“Oh, you think?” Cormack’s eyebrows practically flew off his forehead. “I don’t even understand what you’re doing here.”
“I already told you,” Zoe grumbled. “They’re trying to live forever.”
“No.” Grimaldi pinned her with a dark glare. “We’re trying to form the world in a new image. Don’t you understand? There were creatures here before us and this plane was supposed to belong to them. It was ripped away.”
His chin jerked in a specific way at the final statement, setting my teeth on edge in the process. It was a tiny quirk, but it was something I recognized in my heart from previous interactions with the revenants. Before I even realized what I was going to say, the words escaped. “You’re a revenant.”
“What?” Cormack jolted, his eyes landing on me. “What are you saying?”
“He’s a revenant,” I repeated. “I don’t think he’s the only one either. Renley is a revenant, too.”
Rather than deny the statement, or make a fuss, the men exchanged amused looks.
“Why would you think that?” Renley queried finally, tilting his head in the now-familiar angle. “Why would that be your first assumption, Izzy dear?”
I hated the condescending tone of his voice but that was the least of my worries. “It’s just what makes sense. You guys have been taken over by revenants.”
“But how?” Braden challenged. “They don’t look like the other revenants.”
“They’re different,” I agreed, my mind going a mile a minute. “They’re still revenants, though. They’re ... the ones that worked.” How I knew that was beyond me. It was as if something finally clicked in my head.
“I don’t understand.” Braden’s expression was blank. “Were there ones that didn’t work?”
I nodded. “The ones that came back through the gate. They were an early attempt but they failed, so they sent them back anyway to get them out from underfoot. Renley and Grimaldi are examples of what worked ... which means there are even more of them out there.”
“Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner!” Grimaldi crowed, triumph flitting through his eyes as he threw his hands in the air. “I knew you would be the one to figure it out. It’s fitting that it’s you, since your parents were the first experiment to actually work.”
He threw it off as a casual statement but I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest as I took an inadvertent step back. That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be right.
“Izzy?” Braden moved closer, wrapping his arm around my waist to support me. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, look at her face.” Grimaldi was smug to the point of being intolerable. “She didn’t know. She thought her parents were dead, gone, locked away in the recesses of her mind. Well, little girl, this is your lucky day. Part of them lives on.”
“I ... .” I waved a hand in front of my face to dissipate some of the heat growing there. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.
Zoe was the one who moved in front of me, planted herself in the one spot I couldn’t look away from, and forced me to focus. I found sympathy reflected back at me ... and outright anger. “Don’t let them beat you,” she ordered. “This is what they want.” When she turned back to Grimaldi and Renley, it was with a clear purpose. “You guys are pretty proud of yourselves, aren’t you?”
“Just a little,” Grimaldi replied, holding his fingers about an inch apart as he shot her a smug smile. “She was always on our list to be a partner rather than an adversary. This will ensure that.”
“It won’t.” Zoe was calm. “She’s not going to be what you want her to be.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I’m done listening to you, and you’re done in this world.” With that, Zoe dropped the shield and immediately fired a jolt of freezing magic into Grimaldi’s chest. Aric was obviously anticipating what she would do because he’d already partially shifted, his claws at the ready, and he swiped at Grimaldi’s vulnerable neck area with little preamble, the smug reaper’s head hitting the ground before Aric’s claws fully retracted.
The other handful of reapers — or perhaps they were revenants, who could say — reacted out of fear and started murmuring. On the opposite side, Braden, Redmond, Cillian, and Aidan already had their weapons drawn, and they had the upper hand so it was easy to pick apart our opponents. Renley, however, was a different beast. He took one look at what was happening, sneered at Zoe, and then bolted through the gate behind him. It was located in the opposite spot from the one I’d been dragged through, but I knew I had to follow even though I had no idea what waited for me on the other side. I was almost to the opening when Zoe grabbed me around the waist and shook her head.
“No.”
“What? We can’t just let him go.”
“We don’t have a choice.” Zoe was calm, rational, ice to my fire. I didn’t understand. Zoe did, though, and she was firm. “We have to close the gates. That’s the most important thing. We can’t allow these things to cross back and forth. That means we have to end this part of it here.”
She spoke the truth and yet I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Were there really revenants running around with my parents’ faces? I needed to know. I needed to see them. I mostly needed to set them free. I had so much angst working through my brain and I could barely swallow any of it. All I wanted to do was roll into a ball and cry until I could no longer muster a tear, and that caused the rage to roll through me like a train without a brake.
Zoe refused to let me succumb to my baser urges. “Do you feel that?”
Confused, I shook my head. “What?”
“That.” She pointed toward the remaining shelves, to the things that had been
