Kelly Meding - Wrong Side of Dead

Baylor shifts forward in his seat, angling toward Wyatt. “You’re absolutely convinced of this? That the Fey Council has been fucking with us all along?”

“Yes,” Wyatt replies without hesitation. “Amalie has been playing everyone like her own private chess set, but there was one thing she didn’t count on and it screwed up her carefully laid plans.”

“And what’s that?”

“Evy.”

I jerk upright. “Huh?”

“You,” Wyatt says. “You have consistently defied her expectations, so she’s had to improvise. And for a creature who’s been planning this for decades, improvisation doesn’t come easily. It’s probably why she’s withdrawn completely and ceased contact.”

“Why? Because she’s frustrated that I haven’t laid down and died yet?”

“Pretty much. I think that night in First Break she fully expected us to stay there until your clock ran out, so we wouldn’t interfere with Tovin’s plan.”

Okay, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Amalie told us how to stop Tovin from bringing the demon across the Break. “What are you talking about?”

“You were there, Evy, when Tovin summoned the Tainted. He was going to do it whether he had me to host the thing or not. He had those hounds in the room, and he had you at the end. If we’d stayed in First Break like Amalie wanted, Tovin would have summoned the Tainted anyway and no one would have been there to stop him.”

“Why, though? Why would Amalie have wanted the Tainted loose and uncontrollable?”

“Chaos,” Kismet says.

Wyatt nods. “The Tainted would have destroyed everything in its path. Tovin may have even gone further and loosed those caged hounds, as well as the hybrids locked in the lab. The goblins would have swarmed the streets, along with the Halfies. The city—” He stops, looks away, his temper simmering.

“Chaos,” I repeat.

“But she gave you that spell to turn the Tainted into a crystal,” Kismet said. “Why?”

“To keep playing the part of the benevolent ruler?”

“I have another theory on that,” Wyatt said. “I don’t think she intended that spell to work.”

I frown at him. “But it did.”

“Do you remember what Jaron said before she died?”

“Betrayal.” We’ve just never known what she meant.

“What happened directly before she showed up on our doorstep?”

He can’t possibly mean Alex’s funeral, so … “The earthquake. Thackery stole the crystal from the Nerei. The trolls were fighting, and some were attacking Boot Camp.”

“Exactly.”

“The Fey aren’t united,” Kismet says, catching on faster than I am. “Someone made sure the containment spell worked. You think Jaron was working against Amalie?”

“Yes,” Wyatt says. “That’s my theory.”

I struggle to maintain some semblance of composure when all I want to do is scream. In some ways, I always knew what might happen if we failed at Olsmill. While Tovin summoned the Tainted across First Break, the crystal containing the captured Tainted is currently contained and hidden far away from the Fey. A lead-lined box in the back of one of the trucks parked outside isn’t the best of places, but we’re keeping it close.

Hearing all this said out loud and knowing it’s what Amalie wanted spears my chest with a dull pain. I do not suffer betrayal well, and this … there isn’t even a word for what this is.

“But why?” Kismet asks. “What does the Fey Council gain by that sort of chaos and destruction?”

“Well, that should be obvious,” Astrid says. “The extinction of the human race.”

“Evy?”

Wyatt’s voice carries up the side of the hill long after I hear his approach through the underbrush. The sun is setting, casting the forest in shadows, and as hungry and exhausted as I am, I can’t bring myself to leave the comfort of these woods. It isn’t quiet—activity from the motel below prevents that. But it seems isolated. A private place to muddle through my thoughts.

“If you ask if I’m okay, I may have to punch you,” I say.

He laughs. I’ve missed that sound. I shift sideways on the fallen log that’s my chair. He stands a few feet away, leaning against a tree trunk, hands in the pockets of his cargo pants, a black smudge slowly melting into twilight. I want to run to him, throw my arms around his neck, and let him hold me.

Instead, I ask, “Any word from the hospital?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Bastian died a few minutes ago.”

I feel nothing at the news—just the same numbness around my heart that has been there since the meeting. “So what did they decide?”

“Gina and Adrian are talking to the other Handlers right now,” he replies. “It’ll take some time, but I think they’ll come around.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then they don’t. We can’t force anyone to accept the idea of working alongside the very creatures they’ve been taught to hate and hunt. No one changes their mind-set overnight, Evy. You know that.”

“Yeah, I do.” My tentative friendship with Danika planted the seeds of change that Phin’s influence forced into growing. Seeing individuals rather than an entire race, and judging each one separately. “So I guess this is what we were fighting over earlier?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“For the most part?”

He picks a path through the fallen branches and brush, each step careful and deliberate. He sits on the log without upsetting its balance, an arm’s reach of distance between us. Up close and without the lens of recent battle, I see the shadows under his eyes, the new wrinkles at the corners. The weight he’s lost and the way he’s aged. He’s not even thirty, and yet he looks close to fifty now.

“You know, part of me feels like I betrayed you,” he says, “by accepting that you’d died.”

“Wyatt, don’t.”

“No, Evy, please.” He’s speaking to me, but his attention is on the ground in front of us. “Part of me does think so. I never should have doubted you’d find a way back, and that part is so happy to have been wrong.”

“What’s the other part think?”

He draws his fingers through his hair, down his chin to scratch at his throat where his dark beard has shadowed the skin. He still won’t look at me. “The other part of me is angry and scared of getting his heart broken a third time.”

The words hit like a punch to the gut, all the more powerful because they’re honest. For Wyatt I’ve died twice, and both times I broke his heart. And I cannot guarantee it won’t happen again. Loss is part of our lives; we both know and accept this. But how do you lose the same person over and over, and still find the strength to return for more?

Do I even have the right to expect him to? I wouldn’t be here at all if Max hadn’t interfered. I told Thackery to kill me when he was finished with me, and he swore he would. Consistently defying expectations by not dying is fun when it confounds the bad guy, but not when it hurts the people I care about. Coming back ripped open a healing wound. Again.

“I get it,” I say.

“Do you? Because I’m not even sure I get it. Everything is so—”

“Different?”

He finally looks at me with utter devastation in his eyes. Glimmering with unshed tears, full of confusion and love and fear and so many things that both thrill and hurt me. “I still love you. That hasn’t changed.”

“It’s okay, Wyatt.” It isn’t okay, not one bit, but I say it anyway. I say it like I mean it because I have to. He needs this. He deserves this.

“Is it?”

“Of course.” I scoot closer and rest one hand on his knee. “I still love you, too, and even though I’ve said it only a few times, I do mean it. And you’re right. Everything is different now and we can’t pretend it isn’t. We can’t go back. We can’t fix it. We can only be who we are now.”