis’ shimmery pale flesh, turned more molten in color, like a gleaming gold. “I planned all of this. She cannot escape me, she never can.”
Sitting up, she curled her fingers through the holes in the rope netting and slashed at him with her wickedly curved nails. Hissing at the immediate ripping pain, he jumped back.