I felt myself slipping away again. Disintegrating. Being pulled apart from myself, though this time it wasn’t painful. “Wait,” I said. “It’s taking me.”
“No.”
Turning, Ariel evaporated into smoke, spinning me inside his mist. But it didn’t help. I was pulled away, right through his arms. It was seamless. One second there, and another not.
Their voices rang into echoing silence, and I was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
____________
ARIEL
Meg vanished and Khalasroared.
It had been centuries since I heard that sound. But this time, I fully agreed with him. Everything in my being was rigid—completely opposite of what it felt like to be a spirit.
He turned to us. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “This is the magic attacking Meg, not Prospero. He might be provoking it, but he doesn’t have the power to do this right now. He’s been planning this, and with Meg, but not until recently when we saw him spying. And as soon as we knew that much, he ordered us not to warn you.”
The gargoyle was fully stone now, the beast in him responding to our mate being gone.Ourmate. Seeing the relief in Meg’s eyes when she realized it was true. Holding her—kissingher—I needed her back right this fucking second.
“He’d have planned this forcing of your hand… Laurent,” Trin said, hesitating over the name. None of us were used to calling him by his new one. “Relying on the island’s power to do it? That, I didn’t expect. But in a way, it’s better.”
“And in another way, it’s worse,” Laurent said. “Prospero is predictable.”
“There are only so many places on the island,” I said. “We can find her.”
Somehow, my voice was far calmer than I felt. Ifeltlike I wanted to turn into a whirlwind and destroy everything in my path in order to protect her. Keep her safe from the danger I exposed her to. That Prospero forced on her.
“We need to kill him,” Ban said. “As soon as she is safe.”
I didn’t disagree. For centuries, we hadn’t had a reason to try. Bound to the island as he was, the master sorcerer was nearly impossible to kill. And I was willing to own my own apathy—as long as Prospero was trapped, we were keeping a monster happy and mostly contained. Now?
Now the hold he had on me felt like a stain. A bruise on my soul. Ban was right. We needed a way to end this. Maybe the reason we hadn’t yet was fate gently guiding us toward Meg, because if we had broken free we never would have found her. But we had her now, and I didn’t plan on letting her go.
“I will kill him,” Laurent said. “Somehow, I will. But finding her comes first.”
A thought occurred, and I didn’t know if we were all thinking it, but there was no way to keep it in. “There’s a way to always find her. But I don’t know if she’s ready.”
All eyes in the room were on me. It wasn’t a secret that mates could bond, and the idea of feeling her? Sensing her emotions? Her pleasure and her pain and everything in between?
My feet disappeared into smoke. I wasn’t able to keep myself together when I thought like that.
“One thing at a time,” Trin said, but the way his voice sounded too, I knew I wasn’t the only one having a hard time controlling myself at the thought of bonding our mate.
“Where would it take her?” Laurent asked, his body shrinking back into its human form. He’d destroyed most of his clothes, but there wasn’t any part of him we already hadn’t seen. And sharing a mate? We were all about to get that much closer.
I didn’t want to think about where she was. The magic wouldn’t go easy on her, but given how much was in her. My body froze once more. How fast would it try to kill her?
There were plenty of dangerous places on this island, but the magic was clever and had used things at its disposal, like Prospero’s own creations. The fastest way to kill someone? Prospero had already turned that into an art for his own experiments.
But I glanced at Trin. “Do you think—”
The octopus shifter swore and dove under the water. Ban growled and was out of the cave in seconds.
“What?” Laurent asked. “What, Ariel?”