Shit.
“Maybe now that the witch is dead—”
“He’ll find another. Lily, I can’t sleep at night until I know we’ve stopped the Winter King.” His voice held such malice, but it wasn’t the tone that gave me chills. It was the way he referred to his own father as the Winter King. I knew then that what Cam said was true, and if I killed him, he’d be okay with it. As fucked up as that sounded. This man wasn’t his father, not anymore.
“Okay, let’s bring all the crystals home,” I told him.
I followed Liam out the back door, looking above me and wondering where the Winter King was, expecting him to jump out of nowhere and try to take us out… but he didn’t. It was eerie and gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Liam limped, and I got a better look at one of his wings. It was bleeding and bent at an odd angle, how he’d flown up that staircase was beyond me.
“Liam, slow down. Let me heal you.”
He shook his head, pressing on as he pushed into the woods. “There are three clusters of three crystals each. You need to save your strength to fight us a way out of here.”
I spun around, noticing that no one was following us. “No one is here, I’ll have enough energy to do both. Just hang on a minute.”
I ran to keep up with him as he dropped to the ground in front of a large oak tree and started digging. Using his hands, he dug into the dirt like a crazed maniac. I knew he probably had some PTSD from what they did to him and wasn’t handling it well, but I didn’t know how to support him at this moment. So I just let him be… Instead, I lay my healing hands on his bent wing as he clawed at the ground like a wild animal, making clumps of dirt and grass fly everywhere.
“Gotcha,” he breathed, and I froze.
Pulling my hands from his wing, which now looked better, I peered at the hole he’d dug. Three dirty crystals lay in a triangle formation about a foot into the ground. They were sickly looking, and I knew that the Winter King had used the dark witch to turn them this way. That meant I couldn’t touch them, but Liam could. Reaching inside, he pulled all three into his arms and looked up at me, grinning. “We’ll rebuild Faerie. Close the portals, burn all the blue doors, and The Winter King can never come for me and my brothers again.”
I nodded sadly, a bit confused that he was trying to simply lock the Winter King out and not kill him. I knew, in that moment, that it would have to be me. I would have to be the one to kill his father because, no matter how much that man had tortured Liam and his mother and their entire family… there was still a shred of love there. I could see it in his eyes and the way they looked achingly sad when he spoke about the man who raised him.
I’d been wrong in my earlier assessment, Cam too. He wanted his dad gone, not dead. There was a difference.
“Yeah, we’ll do that,” I told Liam, not wanting to stress him any further. There was no way I was letting his father stay loose out in the world, and I couldn’t destroy all the blue doors after inviting all the fae to come home. They would need to stay open, always.
As we ran to the next crystal cluster, I started to feel dread grow in my gut. Where was Elle, Cam, Jasper, Trissa? Where were Liam’s men, and why was the village so quiet? I liked to believe that we had the upper hand, that we were stealthily grabbing these crystals while the king’s guards fought Liam’s men off, but…
“Liam, why aren’t they guarded? The crystals?” We were deep in the thick woods behind the house, but still, you would think the king would put some guards on the area.
We’d reached the second mound, Liam dug at the ground, his fingers bleeding as the pile of other crystals he’d found lay on his lap.
I didn’t bring any healing water. It just struck me, at this moment, I’d charged after Liam and not thought of any way to heal these. Could he carry nine dark crystals himself? I’d touched one and got burned on my arm, could he carry nine without injury?
“Who cares why they’re not guarded. We got three more!” Liam whooped, dusting off the final layer of dirt.
Sure enough, three more crystals emerged from the ground. When Liam placed them in his arms with the stack of the other three, he swayed a little as if he were about to fall over.
“Liam!” I caught his elbow before he went down.
He winced, looking up at me with sadness in his eyes. “Why is there so much darkness in the world? Why can’t everyone just focus on love?”
I swallowed hard.
It was a valid question, one I think everyone thought of from time to time, but not one you would have while you were in the middle of the greatest crystal heist in history. They were affecting him. Six dark crystals were too much.
“Liam, let me try to help carry them.” I opened my shirt, indicating that he should deposit them in, but he shook his head.
“No, I’m fine.” He took off, running the forest perimeter, in search of the next pile of crystals, but quickly fell and faceplanted in the dirt. Catching up with him, I reached out and hooked my hands under his armpits, hauling him up. “Liam, dammit. You listen to me! We’re partners now. In this together. Let me help you!”
He rolled on his back, clutching his ribs, which I suspected were broken, breathing heavily. “You
