Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Gray
The survivors of Perry Hollow hadn’t moved from our spot in the woods. The griffin remains billowed from the flames as we tended to the wounded and said goodbye to our dead. Healers worked overtime tending to patients while instructing non-healers on how to care for others.
Nightfall had landed, blanketing our makeshift camp in a shroud of blackness.
I sat on the ground beside Kodiak, who lay unconscious from the wound he’d taken from the griffin’s talons across his chest. Shirtless, his barrel chest shimmered with gold and oozed the griffin’s black poison.
Every few minutes, I wiped the wounds clean with a wet rag, careful not to let the poison touch my skin with the gloves provided by the healers.
“Is he going to make it?” Shadow’s thick Cajun accent couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else around here.
I dropped my chin. “I don’t know.” I sighed, feeling the weight of defeat continue to press down on me.
“I presume you two are close.” Our prisoner-turned-refugee sat down beside me, grabbed a pair of gloves sitting off to the side, and slapped them on his hands before snagging the wet rag from my grip.
I relinquished the cloth, allowing him to take over. “He is…” I trailed off, fumbling with how to explain the relationship I shared with Kodiak. We weren’t the best of friends, but he was someone I trusted, who brought compassion and a sense of safety. “He is a close friend.”
“I see,” Shadow murmured as he wiped away the oily liquid seeping from Kodiak’s chest wound.
“During all of this,” I started, “I haven’t had the chance to get to know you at all. It’s all been such a blur since you arrived. Tell me about yourself. Especially since you’re Chrome’s secret brother.”
Shadow sucked in a deep breath, staring at the deep gashes on Kodiak’s chest. “Well, I come from the New Orleans Domain. I left it long ago to go off on my own. I never really associated much with the cutthroat lifestyle Kinetics live. I preferred to be on my own, following my own agenda.”
“The New Orleans Domain just let you leave like that?” I asked, shocked.
Shadow chuckled, gently wiping the wound again. “I wasn’t anyone of importance. I was adopted by my mother’s cousin. So having that label on me growing up set me up for failure in the Kinetic world.”
I knew all too well what he meant. Kinetics at the Royal Domain looked down on me my entire life, believing I had been adopted. “Had I not been considered royalty, I would’ve snuck out of the King’s Palace years ago. Even being adopted royalty doesn’t spare you from their hatred.”
“But you’re not really adopted, though, are you?” Shadow asked. It wasn’t an accusation, more like he was genuinely trying to understand.
“No. I wasn’t. But I only just discovered that less than a year ago.”
Shadow nodded in understanding.
“So how is it possible that you’re related to Chrome? What’s your agenda that you mentioned?” I pressed.
Shadow sighed, keeping his focus on Kodiak. “Before Amethyst was forced to carry and deliver Chrome, she had been in love with someone else. Someone at the Royal Domain…”
My eyes widened as my suspicion was confirmed. “Smokey.” Holy shit. Of course, they were related. They shared the same enigmatic smile.
With a nod, Shadow chuckled. “Don’t tell him. Let that come from me.”
I nodded numbly, my mind spinning. “Wow. I just thought I was going crazy seeing both Chrome and Onyx when I saw you. I didn’t think it was possible.”
Shadow chuckled. “Anything’s possible, Princess.
” He glanced at me. “Before my mother began to show, she returned to her childhood home in New Orleans to keep the pregnancy secret. When she delivered me, she left me in the care of her cousin to adopt and raise. She refused to see me in person out of fear that Forest would discover my existence. But I always maintained contact through letters. Never met Smokey, though. I don’t know if he even knows I exist.”
I sucked in a deep breath, shocked at the continuous onslaught of secrets. “Chrome knows who you are?”
“Fully.” Shadow scanned over Kodiak’s other wounds with a pinched brow.
Of course, he did.
“So–” I cleared my throat. “What have you been doing all these years on your own?”
“Would you believe me if I told you that I worked to expose Forest behind the scenes?” He peeked at me from the corner of his eye with a smirk.
Taken aback, I sat up straight. “Wha–why?”
Shadow hesitated, carefully wiping at Kodiak’s chest again.
“As long as he lived, my life was in danger. I wanted a relationship with my mother and father. So if I could get rid of him, then I could convince myself it could happen. Eventually, I joined the CIA for a while, trying to find any information regarding his dealings with the human government.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And what did you find?”
“That he sold us all out to the humans for a war. He provided them with the intelligence on our weaknesses. For both Kinetic and Elementals alike. They were planning to make weapons of mass destruction composed of redfern and black crystal. We never stood a chance. But the EMP struck, and although it fucked everything, it saved both races from being completely annihilated.”
I looked up to the sky, shaking my head. “How does that man continue to surprise me with each passing day? You’d think by now I’d be used to it.”
“He needs to be put down.”
I swallowed, guilt creeping in at the memory of failing to kill him. I had been so close. “So why do you want to kill Chrome so badly?”
Shadow whistled lowly. “That is a much more complicated one to answer, Princess.”
“I have time,” I said, trying to quell the protective part of me when it came to Chrome.
“Well, we met about a decade ago after he fled the King’s Palace.
I found him, and we grew close. Things went south.
He tried to kill me and thought he had. Then, he killed our mom.
I tailed him for a bit after he exploded the Royal Domain and destroyed the veil.
I know he’s neither Elemental nor Kinetic anymore.
And I know that the only way to spare him—and the world—is to kill him. He can’t be saved.”
“That’s what I keep being told,” I said dully, relaxing against the ground, pulling my knees to my chest, and turning my attention back to Kodiak. If Chrome were himself, he wouldn’t leave his side.
“You don’t believe it?”
“I refuse to,” I said, remembering that vulnerable gaze he’d given me back at the Hollow. He was still in there somewhere. I knew it. “There has to be a way to bring him back. I won’t give up on him. He would do the same for me.”
“You love him then?” Shadow pressed.
“I do,” I said, not elaborating on the Twin Soul Bond.
“And if you don’t restore him? Then what?”
I paused, unable to even think of what would happen if I failed to find a way to restore him. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll figure it out as we go. But until I find hard evidence that he can’t be brought back to himself, I won’t give up hope.”
“Where do you intend on finding this evidence?”
“There’s a man in Arcadia that Slate knows. If anyone has knowledge about this, it would be him.”
“Would his name happen to be Valik?” Shadow’s short fringe draped over his brow, like the deepest shades of coal.
“You know him, too?” I asked, my eyes widening.
“I’ve met him from time to time,” he said with a casual air. “Very peculiar man.”
A hand pressed on my shoulder from behind. “Gray,” Slate said. “I know it’s not ideal, but I don’t believe it’s safe for us to stay here much longer.”
I sat up straight, pivoting around to look up at him. “What’s wrong?”
The signs of exhaustion were beginning to show in the dark circles under Slate’s eyes and the way they drooped. “Some of the others noted they’d spotted someone standing at the edge of the wood earlier. They couldn’t get a full description of him because it was too shaded, but—”
My blood raced, pulsing in my ears. I knew deep in my soul that it could only have been one person. “But what?”
“But they said, from what they could see, it looked a lot like Chrome.”
My heart faltered, wondering if he had truly been standing there when I heard his voice in my head.
I jumped to my feet, grabbing Slate’s biceps and pulling him off to the side, away from others’ hearing.
In a hushed voice, I recounted what I had experienced when I’d tried to deplete Aella.
“And since he’s been gone, I’ve felt this need to deplete occasionally.
It’s been unusual, but I worry that it’s—”
“What he’s feeling is being projected to you down your bond,” Slate finished, brows raised. “You felt the bond’s connection just before you tried to deplete Aella?” he asked, brows furrowed.
I nodded, reluctantly admitting the truth.
“Yes. I did. But at the Hollow, just before Shadow appeared, he had looked at me, and when he did, it was as if he were himself again. His eyes were normal. I swear he mouthed the words, ‘I love you.’ And the look on his face, Slate, it wasn’t the face of the man who potentially killed Orion. ”
Slate cleared his throat as he braced his hands together behind his neck, looking up at the sky. “Unfortunately, whatever moment of clarity he had, if he did, didn’t last long enough to make much of a difference.”
Traipsing through the woods, poisoned or not, wasn’t the best idea. Especially when you had a handful of mortally wounded individuals who were unconscious.
It took a few hours to get everything packed back up again, and by the time we were ready to set off, the hints of the morning sun began to peak low on the horizon.
Earth Elementals, led by Void, continued to separate a wide path for us to traverse through, while air wielders, like Aella and me, alternated with one another in our ability to carry the wounded.
With Slate’s Kinetic ability, he illuminated the woods enough for us to be able to see in every direction around us.