“I’m so sorry. I tried to stop them, but there were too many. They knocked her out, but she saved me.”
Emotion wads up in my throat until I’m almost choking on it, and tears try to well up in my eyes. The thread of hope I was clinging to has just been snipped. They have her.
“She did something to me—something that made that son of a bitch get out of my head,” Kimber says, pointing to her neck to show me a symbol that has been branded there permanently like a freshly inked tattoo. “They tried making her put on a collar. It was Alex. Fucking Alex kept her distracted while they crept up on her. She came alone, Thad. Why was she alone?”
I can’t speak, because I know I’ll break if I try. My hands are shaking, because I don’t know what to fucking do or where to go.
“Because she knew how strong they’d be, and she didn’t want anyone dying for her,” Reese says on a sob. “She came here knowing she could save you by sacrificing herself.”
Kimber wipes away her tears, cursing as she looks around. “I tried following them, but they were gone the second they left this plane. How do we find her?”
Taking a calming breath, I start thinking, running over every possible answer.
“We’re fucking gatekeepers,” I tell her. “We control the planes. I’ve tasted Roslyn, and since then, it’s been like I could feel her when I was close enough.”
A chill creeps up my spine, and I look around, finding nothing but air. But I know who’s lurking, because I know what that chill means.
“So we search blindly through the planes until we find her?” Dice asks. “Excellent plan.”
“Got a better idea?” Kimber hisses, but I’m backing away as they argue, slowly seeking out our hidden intruder.
I spin suddenly, grabbing the invisible asshole by the throat, and I slam him into the tree behind him just as he appears.
Fucking scarred Gemini.
The bastard laughs when I shove a knife against his throat. “Really think you can kill me before I kill you, mate?” he asks, smirking.
The argument has ceased, and all eyes are on us.
Slade’s cocky smile falls just as mine forms. “See, the great thing about being a gatekeeper, is that you learn a few tricks along the way,” I tell him, reading the confusion in his face when he tries and fails to dematerialize. “And over the past couple of decades, I’ve been learning to control the planes around me to keep people from just vanishing from my grip. Handy, huh?”
Orbs start to form on his hands, and I shove the blade closer to his throat, just hard enough to draw blood. “Physically, I’m stronger than you. And I’ve been around a while, so it’s going to take more than a couple of shots from you to kill me. But this knife can take your head off with one good push.”
He winces when I push it a little deeper to emphasize my point.
“Who do you think will die first right now?” I ask him, hoping he gives me a good reason to end him here and now.
His lips tighten, and he glares at me, silently admitting defeat for the moment.
“The only reason you’re not already dead is because we have a common enemy, and I have a feeling it’ll take all of us to take them down. Now either help us find my girl, or go the fuck away. We have enough spies tailing us.”
I drop the blade from his throat, and his hand comes up to touch the blood I’ve spilled, rubbing it between his fingertips as he stares down at it.
“They’ll break her again, probably easier this time, and you’ll regret letting her live when she hunts you all down just to save her own ass,” he tells me without looking up.
“If she comes, it’ll save me the trouble of tracking her down. But I plan to find her long before they break her.”
“You’re not powerful enough to take them. They do something to make themselves stronger. The average dark user is on magical steroids or something. And they have an army of them.”
“Figured out that much already,” Gage says, still clinging to Kimber as though she might disappear at any moment. “But we have our own army, and I’m on magical steroids myself.”
“You’ll need more than you.”
“You volunteering?” I scoff, to which he snorts derisively.
“Hardly. I’m not an idiot. I’m not rushing in until I’ve done all my research. Spend a few centuries in a cage, and it tends to make you more cautious.”
Coward.