feet planted wide, he proved as supple as a calimbor.
He was protective and possessive, but this was taking both to a whole new level.
Who was this fourth prisoner?
I stretched up on my tiptoes. When my gaze met the dark-haired prisoner’s, my hand, which was still on Remo’s bicep, popped off and smacked my parted lips.
32
The Revenant
I didn’t think my heart had beat once since I’d laid eyes on the man standing beside the slaughtered tigri. I didn’t think I’d blinked or breathed once either. All of my senses were suspended by the sight of a man who was supposed to be dead.
A ghost.
A hero whose memory Neverrians celebrated each year.
I inhaled so sharply my chest cramped. “How . . .?” My lids dragged up and down over my wide eyes as though to clear it of what was obviously an illusion. Every time my lashes whipped my brow bone, the man from the file back in Fake Rowan’s sheriff station was still there.
Still staring straight back at me.
“Is he real?” I murmured.
Remo was so still he looked like he’d become one with the landscape. Only the fluttering at his temple gave away that he was still very much alive. “Yes.”
“But how?” I thought of the mound of orange dandelion clovers that blanketed the gray rock atop one of the Five. “A plant grew from your ashes, Cruz Vega.”
Cruz offered me a smile that made my heart lurch, because it was the same he wore in the picture Iba had of him. “They must not have been my ashes.” Tucking the knife into his belt, he made his way toward where I still stood in Remo’s shadow.
“You look so much like your mother, Amara, and yet so much like Ace, too. It’s incredible.” His eyes, the same vivid green as Remo’s, shone with emotion. “How old are you?”
Remo stiffened, which was impressive considering there wasn’t an ounce of softness anywhere on his body.
“Almost eighteen.”
Cruz’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his corded throat. “Almost the age your mother was when I knew her.” There was something heartbreakingly wistful in his tone.
“Since we aren’t needed here,” Kiera said, “Quinn and I are going to head to the fall and scrub some of the cat gunk off.”
I couldn’t believe I was standing in front of my father’s best friend, speaking to him. This was insane. Almost as insane as the fact that he was still the exact same age he’d been when he’d vanished from our worlds.
Since Remo didn’t shift a foot, not even an inch, I stepped around him, coming to stand at his side instead of behind him. “How are you alive, Cruz?”
“After Gregor . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked at Remo, shaking his head a little. “Sorry, but this is . . . it’s—you were a baby when I was shipped to the Scourge, Remo. Now you’re a man.” He shook his head again, a wavy black lock falling across his forehead and into his glistening eyes. He thrust one hand through his hair, then cleared his throat. “Gregor injected me with dile poison to get Lily back into Neverra. Next thing I knew, I was lying in mud below a portal. I thought I’d died and gone to Hell. Until I reached this cell, and found Kiera and Quinn and a few others.”
“Others?” Remo narrowed his eyes.
“Yes. They’ve all passed on, but there were others.”
My pulse stuttered. “I thought . . . I thought we couldn’t die for good.”
Cruz stared at his bloodied palms, then wiped both on his dark green cargo pants which bore a constellation of other stains. “You’ve encountered the apple, right? Each cell has one.”
All of the blood drained from my body. “I almost ate it,” I blurted out, glancing up at Remo in horror.
He slanted me an I-told-you-chomping-on-it-was-a-bad-idea look.
“I owe you my life, Remo Farrow,” I breathed, and something poked my stomach. What the—
Remo’s eyes, which had been pinched until now, snapped wide.
Oh . . . no. Nononononono. I’d just struck a bargain with the faerie!
I could’ve been dead, so all in all, a bargain wasn’t so bad. Besides, Remo was . . . nice. He wouldn’t use his gajoï to hurt me.
“Amara . . .” Cruz rolled my name, completely oblivious to what had just happened between Remo and me. “Love. Who came up with your name? Your mother or father?”
I wet my lips and turned back toward Cruz. “It was my father’s idea. So . . . so you landed