enchant it himself?”
Shy’s hands expertly poured the tea as my father spoke. “He painted it himself, but the enchantment was commissioned. It was a particular form of magic that wasn’t of this plane. He feared if he used his own, one of the witches would have sensed the purpose. He couldn’t use demonic magic since there were wards against it at the time. So he was forced to use a witch from another plane.”
I had to laugh because I knew what had happened. The trick had been on freaking Myrddin. “He tried to lay a trap for Marcus and perhaps Kelsey, but Marcus was needed by the outer planes. Twelve years ago did anyone sense a…” What to call it? “A disturbance in the force?”
Shy’s head shook but the expression was pure Harry Wharton. “My daughter the geek. What do you mean?”
Evan had a thoughtful expression on her face. “Are you talking about the days when the veil thinned? I don’t remember it well but Albert talks about it. It was how we moved so easily across the planes for a while. Even when it settled down, there were still places where it thinned from time to time. Albert thought Myrddin was doing it.”
So they’d felt the convergences on the Earth plane as well. “No, it was because the Night King was dying and the Day Queen needed her successor to take over the job of fueling the planes. The outer planes exist basically on top of one another. Like Shy explained your relationship, those planes share a space and they require a unique magic to keep the walls up and the planes separate. Summer is made from that magic. She is that magic. But as with all things in our universe, she works best with a balance. Night to her day.”
“Marcus Vorenus,” Evan said with a sigh. “She was Marcus’s mate. The prophecy wasn’t about me.”
“Not you.” I had so many thoughts on how the universe would do its will, and nothing we do could thwart it. Myrddin had tried so hard, but someone had tricked him. “So someone from the outer planes found a way to get their Day Queen the king she needed. Summer couldn’t take her place without Marcus at her side, and Myrddin gave them a perfect way to tempt him through.”
What I didn’t say was I doubted Summer took her place at all unless things had gone the way they had. Daniel had been the one to convince her to unleash her power. Without meeting us, I don’t know if she would have found the peace she needed to finally come into her destiny.
And if we hadn’t gone through, we wouldn’t have been able to bring back Dean, who Kelsey now thought was absolutely essential to taking down Myrddin.
“Perhaps the painting went blank because it had done its job. The outer planes were saved when Summer and Marcus took their crowns,” Evan mused. “But the academics came to believe that the object itself wouldn’t close until someone came back through. They thought it was a fail-safe in case someone got trapped by accident. A way to keep the portal open so Marcus could still go through. Even though it went blank, we still believed you could return.”
“Why didn’t Myrddin destroy it?” I asked.
“Because I stole it, of course,” my father admitted. “Well, I tried to. I wasn’t good at the ghost thing at that point, so I convinced someone else to steal it. It wasn’t hard. She was looking for a way to kill the man. I convinced her to be a spy instead. Turns out my little love is pretty good with death magic. She was trying to contact me shortly after I died, and she didn’t stop until she called me to her circle. She’s the one who found Shahidi for me.”
“Christine?” Was he talking about Christine? Christine was my father’s girlfriend for years. She was a witch of medium power, and she was roughly my age. My father might have gotten older over the years, but his taste in twenty-year-olds had never changed. Christine would be almost fifty now. Was she still loyal to my dad even after he’d died? I’d kind of always thought she’d go to the dark side in a heartbeat. Way before I would have said Liv would go all Dark Willow on us.
“Yes. I know you never liked her much, but she was a good woman. She still is. She’s been in the Council headquarters for