Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
He waved her off but took an offered biscuit. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
“You’re not going to die,” Isolde said with an eye roll.
Kierse glanced up at him over the rim of her tea. He hadn’t been sleeping or eating much since they’d gotten back from Edinburgh. She kept waking up to an empty bed in the middle of the night as if he was pantomiming rest for her and instead holing himself up in his library to research.
“Any update, Walter?” Kierse asked.
Walter glanced up from his computer screen again. “No. I’m still going through the contents of Dallas’s computer.”
“And how long will that take?”
Another blank look. “Uh…days, weeks, or years. Eventually, I’ll get back to training.”
“You will,” Graves said with no doubt in his voice. “Laz and Schwartz have taken on the video footage from the hotel as well. It’s a process.”
She nodded. They’d taken all of their evidence back to New York with them, and the boys had been hard at work trying to figure out what had happened to Dallas and if there were any patterns for her visitors. Kierse didn’t know how it was going to help them in the long run. Dallas was dead. And with her, the information they needed on the Fae Killer.
After finishing her breakfast, she wandered the library, stumbling upon Anne Boleyn sleeping in a rare ray of sunlight.
“I thought you’d enjoy the gloom and doom,” she told her. “Not searching for the sun.”
Anne hissed, but Kierse just laughed. She’d keep working on her.
She walked around the cat and ran her hands along the well-worn leather books. She’d read a ton of Irish folklore and fairy tales in the intervening year. Part of it had been required by Graves when he was trying to show her that he was the Holly King without outright telling her the truth. She’d continued reading the tales of the Fae as if they were a tradition passed down to her by her people. But that wasn’t what she was looking for today.
“Lost?” Graves asked. He came around the stack she was currently perusing, deeper in his library than she had ever been.
“I know you’ve probably read everything in here, but I was hoping to find something to spark about the Ash Door,” she admitted.
She had plans to go see Niamh in the afternoon. She’d been nursing the connection snapping back into place all morning with Lorcan. He was in south Manhattan, and as soon as she’d woken up, she’d felt their connection like an ever-growing tumor.
“I have books on trees,” he said, leading her a few rows over. He gestured to a section before sliding out a slim green volume. “This might interest you.”
She read the title Irish Trees and the Sacred History. The pages were old, worn, and thin, as if he’d read it frequently. “You think this one will help?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a good place to start. What I think we’re dealing with is more magical than tree related, but since you only have access to half your magic, you might need to make do with the trees first.”
“Right. Maybe I need to figure out how to break free of Lorcan’s hold on my magic,” she grumbled.
“If I could do it for you, I would,” he confessed.
She met his gray gaze, wanting nothing more than to let him enter her mind and break Lorcan’s hold on her. There was so much that neither of them said in that moment. He didn’t just want to break Lorcan’s hold on the magic, he wanted to fracture the bond. The very thing Lorcan feared.
But he could do nothing to help her here, which was the crux of the problem.
“I just need to be stronger, I guess.” A thought came to her, and she hated to voice it. “What if I let the cauldron burn away my humanity?”
Graves didn’t balk. He’d done and thought worse than something like that. He’d given up part of his existence to get the sword. The tarot reading had said as much about his future if he didn’t recover it.
“What would that make you if you went through with it?”
“Fae,” she offered.
“In here.”
His fingers brushed the spot where Lorcan’s bond continued to snap against her like rubber bands against her skin. She jerked back at the touch even as light as it was.
He let his hand drop with a frown. The hurt etched in his gorgeous face, there and then gone. It was the connection with Lorcan he’d just touched. The pained look on his face said that he hated that something that simple could trigger it. She hated that, too.
“Bad,” she said finally. About Lorcan, about the bond, about her humanity. “It’d be bad. I don’t know if I could stomach it.”
“Then it’s not the right solution. You can only go for something like that when nothing else is available.” He seemed to be speaking from experience. “All magic comes with a price. There are unintended consequences to choosing to lose yourself in it.”