Page 129 of The Storm of the Empire

“I don’t know how to handle losing you.”

“I don’t know how to either, but all we can do is try to bear it.”

Her face haunted my dreams.They weren’t visions, they were nightmares about not being able to get back to the fae and hear their message. I didn’t want to sleep. Night after night I tried, but after Hazel gave into the exhaustion, I got up. I paced or looked through the library book.

Tonight, I gave up trying to find my way back to the vision and dug through the boxes of my things I’d abandoned to one side of the room. We’d never found time to unpack them, always pulled in a hundred directions or more during waking hours. Even my little side quests had become few and far between, bogged down with reports.

If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn the King was trying to bore everyone to death.

I put the rest of my clothes in the space she’d made in the wardrobe then found my pendant in the bottom of the box with the storm opal I’d taken from the temple.

“What are you doing awake?” Hazel’s fingertips brushed over my shoulder.

“I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d finish unpacking.” I stood so she could see the empty boxes.

“What do you have left?” She held out her hands.

I placed the pendant in one and the opal in the other. “I was just going to find a place to display these. They feel like they should be a shrine to how we began.”

She plucked the storm opal out of my palm and met my gaze. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it in the temple. The first time we were there. It was in one of those hidden closets. I guess I never mentioned it. There were dozens, but something told me to pocket one, so I did.”

She didn’t say a word.

Did I upset her by taking it? Had I made some massive mistake and offended her people?

“I’m sorry. If you want to give it to your family, say where I found it?—“

She put her fingers to my lips. “Shh. No. You didn’t do anything wrong. But do you know how valuable these are?”

“You kinda suggested that, but I wouldn’t sell it.”

“It’s priceless. Like I said, the Far North doesn’t export them anymore.”

“So we keep it a secret or sell it to get rich?” I laughed a little, testing her mood.

“You keep it as a focal stone.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a place to store extra magic when you need it. But I have an idea.” She rubbed it between her fingers.

“What?” I asked, drifting my touch up her arm. Sparks jumped between us. “What are you doing?”

“Charging it for you. Remember how I told you the storms open the hearts of the stones, allowing them to charge?”

“So because you have storm magic, you can open this one?”

“A little since it’s small. I couldn’t give enough power for a large one, but this one I can.”

“So it’s like giving me a little piece of yourself?”

She lifted her face, gaze leaving the stone to meet my eyes. “Storm magic disrupts other magic. My lightning disrupts magic. When I touched you the other day, it pulled you back—” She seemed unsure of herself. But I waited, giving her time to find her words. “My touch pulled you back from the vision, but I won’t always be with you, and I saw what it did to you when I pulled you out of it too soon.”

I nodded. There was no denying it.

“So maybe if you have a part of me with you to pull you back, maybe you’ll never fall too far in the vision.” She searched my face while moonlight cast a sliver of light over hers, drawing out the lovely undertones and freckles on her skin. She was the most beautiful fae I’d ever encountered.

---