Through the Ether (Force of Nature Book 5) - Amber Lynn Natusch Page 0,60

flying wildly. Everyone paused, including what was left of the fey army, and in that moment of silence, I heard a familiar voice calling for me in the distance.

“Piper!” Liam screamed. I strained to locate where the sound had come from, but Knox had clearly heard it and turned to the east. There, cresting a hill, ran his fellow Original, bolting toward us as though his life depended on it.

I could see the tension in his expression from where I stood, and ice snaked down my spine at the sight.

Then, just like the royals had, the entire fey army disappeared into thin air.

I cannot sense them, Etherian growled in my head, and I struggled to process everything that was happening, but I lacked the bandwidth to do it.

“Where did they go?” I shouted to anyone and everyone.

“It was a trick!” Liam yelled back as he neared. “We have to go now—”

Just as those words left his mouth, I felt a shift in my connection to the magic in the ground beneath me. A rift. A change. The earth began to give way, and for a moment, I wondered if it was about to swallow us, as Alaska had swallowed Kingston and his crew—if karma had my number and she’d finally come to collect.

I whispered multiple pleas for aid, but there was no response.

My eyes met Merc’s across the field just as the ground sucked us in like a vacuum and everything went dark.

***

I opened my eyes to the familiar sight of Central Park. I scrambled off my belly to stand while I looked around frantically for the others, only to find them nearby, each one looking as confused as I felt. The magical tang of Faerie was everywhere, as it had been in Mack’s club, but a hundred times stronger. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought it was all an illusion; a trick of the fey king. But I could feel the pull of Earth’s elements, so my confusion and disbelief only grew.

Then, out of the shadows, stepped the fey army, cloaked in a shimmer of sorts—an iridescent aura that shone like diamonds in the light of the moon. And in the center of them stood Phineas with Larken on his arm, the royal couple looking as regal and confident as ever.

“Piper,” Knox called as he inched up behind me, his hand tight on my lower back.

“I feel it,” I replied, slowly putting everything together, though the final picture was enough to break my mind.

“I have to thank you, Piper,” my mother said, smiling down from the slight hill she stood upon, “for being so painfully predictable.” Her smile melted away to display her true feelings; the loathing she felt for her only child. Her heir. “With you in Faerie, we were free to come here to finish the final step in our plan.” Her finger traced the edge of the king’s jaw, and I felt the fey magic in the air strengthen even more. “You were right that Faerie was a fractured land—that Phineas’ lands were tapped of magic, even after I used the amulet to heal them. But I knew exactly where we could find more. A place with infinite resources by comparison.”

All the blood drained from my face. “No…”

“Yes, Daughter. New York is the ideal place to relocate the fey realm. The perfect combination of Faerie and Earth—just like you.” Her wicked smile widened. “And your death will make it all possible…”

My eyes shot wide open and darted around. It wasn’t fey magic that I felt around us—saw surrounding the army before us—but Faerie itself, evident from the shape of the trees to the shade of green that colored them to the scent of the air.

Faerie hadn’t swallowed us and spit us out.

Faerie had been dragged into our realm by a malicious queen ready to unleash her fury on the city of New York. My city. My home.

And my death would ensure it all.

Chapter Twenty-One

Everything made so much more sense now. Every step the queen had taken, every single way she’d played me—played my emotions—had been to get to this moment. I was her ticket to a world with endless power. All she had to do was take out the final hurdle in her way.

“So this is it, huh? This is where it all goes down?” I asked, doing all I could to bolster my bravado and buy myself time to think of something. Because we had neither a full army, nor Etherian, nor the