Page 43 of Mantle (IMMORTAL FLAME #3)

“You know I have Celestial power and abilities… a lot of pieces inside me… all screaming at me at once sometimes. The Celestial part… it’s made up of lots of True Celestials. It gives me access… knowledge… into their minds.”

Holy shit.

“So, she’s the anchor—from this side. Another needs to be on their side—a pure True Celestial—not me.

It’s Cassius. But they know what he’s done.

He will fall soon, so he has to hurry. When Ariana opens the connection from this end to do the severance spell, she’s vulnerable to them.

She needs somebody to join with her… the special dragon…

he can upset Celestial power so it can’t hurt her.

But… there’s something missing. That’s only connecting to both planes.

To break it… she can’t hold that open and protect blowback on the supernatural world at the same time without…

without giving all her power.” He jolted and spun to me. “She’ll die.”

“What?” I choked.

“The connection to them… it could be poisoned.” He blinked hard.

“By me. My power. It’s not pure. It’s pieces, pieces of everything, all creatures, but also having Celestial Power in amongst it.

Yes, I’m the missing ingredient. Hybrid energy is.

Hybrid energy with great endurance. You could pull on the hybrid energy of all hybrids like you, but it would hurt them.

Many could die. But me… I won’t. I can withstand it. ”

“You’d be willing to do this?”

“Willing?”

“Of course.”

“Now I told you this, won’t they make me do it anyway?”

“No. I won’t let it happen that. Neither will Ariana.”

He frowned. “My… choice?”

“I swear it to you. As proof of that, Ariana has erected a shield around you back in the real world that prevents any being from harming you or getting near you.”

“I can feel her magic… I didn’t know how it was manifested. She’s protecting me.”

“Yes. She really is. The four of us will.”

“Four… her loves… she’s yours…” He looked out at me. “I thought… she’s mine, isn’t she? We’re the same. She cares. I imprinted on her.”

“All very true. But the love between you and Ariana isn’t romantic in nature. It’s a deep bond, undeniably, yes. You care about each other. Much like friends, maybe even a brother-sister type dynamic. Does that ring true to you?”

“You won’t take her away from me?”

“No. There’s space for you. Just in a different way.”

A smile spread over his face. “Yes. That sounds nice. I like it. Very much.”

He startled me as he was suddenly right in my space in a blink.

Was he… influencing my dreamwalking?

“How did you—”

“I am many things.” He grasped my arm, making physical contact that I hadn’t expected him to be able to endure at all, let alone initiate in any way. “I cannot come with you yet. I can’t leave this place.”

“Why not?”

“You said you’d stop him from leashing me again. But if you fail, Ariana will die trying the severance spell without me being there. I can’t risk that. You need to find Corvin… take his magic away.”

“If we find him, we can imprison him in The Void.”

“Yes, I know of it. No magic works there.”

“There’s something else we can do… people are working on a spell to infuse you that would nullify your magic even with its hybrid nature.”

“Because I am a threat to them.”

“That’s why the research was commissioned, yes. But it could be employed to activate only if Corvin’s magic tries to touch you. That way there’d be no connection on your end for him to latch onto. So he could never actually leash you again.”

“My magic… so many parts of different magic… it’s part of me. These people making this… they could lie. They could make it permanent and take away what I am. A lot of what I am.”

“Kai would ensure that doesn’t happen.”

“Kai… the sorcerer who used Ancient magic against me… a violation of Celestial Law.”

I tensed, thinking he was taking that a bad way.

But then he nodded. “Yes. He can be trusted. He thinks differently. He would care for Ariana’s wishes for me.”

I held out my hand. “Then, let’s go. Let’s leave this place.”

He remained still. “When it’s ready. Or when Corvin is imprisoned. Only then.”

He tightened his hold on my arm, but not to a painful degree, just enough to convey his urgency.

“I don’t know where I was being held. He only moved me in and out of there through teleportation so I never saw where.

But tell Ariana and Cassius to restart their spell.

I felt them trying to find me. They were close to Corvin’s lair.

He’s a killer. Bodies and blood are everywhere.

It’s dark, underground, dirty. Skulls lined the walls and the floor where I was kept.

” He shuddered. “They crunched beneath my feet… bones and skulls from real beings… badly hurt, then murdered.”

“Fuck, I’m so sorry you had to endure that, and—”

“No, kind one. Listen. In the lab with Ariana that day, she struck him. He bled. He’s part vampire.

His blood that spilled wouldn’t just be his own…

it would have the essence of his victims’ blood—victims who he keeps at his lair.

A spell could be made to use that blood that spilled at the lab to find those victims. Then you find the place. ”

He was a fucking prodigy.

His mind was… young… in some aspects, but the knowledge he carried was miraculous. And it seemed even that young and fractured aspect was evolving swiftly.

In truth, he was fucking extraordinary.

He released my arm, then smiled. “Go now. I will wait for you. Do not worry, I like it here very much.”

He pressed his hand to my head and then I choked as his power briefly touched me, enough to pull me from the dreamwalking and back to reality.

I jolted and blinked hard, slapping my hand to my chest as I pushed past the unsettling sensation of coming back from a dreamscape, especially one that had been so immersive and took such great power and concentration for me.

I rose to my feet and looked at Ketheron unconscious on the floor of the magical cube confining him.

I smiled to myself.

But he wasn’t confined—not to him.

That wasn’t touching him.

He was happy for now.

And once we dealt with Corvin, he’d be able to have that in reality as well.

He was the antithesis to being too far gone.

He was a sweetheart through and through.

And by conveying what he had about the severance spell, he’d just saved Ariana’s life.

When factoring in the reaction of the Celestial Plane, all of our lives, actually.

“I’ll be back,” I told his unconscious form. “We’ll fix this. You’ll be free. I fucking swear it to you.”