I couldn’t think beyond the numbing happiness that had overtaken my body, the way my heart swelled and throbbed and ached and screamed, and every emotion and every fear and every impossibility flew out of me like a thousand blood-soaked birds. They were stripped from my bones and ripped from my soul.
The guilt of failing my daughter, the fear of never seeing her again. The pain of loss. The agony of a love never returned.
It all fell away.
She was right there, in my arms.
And none of those things mattered anymore.
“Rosy,” I sobbed. “My darling girl.” I wasn’t even convinced the words were distinguishable from my cries. Neither of us cared.
Rosaline sobbed harder, pressing her face into my neck in the burrowing motion that was so her. “I’m so glad you can see me this time!”
“This time?”
“Yes, when you were here before … I tried … You couldn’t see … But now you are here!” She pulled away then, smiling through her tears with the same joyful light I had always loved.
I fought the need to pull her back into me. The elated weight in my heart was so unfamiliar I didn’t know how to handle it. It was going to explode out of me. In some ways, I wouldn’t have stopped it. That way, Rosy could feel it, too. Looking in her eyes, I was positive she already could.
She smiled bigger, her little hand pressing against my cheek as she leaned into me, kissing me on the nose as she always had. The memories mixed with reality so thoroughly I couldn’t help it; I had to ask.
“Is this real?”
Rosy’s face fell, her brow furrowing as she pursed her lip in the five-year-old pout I had seen millions of other children do before and after her. My soul soared from watching it line her face.
“That’s a difficult question.” The reply came from beside me, the adult, masculine voice even more familiar to me than that of the child who was sitting on my lap. After all, his held centuries of familiarity, centuries of time together before everything had shifted. Then, after Rosy, after me, it had changed, and he had never been the same.
Yet here, sitting beside me, he was the same.
“Cail.” It was more of a gasp than a word.
“Hey, sis.” He smiled, moving from where he stood in the oddly distorted forest to sit beside us, leaves crunching, twigs snapping at his movement. “It’s been a while.”
He sounded so much like the man I had grown up with, the foolhardy and mischievous best friend who had practically raised me. There was enough pride in him to snap anyone to attention, but so much love and compassion hidden away.
The anger in his eyes that I had seen for so long was gone. The twisted smile melted back into the impish scowl he had always reserved for me.
“Cail,” I said again, fully aware I was caught on repeat. My eyes flashed between him and Rosy, the latter’s smile increasing with each glance, her tiny thumb continuing to play circles over my cheek.
“Wynifred,” Cail said with a laugh, picking up a twig from the ground before him, the mutilated thing vanishing into thick tendrils of smoke at his touch.
“Am I dead?” I asked, unabashed, the solitary logical answer falling into place with a jolt of adrenaline.
Normally, the thought would bring fear, but there, surrounded by my family, it didn’t seem like such a bad ending.
Cail smiled, however, his head pulling into a small nod. “No.”
“Then how…?”
“You were here before with Sain and Ryland…” He didn’t even finish the thought; he let it hang while my brain spun in circles around it as Rosaline leaned into my chest, wrapping her body around me like a little monkey. “We were here, too.”
“The blade.” My voice was hollow and monotone, a weird emptiness opening through my chest.
The calm smile he’d had faded into one of fear and anger, the sharp lines of his face reminiscent recoiling through me, reminding me of the person he had been for the past three hundred years.
“Yes.” His voice was as hard as the look that had overtaken him.
“I’m inside of the blade again.”
“Well, your soul is, yes,” Cail provided, his voice still a harsh line of pain. “Your body is another story.”
My body.
My body that was being forced to walk toward Edmund, the man who had sought control of my magic since the day the fire awakened. The man and his terrible daughter who had looked at me with eager grins, who didn’t even flinch when I screamed. They smiled, exactly as they always had: twisted, vile, malevolent.
I didn’t need any other explanation.
I knew.
I knew because I had seen Ryland under the same kind of control, seen him turned into a puppet, controlled by the same piece of blade that had brought me here last time, the same piece I had pulled from Ryland’s heart. The same blade sitting in my pocket.
And Sain knew.
He had seen where I had gotten the blade. He had told me to run, and I had trusted him, but I had seen him standing in that street, right by Edmund with that same haunting, out-of-place smile as before.
I should have known better. He was working for Edmund …