Why did Fate do this to me? Us?
“Please believe me when I tell you that, despite what I feel for you, C—what I’ll always feel for you, and what I know you feel for me—I will never wish for anything other than your happiness. Jonah’s, either. I may be jealous as all hell over . . .” He swallows hard. “Let’s just say that I will always want and fight for the best for the two people I love most in the worlds. If this is what makes you happy, if this is what makes him the same, I will never stand in the way of that. I almost lost both of you guys over this. I’m not willing to risk that again.”
“What about your happiness?” I choke out. Because right now, I’m pretty sure I’d give everything I have to ensure that.
Somebody calls out that the meeting will start in two minutes; it’s enough to drive Kellan several steps back away from me.
Tiny pieces of my heart chip off with each step he takes.
“They need us in there,” he says quietly. “Let’s let that be our focus today, okay?”
I do as he asks, even though it hurts to do so. For the next three hours, everyone in the conference room focuses on the Elders problem. Two more Métis colonies on two separate planes were attacked in the last week; three people are in intensive care, two others dead. It sounds horrible to admit it, but I was incredibly relieved neither colony was Anchorage. Several Magicals were attacked over the same time period, resulting in one death on the Goblin plane. All accounts have the monsters constantly evolving into more humanoid figures. People are scared, and rightly so.
I’d foolishly thought that, once I discovered I could kill the Elders, the problem was basically solved. Nothing could be further from the truth. As we’d discovered on the last two missions I was sent out on, the Elders are careful not to come anywhere near me.
“Councilwoman Lilywhite,” the head of the Subcommittee, a Gnomish Informer named Johann Baldurrsson, asks in the aftermath of another round of futile arguing over what we should do to counteract this line of evasion, “are you certain you must be touching the beasts to eradicate them?”
All eyes are on me. “I’m afraid so.”
Baldurrsson strokes his snowy beard. “There’s no chance you’re mistaken?”
I feel like I’m letting them all down. “I wish I were. I tried it, only to fail. I have to be touching them.”
“And yet, with each touch, you risk your own life,” he murmurs. “Which leaves us at quite the quagmire. How do we send in our assassin when, chances are, her life is just as at risk as theirs?”
I want to argue that it’s my risk to take, that it’s my responsibility to go out there and at least try, but I see the point he’s making. If I die, not only with Magical-kind be thrown into a tailspin, but so will the worlds we govern. My death is nothing but chaos for all involved. That said . . .
“I don’t think they want to kill me,” I admit. “Cailleache made it seem like they want me in particular taken alive.”
“That frightens me every more,” Astrid says. So far, she’s spent the majority of the meeting quiet, taking notes. Here she is, though, and there’s no hiding the worry in her lyrical voice. “Our history with the Elders shows they are thirsty to eradicate anybody with Magical blood—everyone, that is, but a Creator.”
Uneasy silence follows these words.
Will’s the first to break it. “Chloe told me a story once, of how some early Creator stripped these beasties of their bodies and whatnot. What if they think a different one will reverse what’s been done?”
I’m aghast. “They could never make me do that.”
“Ah, but that’s the thing.” Zthane taps his pencil against the table. “They’re constantly evolving. We don’t know what they’re capable of, Chloe—except their ability to kill powerful members of our kind. The possibility that they could make you do that is something we cannot discredit.”
“So what’s our option here?” Maccon Lightningriver asks. “Because from where I’m sitting, it’s sounding like you are all claiming we don’t have any viable options right now other than to sit on our hands. People are dying—Magicals and Métis alike. What’s to say the Elders will stop with our kinds? What happens when they spill into the general populations?”