Eden came and placed her hand over mine, and I felt a surge of strength. Another hand touched mine, and I looked over and saw Anya’s ghost, her face pale, shining pure. She whispered, “You can do it.”
I could. I had to.
Xander came up from behind me—his boots abandoned and still stuck to the floor across the room—and wrapped his arms around me. “I believe in you,” he told me.
I would do this. I had people I loved who needed my protection. They pooled their magic into mine, and I channeled it, watching as the blue color of my sister’s magic weaved into my red one. My mother’s was white, and even Xander had a faint line of power. Together they strengthened my own.
“Ahhhhhhh!” I screamed as I pulled on the layers of power I had weaved over the opening. Allemar rushed toward the closing portal to escape the grasp of the daemon, his face a mask of hatred, his hands glowing purple with dark magic. His spell broke through the portal just as it closed, hitting me square in the chest.
I was blasted backward and crashed into the stone steps. All I remembered was the pain that racked my ribs and the burning sensation that ran up my arm and face. I coughed and blood splattered the white marble floor.
Eden’s face hovered over mine, tears streaming down her face, her hands glowing with power as she tried to heal the damage that I believed was inescapable. I knew what was happening, had seen it one too many times before.
I was dying.
Xander was there, pulling me close, his mouth moving, but I heard nothing as he shifted in and out of focus, my own death vision coming to an end.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Voices murmured softly like the crashing of ocean waves, slowly bringing me out of my slumber. Light streamed in through the window, warming my eyelids; the scent of lavender soothed my battered soul. My eyes flickered open as I saw the bundle of dried lavender lying by my head, and I knew there would be another bundle tucked under my pillow, with probably a satchel of other herbs under my mattress. Eden was reading out loud, and Meri was splayed across the bottom of my bed. I was home. In the tower.
“The stars have blessed us with your return,” Eden whispered when she noticed I had awoken. She leaned forward and brushed a strand of hair out of my face. “We feared we had lost you.” She tried not to look, but I saw her quick glance down to my hands and the anguish she was hiding there.
I looked down, finding my hands braced with splints and wrapped in gauze. I felt like a toy doll, unable to move. Sighing, I lay back down on the pillow, sore that something as strenuous as lifting my head had exhausted me.
“What happened?” My voice was hoarse from disuse.
“You’ve been asleep for a very long time,” Eden said. “Days.”
“You did what you had to do,” Mother Eville added from the stairwell as she came to sit next to my bed and patted my arm.
“You knew,” I accused her. “You knew all along who I was, who Xander and Queen Anya really were.”
“Yes, I knew. For I was the one who brewed the potion to help Queen Anya—I mean your mother, Hyacinth, conceive a son. You were only four when I met you and saw your affinity for magic. You wouldn’t remember me, but I remembered you. You in your room on the rug, turning the pages of books with only your mind. Oh, how it terrified your mother. She feared Allemar would use you for evil. It was her idea that I bargain your life for the son, that I take you and raise you as my own.”
I played with a string on my quilt as I pondered the enormity of what she was saying. It was the opposite of what my father had told me.
“The night your brother was born. I came and stole you away as promised. Your mother, weakened, tried to escape through the mountain pass into Baist, and it just so happened that King Gerald and his young son were hunting a werewolf that was terrorizing the town of Celia. As they were coming out of the pass, the very wolf they were hunting attacked them. Young Xander was mortally wounded. Your mother with her death seeker gift was pulled to them as he lay dying, and she tried