“Then why are you here—?”
“There was one future that led me down a different path. A single future in which I could protect her, and that future meant I had to abandon her. I had to let her be taken and find the one person who could save her: Her mother. And don’t think it didn’t cost me. I abandoned her in the moment she needed me most, and I couldn’t tell her why for fear it would interfere with my possibilities.”
The one person who could save her….
I kneel back on my haunches, sick with grief. “We’re going to rescue her?”
His green eyes hold the weight of the world. “I don’t know.” He hesitates. “You are the leanabh an dàn. You twist fate, Princess. I see a thousand possibilities around you, but I don’t see the end of our journey. I only see… a Hallow, an ancient god rising, and a princess sobbing as she rocks her daughter in her arms. I never see beyond that moment in time, but I do know this: You will find her. And you will hold her in your arms before tomorrow ends.”
“Vi?” Thiago murmurs, stepping out of the cottage and resting a hand on my shoulder. “What’s he saying?”
I didn’t realize I was the only one who could hear Grimm, so I swiftly fill him in.
“There is one last thing,” Grimm tells me, and his eyes glow so golden I can’t look away from them. “If you set out for the Black Keep, then the Horned One will be freed from his prison. You will hold your daughter in your arms, this I promise, but in doing so, you will set about a chain of events that sees him freed.”
A punch of breath escapes me.
The only way the Horned One can break free is if powerful blood is spilled within his Hallow—if Angharad manages to complete her sacrifice.
“If we don’t go, he will rise anyway. Her blood will be just as powerful as my own. But if there is a possibility we could rescue Amaya, then I will take it.”
“If you get to her in time, then she will survive.”
And I note how carefully Grimm phrased everything.
He said I would hold Amaya in my arms. He said the Horned One will rise. And Amaya will survive.
But he didn’t say that I would walk out of there alive.
Maybe that’s the price I must pay to keep her safe.
“Vi?” Thiago demands.
I slide my hand over his, squeezing gently. “If we go to Black Keep, then Amaya will be safe. She will survive.” And I look up at him and don’t tell him my suspicions. “Grimm says I’ll hold her in my arms. We will have our daughter back.”
I just don’t say for how long.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I close my eyes as Thiago carries me back to the Hallow, trying to open the line between myself and the fetch. I’ve seen through its eyes before, but I’ve been trying to fight the link between us for so long, that it’s not until I touch the white hand mark on my arm—where it touched me once—that I manage to get through.
I thought I’d killed it when I blasted it with light, but it must have twisted into the Shadow Ways at the last moment.
I open my eyes to a dark hallway, and there’s a weight dangling at the end of my hand.
“Let me go!” the little girl screams, sinking her white teeth into our hand.
Pain jars through me, and I can’t stop him as he backhands her across the face. She slams into the wall, and I’m screaming in my head, trying to stop him from touching her, when he goes still.
He turns to look at the wall—toward my mortal body—and then I’m no longer in his skin. Instead, we’re staring at each other across the distance.
“You will die,” I tell him, “if you ever touch my daughter again.”
The fetch merely smiles and hauls Amaya to her feet.
“Too late, little bitch queen,” he whispers. “She is bound for the Horned One now.”
He makes a sharp cutting gesture, and the world drops away. I try to reach for her, my gaze meeting hers, but—
I jolt back to awareness in Thiago’s arms, gasping for breath.
“She was so close,” I whisper. “I saw her face. Her eyes. She has your eyes.”
“We’ll get her back, Vi.”
Heat floods behind my eyes. I promised I would protect her. I promised that all she would ever know is love.
But there’s no time for tears.
Only rage.
My mother never broke me. I won’t allow this to do so either. Amaya needs me.
He slowly sets me on my feet.
“Take me to the Hallow,” I whisper.
“We’re not ready,” he says. “Eris and Baylor are redistributing our packs and trying to—”
“Not to travel,” I tell him. “I need to talk to the Mother of Night.”
“Vi—”
“No.” I turn and press my palm against his cheek, thumb stroking the stubble along his jaw. “I love you, Thiago. I do. But there is no more time for second guessing. I need to see her.”
And this time, I do not go to bargain.
I close my eyes as I lie in the snow in the center of the Hallow.
“Are you there?”
My stomach plummets. The ground drops away.
And when I open them, I’m standing within the Mother of Night’s prison world. Soft lights pick through the darkness, but the Mother waits for me, her hood in place and her dark eyes implacable as she rests her hands on the arms of her throne.
Rage beats within my chest like a flurry of bird’s wings; some part of me feels empty and scraped raw. Perhaps my chest is nothing more than a cage, my ribs the bloody bars? Perhaps there is a bird in there, waiting to be released, though if it is, then it’s a falcon, and its claws knot in my guts even as I think it.
“They took my daughter,” I tell her.
She
