Page 15 of Veiled Fate
“Where Fate is,” I said heavily, turning my left forearm up to gaze at the spot where I’d been stabbed. The wound was gone. Even the pinkness of fresh skin was all but untraceable.
“Jada … where is she?” It was a pointless question. I could see he knew what I was getting at as well. But he still had to ask it.
Slowly, I lifted my head, meeting his eyes. He had to ask. And I had to answer.
“She’s insideme.”
Chapter Eight
It was the answer Kiel had expected.
That didn’t mean it was one he liked. His lips, normally so thick and kissable, flattened into an unreadable line. With a face like stone, he stood up from the bed. I watched the muscles of his right leg twitch over and over again. He wanted to pace. Movement to help burn off energy. Burn off worry.
Was it worry over me? Or over Fate?
“All right,” he said at last, rubbing the fabric of the closure to the captain’s quarters. “Okay, if that happened, it would make sense. The Alphas are immortal. They can heal from anything. So, if Fate is inside you, then you can do the same. But I think you need to explain to me what the heck happened and why you think this is the situation.”
“When I destroyed the stone, I was bleeding profusely. Andracis’s dagger had gone right through my arm. Then he yanked it a bit. There was a lot of blood on the floor, and I slipped and fell. I don’t know if you saw it since you and Arcadus were fighting. Somehow, he hadn’t defeated you yet.”
I vividly remembered the strength of Arcadus on my Fate Night, casually stopping me from destroying the stone with one hand. How Kiel had managed to fight him to a draw was near miraculous.
“No, I didn’t see it. What happened after you fell?” he asked tightly. Not answering the implied question.
“The stone shattered, as you know. But … something shot up my arm and into my body. At the time, I thought it was just feedback or even pain from hitting my arm on the ground. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Until you were stabbed.”
“Not quite,” I corrected. “We were in the sewers. Right when we saw the contact. I looked down at my arm as we passed under a grate and …”
“And what?” Kiel crouched, staring me right in the eyes. “Jada, this is important. What did you see?”
“A flash of green light, deep in the wound,” I said a bit hoarsely. Was it really happening? Was I truly now the home to a shard of a goddess?
Am I immortal now, like the others?
“Is that it? The only clue you have to the fact that Fate might be inside you?”
“Besides miraculously coming back from being gutted?” I added dryly.
“Well, yes, that, too,” he conceded a bit sheepishly.
“No,” I said, deciding to tell him everything instead of holding it back. “After I died—which is really weird to say, by the way, I’m not sure I’ll get over that any time soon—after I died, I went somewhere.”
“In your mind?”
“My mind, my soul, I don’t know what it was, so don’t ask. All I know is I ended up somewhere, and I think I talked to Fate.” I frowned. “No, talked is too specific. I asked this ghostly thing if it was Fate. I heard a voice in my head saying yes. But it could have been my own damn mind answering what I thought I was seeing.”
Still crouched in front of me, Kiel placed one hand on my knees, his hand big enough to rest between them. “Whatdidyou see, Jada? Where did she take you?”
“A mountainside temple of some sort,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know. It was really dark. All I could see, for the most part, was a hole in the side of a mountain. Oh, and these two giant wolf statues to either side of it.”
“The Hunters,” Kiel said softly, looking down between us.
“What?”
“They were on the hunt, yes? Not sitting or lying, buthunting?”
I gaped at him. “How did you … do youknowwhere I was?”
