Page 46 of A Fate of Ice and Lies (Fated #1)

Chapter

Eighteen

ELIAS

I fought now without hope.

I fought with Nalari about how she’d invaded Teddy’s mind at the worst possible time.

I fought with Everly, who trained Teddy when it should’ve been me.

I fought with Brenton, who had been the only one forgiven for some unknown reason and able to maintain a friendship with Teddy.

And I fought with George, who insisted on babysitting me.

My favorite fights were with the hydras Nalari and I had hunted down two days ago. Finding four of their nests and killing them had brought me more satisfaction than using my magic to help feed the people of this realm ever had.

Since my youth, my hands were trained for fighting, not tending. Not for gentle caresses or?—

Not even for the sewing or whittling that brought me peace.

I caged those thoughts in the deep abyss of my mind, where I didn’t care. Didn’t want to care.

I hadn’t yet rejected Teddy as my mate the way Nalari kept demanding I do.

Maybe I would, but I probably wouldn’t. I quietly liked that tiny spark of connection that remained between us.

No, not between us. She’d rejected me again.

There was no tether on her end, only mine.

While my end of the bond wasn’t as strong as it once was, it was still there.

Small and insignificant, but enough to keep me from losing myself entirely to the darkness.

Without it, I was certain I’d plummet. Maybe after I’d killed off all the hydras, I’d let myself go. But there were still nyxx, lirio, and thunderbirds to deal with.

Nalari pitched toward a thick forest, where the trees shifted unnaturally. My heart raced in anticipation of the upcoming battle.

“I don’t remember you ever being this excited over a fight,” Nalari said.

I grunted.

It wasn’t like I had to send her my thoughts for her to hear me.

Nalari circled over the trees and banked hard to the left when she saw one of the hydras.

All three of its heads glared back at us and spit out streams of fire.

Nalari roared, breathing fire back. When she circled back around it, this time lower to the ground, I jumped off her back and landed on my feet hard enough to turn my ankle.

“Elias,” she roared out.

Rather than heal my ankle, I let the pain move me forward. With a wave of my hand, I materialized my sword and ran for the hydra.

“Do you have a death wish?” Nalari’s anger trembled through me.

I dove beneath the monstrous creature, and as it blew white fume from his nostrils, I sliced beneath its underbelly. Blisters formed wherever the fumes and blood touched. I ignored the sudden burning on my face and hand and instead plunged the knife into one of its necks.

It screamed. When its poisonous blood spilled from its wounds to my cheek, I smiled. Because I could live with this kind of pain.

“You were toying with them!” Nalari growled in my head as I ate my supper in silence.

While Nalari continued griping, my other friends took the hint and remained quiet.

“I will not continue taking you hunting if you do not stop this foolishness,” she continued.

Whatever Brenton had cooked was tasteless. It was nourishment, though, which was all it needed to be so I chewed it and washed it down with water.

“Are you seriously going to get yourself killed over some belligerent human?”

I pounded my fists hard on the table, making the plates shake.

As my friends backed away from the table, I shot up to my feet and grabbed my chair to throw against the wall.

I reined that rage in, my limbs trembling with the effort of not throwing the chair.

The wood beneath my hands began to crack before it sizzled and turned to ash.

Brenton hissed something I couldn’t hear, but his smirk fell at my warning glare.

Everly traced a finger over her pointed ear that had reshaped once I returned her magic to her. “Elias.” She took a careful step toward me, but George gripped her arm and held her back.

Good. I didn’t want any of them near me.

“Talk to us,” she pleaded. “We’re your friends.”

I bared my canines at her and growled when George stepped protectively in front of her.

My rigid shoulders threatened to fall forward. This was what I had become. A snarling asshole whose friends needed protection from.

On a sigh, Everly stepped to George’s side while he maintained a defensive position, ready to strike me if I threatened Everly.

“We’re here whenever you’re ready,” Everly offered, her voice smaller than it should’ve been.

I thundered out of the house, slamming the front door hard enough the whole cottage shook. Brenton followed, opening and closing the door with much more care.

I needed to hunt, to kill. To protect.

It was all I was good for anymore.

Brenton gripped my arm, his expression hard. “You want to do something productive? Something to keep Teddy safe?” He paused, and when I remained quiet, he said, “Tell us about the journals you’ve read. Let’s try to figure this out together.”

His offer quieted the blood roaring in my head. Made my primal instincts simmer, but I tried to hold on to them, not wanting to open myself to feel the pain that waited for me.

Although fleeting, the time I’d had with Teddy had been a dream. Now, without her, my soul withered. I held the tiny moments we’d shared, though.

You are too, too good for this world, Elias.

She’d said those words to me once and had meant them. But then she’d learned the type of monster I actually was .

“Inside.” I jutted my chin toward our cottage as I tried to grip onto my primal instincts that seemed to slip away the more I thought about Teddy. “Nalari,” I called out. She and I had already discussed what I’d read in the first journal but not the second.

From her pasture, I heard her flap her wings. By the time I went into our cottage and closed the door, she landed on the clearing in front of our home.

I went back to the kitchen, where Everly and George stared at the table. When I took a seat, George held his breath.

“I think whatever’s going on here with Teddy and Leanora, what Leanora is communicating to Teddy is true. It differs from what we learned, but I believe Leanora is telling the truth. I can’t explain it, but there’s soul magic at play here through Teddy.”

I didn’t wait for them to reply but started telling them what I’d read from the first journal Teddy had ever written in about the mages from long ago.

How their prophecy had foreseen their genocide.

To save their race, they hid triplets at a nearby village.

They’d somehow managed to hide their essence from the fae so they’d overlook the two infant boys named Blaise and Alastor, and one infant girl they called Leanora.

While many of the ensuing entries were irrelevant and only spoke about their upbringing as normal, fae-like children, I’d read each entry with care.

Interestingly, the three children grew up reading a living book written by the mages, and they learned magic from its pages.

From what I gathered, the book only revealed what they needed to know at the time and nothing else.

The mages had been careful with how they taught the children so they could grow up without others realizing what they were .

Through the years, they kept their magic hidden from our realm, with Leanora’s growing the strongest. While her brothers eagerly read from the living book, Leanora spent every free second scouring the book, looking for things she may have missed the first few times she’d read it.

Pleased with her tenacity, the book opened more for her, giving her secrets and lessons it kept hidden from her brothers.

The last entry of the second book I’d read was the most disturbing.

When the triplets had reached adulthood at 119 years of age, which was the same age fae were considered adults, Blaise told Leanora how he wanted her to use soul magic to absorb his magic indefinitely.

Although he’d end up without magic, it was a consequence he was willing to pay so she’d be more powerful and could potentially destroy the fae.

Their brother, Alastor, hadn’t agreed with Blaise and refused Leanora his magic.

As magic so often did when its vessels were not properly trained, things went wrong while Leanora absorbed Blaise’s magic.

Wrong in the most horrid of ways. Leanora had pulled too hard, too much from Blaise.

Even after she’d accidentally killed him, she continued to pull from his essence until she robbed him of his soul too.

There was no mention of her mourning her brother, who’d sacrificed everything to avenge their people.

Instead, she obsessed over the text she’d already read, and months passed before the living book revealed more about the soul magic so that Leanora could use Alastor as a power source.

While she read through the new text, she kept her remaining brother chained in iron so he couldn’t escape.

Only when she knew she wouldn’t kill him did she begin to drain him. As long as she kept him alive, she could use him as a battery, only absorbing some of his magic while also taking pieces of his soul.

Nalari hissed when I finished talking. Her anger coiled around me like a vise.

“Allowing one to absorb your magic is the purest form of magic. It’s a sign of respect and trust,” she said. “ This mage defiled our magic. She’s ridiculed everything we stand for.”

Magic, in its simplest form, was a balance of energy. It couldn’t be destroyed but only changed or channeled. It was why I was willing to allow my friends to absorb some of my magic, why I was able to push my magic into the ground to keep Teddy’s place warm.

It was why Leanora was able to kill Blaise but not his magic. And it was why keeping Alastor alive to use him over and over again cheapened the very essence of magic.

“I don’t understand,” Everly said. “If what you read was true, it’s vastly different from how the mages met their end in our realm. Could she be from a different realm?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “It makes sense she’d be from a different realm, but why would she be targeting Teddy? Is it a coincidence she’s my mate, or is she speaking to her because she’s my mate?”

“But why would she tell Teddy, a human, anything about her past?” Everly added.

I didn’t know that either.

George rubbed a hand over his face. “How do we find this mage?”

“She could be in our realm,” Everly said. “It makes sense if she’s from ours. I mean, there’s a reason she’s talking specifically to your mate.”

That word. Mate. It sliced through me and left me raw.

“None of this makes sense.” Frustrated, I pulled at the roots of my hair.

“I think we should consider her being in our realm,” George said. “It gives us somewhere to start.”

“So what?” Brenton asked. “We go back home, you know, the realm we were banished from, and do what exactly? Where would we start looking?”

“If she’s the one controlling the creatures that have crossed into this realm, she could be living with them outside Niev’s borders,” George said.

“So we go there?” Everly asked.

“No,” Nalari said, opening a connection between all of us. “Let me get answers and permission from the Elders before we step back into Niev.”

“To what end, Nalari?” I asked. “Wait for her to come here and kill Teddy?”

“From what you’ve read, I don’t think she wants to kill Teddy,” Everly said.

“There’s no way to know that,” I argued. “She’s been talking to Teddy for years. Why? Why is she talking to her? The mage attacked me during the thunderbird battle. She’s talking to Teddy and tried to kill me. Why?”

Desperation tore through me with this driving need to keep Teddy safe. But how could I do that when I didn’t know what we were dealing with? When the journals Teddy had written had left me with more questions I didn’t have the answers to.

“I won’t take the risk,” I said on a snarl. “Not with Teddy.”

Already, I’d failed with her on every level. This, at least, I could do. I could keep her safe.