Chapter Sixteen
Patience was a skill Blade had honed over the years. Raven’s sudden disappearance had not been natural and he stayed where he was in the hopes she would be returned to him. If she did not reappear soon, then he would search for her.
And he would not rest until he found her.
He crouched, his crossed arms resting on his knees, and waited. It seemed ironic to him how Godseekers preached that the goddesses preserved all life, yet here in the boundary they had created, birds did not sing. Nothing moved through the spongy, rotted earth beneath Blade’s feet, and not a breath of wind stirred the dense fog enveloping him.
Hunter had once said he believed the immortals were one and the same, and that they served nothing but their own purposes. He’d had no love for any of them, not until he’d met Airie. Blade, on the other hand, had been raised in the Godseeker Mountains and could never seem to shake the beliefs taught to him at an early age. Because of his long-held beliefs that the goddesses were benevolent to the innocent, he had been certain that Raven’s demon blood would be of no significance to them.
He should have listened to her concerns. She had not wanted to enter here. If harm came to her it would be his fault, and he did not think he could bury his guilt as he had in the past and pretend it did not exist.
He had no idea how much time passed before the mist finally parted, only that he had started to lose his considerable, hard-earned patience.
But it was not Raven who appeared to him.
This woman was tall and blonde, with purple eyes, and while not as beautiful as Raven, she was more so than an ordinary woman. Her dress was whisper thin and translucent.
He had seen goddesses in his youth. He knew what she was. The sight of her mesmerized him. Held him in place. And he resented it.
“You’ve brought a demon into our boundary,” she said. Disapproval filled those purple eyes. Disappointment in him rang in her tone. “We would have expected better from one of our own.”
“She’s not a demon,” he said. He tore his eyes from hers, although with difficulty, and searched the mist behind her. “Where is she?”
“Lost.”
Fear for Raven bubbled up, and although he quickly suppressed it, he was not quick enough. The goddess felt it, too.
“No demon can cross,” she said. “But you, on the other hand… You’ve traveled a long distance to find us. You want to start over, to find a new life. You, we’ll let through.”
The mist parted. Far off in the distance, he saw a length of blue sky that rippled and shimmered.
No, he thought. Not sky.
Water. What he saw was the sea. He had dreamed of it for years. He had come here to find it. The temptation was overwhelming.
He stood and took a few steps toward it. And then he remembered Raven and paused, turning back.
His eyes met the goddess’s. “I won’t go without her.”
“Why not? You can’t save her,” the goddess said. “If the Godseekers don’t kill her, then the demons will claim her. You’re going to fail.”
Again, fear for her clawed itself free. He did not want to fail her.
He remembered how Raven had warned him not to show fear in the demon boundary because they would know and use it against him. This goddess tried to do the same. His bigger failure would be in walking away and not trying to save Raven at all.
“I won’t go without her,” he said again.
The mist began to slide back into place, swallowing the patch of blue, but in a tantalizingly slow manner. He could not tear his eyes from it.
“Even if you do manage to save her life, she can never be yours,” the goddess said. “Think of what the future would bring you. Imagine any children you might have together, the potential danger they create. You would never be able to teach them compassion or mercy or how to survive in a mortal world.”
In his head he knew he should not listen to her. This was another of his fears that she had managed to capture. But in his heart, he also knew that while demons used lies to get what they wanted, goddesses spoke truth. Raven deserved a future and he had nothing to offer her.
He glanced at the blue on the far side of the mist, then back to where the Godseeker Mountains should be. Somewhere, Raven was lost in this. She had not abandoned him in the demon boundary, and he would not walk away from her in this one.
Raven’s future was the one that mattered. If she were gone, his would have no meaning. He could not go forward and wonder, for the rest of his life, what had become of her, if he had failed her. He did not look again to the vanishing sea but turned in the direction of the mountain.
“I won’t go without her,” he said, for the third and final time.
The goddess vanished and the mist thinned.
Raven was deeper into the boundary than he would have thought possible, and he had to shout to get her attention. She ran to him, her pack jostling between her shoulders and hampering her stride, but a path cleared for her and she was soon in his arms. He buried his face in her hair, reassuring himself she was safe.
But there was no time to do more than that. The thickening mist crept upward, forcing them to move back or become buried, and he was not willing to take any more risks with her life.
He grasped her hand in his, careful of her singed palm, and guided her over uneven earth, out of the forest and toward the safety of higher ground. They climbed steadily for another half hour until Blade was certain the boundary was well behind them.
He helped remove Raven’s pack and set it alongside his own, amid broken chunks of sandstone and spindly, naked elder bushes, then listened quietly as she told him what the goddess had said to her.
Anger and defiance sparkled in her eyes as she finished. “I won’t be judged by them, and I won’t let them condemn others like me either. It’s not their right. To them, we’re something even less than mortal. We’re nothing.” Her expression grew more determined. “None of us asked to be born. We should be given a chance to prove our value, not discarded as worthless.”
He did not respond right away. With the mountain at his back he gazed across the boundary toward the unattainable horizon. Although the sun battered hot against its surface, the blanket of mist did not dissipate. The wind, despite the deceptive heat of the sun’s rays, held an unmistakable chill that warned days such as this would soon be over for another season. Logically, Blade knew that time had run out and his options were now restricted.
There would be no new life for either one of them in the Old World.
In the eyes of the goddesses Raven was a demon, but if they could not see that she was so much more, then Hunter was right—they might be immortals, but were undeserving of worship or respect.
At the same time, the goddesses were not wrong to maintain their boundary. There were spawn at large in the world more closely resembling their demon fathers than their mortal mothers. More would likely be born.
The goddess who had spoken to him was correct when she said he was not the man to teach compassion or mercy. He had none of those things left in him.
Raven came to stand beside him, placing a hand on the small of his back. “Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
“I know of several small mountain villages within a week’s walk of here. We’ll find one that’s abandoned and suitably secure, and we’ll spend the winter there.”
Above them, a hawk tipped its wings and curled around in a circle, tracking some small animal on the ground not too far away. Blade lifted her pack and held it out so she could slip her arms through the straps.
She did not move. “Should we try to find Roam, or Laurel and the others?”