MAGIC UNLEASHED
In this savage why choose romantasy, fated mates, forced proximity, and phoenixes rising from ashes collide when one broken heroine must heal enough to bond with three protective alpha phoenix shifters before the psychopath in her head destroys two dying worlds.
A shattered Chosen.
A corrupted soul-bond.
Three phoenix kings who died to free me.
In a dying Faerie where magic bleeds from corrupted ley-lines, I am the last. The last Chosen. The last fragment. The last hope.
Trapped in frozen ice. Rescued. I thought myself saved until the last of the immortal Six carved a partial bond into my soul. He's inside me. Whispering. Watching. Making me feel things that aren't real. Every moment I heal, he punishes. Every time I reach for my mates, his phantom hands remind me what he took.
Three phoenix shifters—Cedar, Calder, and Ryland—swear their touch can burn away his corruption. They say their soul-lights will purify me. That completing our bonds will shatter his hold.
But bonding requires surrender. Trust. The very things Artus destroyed.
The grimoire fragment pulses with purpose. Five sisters wait across dying worlds to save millions. If I don't bond with my mates, both worlds fall.
If I burn to ashes, will I rise clean or stay broken forever?
Read if you like:
🔥 Protective phoenix kings and dangerous fated mates
🦅 Why-choose romance with scalding tension and slow-burn healing
⚡ Chosen One prophecy, hidden magic, and ancient grimoire secrets
💔 Trauma, scars, and raw emotional recovery through found family
🌙 Shifter worlds with soul-lights, forbidden bonds, and searing connection
✨ Touch that heals—magic burning away corruption one caress at a time
👑 Broken heroines fighting for freedom and the right to choose their fate
🗡️ A psychopath in her head and the mates determined to silence him
💫 Transformation, belonging, and the wild ache to finally be wanted
🔥 Steamy, high-stakes intimacy and fierce devotion
⚔️ Healing after violation, rising from ashes, and a heroine learning to trust again
Content notes: Magic Unleashed is the sixth and final book in the Cursed Shifter Series and contains mature themes, explicit scenes, references to past trauma, and brutal survival. For adult readers.
CHAPTER ONE
I was going to die in the cold. Not quickly, not cleanly, not with any mercy the universe might've seen fit to grant a girl who'd already suffered enough. No, I would die the slow kind of death where I'd be present for every second of my body surrendering, where consciousness would become a curse rather than a gift, where I'd have to experience the full horror of my own ending before the darkness finally, mercifully took me.
My lungs seized first. The air turned to glass in my chest, each attempt at breathing sending crystalline shards of pain spreading through my ribs, into my spine, down to the tips of my fingers. I couldn't move. Couldn't scream. Could only exist inside this frozen tomb while my body systematically shut down around me.
Then my heart stuttered. Skipped. The silence that followed terrified me more than the pain had, because pain meant I was still alive, still fighting, still here. But this quiet? This awful, hollow nothing where my pulse should've been?
I was slipping away.
Darkness swallowed everything, and I thought, this is it, this is finally it, and some ruined part of me was almost grateful.
And then I woke.
Woke to the same crushing pressure of ice encasing every inch of my body. The same moment of confused terror before my fractured mind caught up and remembered what was happening to me. This had happened before. Would happen again. The blacking out never stopped; it only paused long enough to let the dread build before it started over.
Where was I? The question rose every time consciousness returned, fragmenting before I could follow the thought anywhere useful. A cell? A tomb? Had someone put me here, or had I stumbled into this frozen prison on my own? Neither answer mattered when I kept losing consciousness over and over and over, trapped in a cycle that refused to end.
How long had this been happening? Hours? Days? Weeks? Time meant nothing when every moment blurred into the same pattern. Pain. Darkness. Waking. Pain. Darkness. Waking. An endless loop with no exit, no reprieve, no hope of escape.
The ice pressed against every inch of me, a tomb that wouldn't let me rest. It held me suspended in the worst moment, that terrible instant before I lost consciousness, and refused to let me pass through to whatever came after. I'd have welcomed death at this point. Welcomed anything that would make this stop. But the cold wouldn't release me. It kept me here, kept me aware, kept me suffering.
I tried to scream, but my throat was frozen shut. The sound died before it could form, trapped inside me with all the other things I couldn't release. Terror. Horror. The frantic, clawing need for this to end. They built and built inside my chest with nowhere to go, pressure without relief, agony without expression.
The cold had turned my muscles to stone. My fingers wouldn't curl. My toes wouldn't flex. My eyelids refused to close, forcing me to stare into the dim blue of my ice tomb while my body shut down piece by piece. I was a prisoner inside my own flesh, aware of everything, unable to change any of it.
All I could do was endure the next brutal wave of unconsciousness coming for me. Endure my lungs seizing with that bone-deep ache for air. Endure my heart struggling, each beat slower than the last. Endure the darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision, narrowing the world to a pinpoint before swallowing that too.
And when I woke again, the cycle started over. Again. Again. Again. Nothing I could do would stop it.
The pattern should've dulled with repetition. It didn't. I tried to brace for it, tried to prepare myself, tried to endure without the spike of terror that came each time my consciousness returned, but every waking was fresh horror. Every time, my body reacted the same way, the same frantic surge of fight or flight with nowhere to go, the same mounting dread as I realized what was about to happen. My mind couldn't adjust. Couldn't accept. It kept fighting, kept hoping, kept breaking apart when the cold proved stronger than my will to survive.
How many times had I blacked out? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? My thoughts splintered before I could count, fragmenting in the way ice splinters under pressure. There was no before, no after. Only this endless loop of agony and confusion, stretching into eternity.
The worst part was the awareness. Those brief seconds of consciousness between blackouts when my mind cleared enough to understand what was happening to me. To realize I was trapped, truly trapped, with no way out. To let the terror rise before the cold dragged me under again.
I didn't understand why this was happening.
I didn't understand who had done this to me.
I didn't understand if I was already dead and this was a fucked up afterlife where my sins were being repaid tenfold.
Perhaps I deserve this, a dark corner of my mind whispered. Perhaps this is exactly what happens to girls who run. Girls who hide. Girls who think they can escape what they are.
I shoved the thought away before it could take root. Survival didn't leave room for self-pity. I'd learned that lesson young, and I wasn't about to forget it now, trapped in ice with death cycling through me on repeat.
Sometimes, in those fleeting moments of awareness, I sensed presences brushing against my mind. Warm ghosts where everything else was frozen. Steady when my thoughts shattered. They pressed into the spaces between consciousness and oblivion, intimate in a way that made my chest ache with more than cold.
Three of them.
Probably nothing more than fever dreams. Hallucinations from hypothermia and whatever torture had landed me here. My mind breaking under the strain, inventing comfort where none existed because my brain understood I couldn't survive this alone. I'd always been alone. Had learned to prefer it that way, because alone meant safe, meant no one to betray me, meant no one to lose.
But these presences? They didn't follow the rules I'd built my life around.
They were warm where everything else was frozen. Present when I was slipping away. They reached for me in the darkness, and despite every instinct screaming that this was dangerous, that letting anyone in was dangerous, I found myself reaching back.
They were real. That was the maddening thing. They pressed against my awareness the way real people would, anchoring me when I started to drift. The sensation of breath ghosting across my skin surfaced in the moments before darkness took me. Warmth bloomed low in my belly when everything else was numbness and pain.
I clung to these presences because the alternative was drowning in the frozen dark by myself, and I'd spent my entire life alone. Once, I wanted to let someone in. If they weren't real, so be it. If this was all some elaborate trick my dying brain was playing on me, I'd take it. At least I wouldn't die alone.
The presences pulsed against my awareness. Insistent. Refusing to let me slip away, refusing to let me surrender to the dark, refusing to stop pulling me back to consciousness though consciousness meant more suffering. They wove through my fragmenting thoughts, catching the pieces before they scattered.
One burned with fire held in check, a heat that should've been terrifying but instead made me want to move closer. Another spread the way shadow takes form, darkness that wasn't cold but somehow protective, a dangerous thing that had decided to stand guard over me and the world. The third glowed with a light that refused to dim no matter how deep the darkness grew, stubborn and bright and impossible to ignore.
Hold on.
The words weren't words. More a compulsion, a certainty that hummed through whatever connection linked me to these phantom presences that shouldn't exist.
We're coming for you.
Lies. Beautiful lies my broken mind whispered to keep me sane. No one was coming for me. No one had ever come for me. That wasn't how my life worked. I was the girl people used up and threw away, the girl who slipped through the cracks, the girl who survived because no one cared enough to make sure she didn't.
But I held onto those lies anyway, because when they touched my awareness, a part of me responded. A part of me that recognized them. A part of me that wanted.
Memories surfaced between blackouts, bobbing up through the ice the way bodies bob through water. Pieces of my life from before this frozen hell, when I was young enough to still believe the world might be kind.
I remembered stone walls so cold they hurt to touch. Harsh echoes through corridors I wasn't allowed to walk. Being small enough that people looked through me instead of at me. I remembered that. Remembered being invisible. Remembered thinking that invisible was good, because invisible meant safe, meant overlooked, meant surviving another day.
Esoti's castle. The memories sharpened into focus despite my fragmenting mind. Scrubbing floors until my hands bled while the water in my bucket turned pink. The sting of split skin that I learned to ignore. The ache in my knees from kneeling too long, until standing became a reward instead of a right.
I remembered watching a platinum-haired girl younger than me take beatings meant for someone bigger, someone stronger, someone who mattered. Serafine. Her face never blurred in my memories, but I always remembered the crack of flesh meeting flesh. She never made a sound no matter how many bruises she wore. How I'd wanted to stop it and hadn't moved, paralyzed by my own smallness, my own helplessness, my own overwhelming fear of what would happen to me if I tried.
Coward, I'd called myself then. Coward, I called myself now. Certain things never changed.
I'd escaped eventually. Fled into the wolves' forest with no plan beyond never looking back, branches catching my clothes, tearing skin, leaving me bleeding and frantic but free. The bite of hunger that went on for days until my stomach stopped growling and started aching, a dull throb that became my constant companion. The exhaustion that settled into my bones and never fully left, not years later, not ever.
Then came the discovery that changed everything.
I was ten years old when infection crawled through a wound on my leg, red and swollen and weeping, and I'd understood with terrible certainty that I was going to die alone in these woods with no one to mourn me. But then light bloomed in my palms. Red and orange and yellow flames that danced across my skin without burning, that closed torn flesh without leaving scars, that marked me as other than human.
That was the first time I'd healed. The first time I'd understood that going back meant certain death, and that I couldn't let anyone see what I could do. The first time I'd realized my survival depended on staying hidden, staying secret, staying alone.
Monster, I'd thought, staring at my unmarked leg where the infection had been. I'm a monster.
The years after that compressed in my memory, bleeding together into a single stretch of movement and fear and loneliness. Seasons passing. Towns appearing and disappearing. Healing people for coin or food, closing wounds and curing fevers when I couldn't walk away from suffering, when helping them put me at risk. Keeping my head down. Always secret. Always quiet. Moving before anyone could ask questions or remember my face.
I was good at disappearing. At being forgettable. At slipping through the cracks of a world that didn't care about one more orphan girl with no family, no history, no name worth remembering.
Until I wasn't.
Someone in panther territory had turned me in. I never learned who. Never got the chance to look them in the eye and ask why, though I imagined it countless times during the years that followed. The Cadre had come calling, and so much for healing people there. So much for thinking I'd finally found somewhere safe. So much for keeping my secret.
They threw me in a dungeon, but not the normal dungeons of horror below Titan's stronghold. No, those would've been too merciful. I was thrown into a special dungeon, magically warded and forgotten, where the darkness was so complete I could taste it on my tongue. I lived alongside the other forgotten in pitch black until the guards came to hurt us. We were caged in stone walls that wept moisture, surrounded by the smell of rot and fear and things I tried not to think about too closely.
The screaming echoed off those walls. My screams. Others' screams too. People I couldn't save no matter how much I wanted to. People who died in the dark while I listened to their last breaths and wondered when it would be my turn.
Chains bit into my wrists and rattled when I shook, especially during the torture that went on and on and on. So long I forgot what life without pain tasted of. So long that pain became my baseline, my normal, the constant drumbeat of my existence. Sometimes I'd heal the worst of my wounds when the guards left, stealing moments of relief where I could, but I never turned my ability over to them. They would've had to carve it out of my bones, if such a thing were possible.
Give up, part of me had whispered during the darkest moments. Stop healing. Let them win.
But I couldn't. Wouldn't. A stubborn part of me refused to surrender, when surrender would've been easier. When death would've been a kindness.
I'd thought I'd die there. Had made peace with it, as much as anyone can make peace with dying alone in the dark. Then a shockwave blasted through my cell, ripping apart reality itself, and I'd been flung into endless ice. Endless waking. Endless blacking out. Trapped here with no way out, trading one torture for another.
My thoughts fractured again. The memories slipped away, dissolving into the cold.
But the presences stayed. Warm points of light in the dark. Steady. Patient. Refusing to let me go.
And cold. Always so, so cold.
Until it wasn't.
Until heat bloomed around me, burning but not killing, the temperature shift so extreme my frozen mind couldn't process it at first. The heat imbued the ice encasing my body with a warmth so intense it lived, it pulsed, it breathed. Someone had decided I wasn't going to die here after all.
Fire. Though I didn't have words for what kind. I only understood that it was melting the prison that had held me, eating through the ice tomb I'd been frozen in for gods only understood how long.
The ice cracked. A sound that split the silence the way thunder splits a storm, so loud it rang through my bones. The pressure around my body shifted. Loosened. More cracks spider-webbed across the surface, each one singing as the ice gave way.
And then I fell.
The world spun as I tumbled through space with nothing to grab onto, nothing to slow my descent, nothing but air and gravity and the rushing realization that I was about to hit hard. I freefell for what might've been seconds or hours before I slammed into solid ground.
Pain exploded through my spine, radiating outward in waves that stole my breath and my thoughts and everything except the pure physical fact of agony. I lay stunned, unable to move, unable to do anything except exist in the aftermath of the fall.
Alive, I thought distantly. I'm still alive.
I wasn't sure if that was good news or not.
Sensation slowly returned. At least this time I hadn't blacked out. My brain was so sluggish it took a long time for that realization to sink in, but when it did, relief flooded through me. I breathed. Ragged, painful breaths that tasted of blood, but breathing. My heart hammered against my ribs, too fast and too hard, but beating.
Snow pressed cold against my cheek. Wind howled across my soaked skin, turning the water from melted ice into a thin layer of frost that made me shiver so violently my teeth rattled. I was so cold my hands had gone numb, but I was alive. That had to count for a thing or two.
I wiped the frost from my lashes with fingers that didn't want to cooperate, trying to clear my vision of the endless white. Was I blind now? I'd thought blindness meant darkness, but everywhere I looked was nothing but white and more white and the gray of clouds heavy with snow.
Not blind, then. Somewhere that had no color.
There was no variation in the endless expanse of frozen nothing stretching around me. No shelter. No warmth. No signs of life anywhere in the wasteland surrounding me. Nothing but endless, freezing cold white in every direction.
Perfect. I escaped the ice tomb to freeze to death out here.
Slower. More aware. But dead all the same.
My arms shook with the effort as I tried to push myself up, muscles screaming in protest after gods understood how long trapped in ice. They gave out halfway, dumping me back into the snow, the impact jarring through my bruised spine.
I tried again. Failed again.
Get up, I ordered myself. Get up, get up, get up.
My body refused to obey.
Sensation faded as the cold crept deeper. Into my bones. Into places I hadn't realized could register temperature. My body was shutting down again, slower than before. Hypothermia instead of whatever had been happening in the ice. A more natural death, I supposed, though that was bleak comfort.
Ha. Bleak comfort. Hilarious.
I was losing my mind. That was probably a bad sign.
I searched for my ghosts, my presences, the warm points of consciousness that had anchored me in the ice. But my mind was empty now. There were no more gentle reassurances, no more touches that weren't real, no more promises of rescue. I was alone again.
They were only imaginings anyway, I reminded myself. Hallucinations born from trauma. Nothing real. Nothing worth mourning.
But the emptiness ached anyway. My luck that the first people I'd let in, the first presences I'd allowed past my walls in years, were figments of my dying imagination.
My eyelids grew heavy. The darkness reached for me, soft and welcoming after all that cold, all that pain, all that suffering. Perhaps this time I wouldn't wake up. Perhaps this time I'd finally get to rest.
Then a figure appeared through the white.
I saw him first as a blur of movement against the endless pale, a shape that shouldn't have been there. My exhausted brain took too long to process what I was seeing. Male. Tall. Long hair. Bundled against the cold in bulky white furs that blended with the landscape. Walking toward me through the snow with an ease that said this frozen hell was home to him.
And he was walking straight for me.
Run, my instincts screamed. Fight. Do anything except lie here waiting for whatever comes next.
But my body refused to obey. I couldn't stand. Couldn't crawl. Couldn't stay awake. My eyes drifted closed despite every instinct screaming to stay alert, to watch, to prepare.
Don't fall asleep. Don't fall asleep. Don't...
My eyes snapped open when a soft thump sounded beside me, the sound of someone dropping to their knees in the snow. The male crouched over me, blocking what little light filtered through the clouds.
And he was blue.
His skin was blue. Not pale or sickly or touched with death, but a rich mid-blue the color of twilight given form, the shade of sky in that perfect moment between sunset and darkness. The color shouldn't have been beautiful, should've been wrong, should've made me recoil. Instead, I couldn't look away.
His ears came to sharp points visible through the navy hair that fell past his shoulders, longer than any human male would wear it. The strands moved with the wind, revealing more of that impossible skin, those sharp cheekbones that could've been carved from ice.
Thick lashes framed intense eyes that studied me with an expression I couldn't read. His features were angular, elegant, the kind of face that belonged in paintings or dreams. Beautiful in that dangerous way that made my survival instincts scream warnings though the rest of me drank in the sight of him.
He was otherworldly. Perfect. Wrong.
The thought snapped into place with terrifying clarity.
Fae.
He was fae.
Fae couldn't be on Earth. The barriers between our worlds had been sealed for a millennium, after King Cedar turned his back on all of humankind. Had this male been hiding here all this time? Since the barriers closed? How many others of his kind were concealed in the frozen wasteland where no one would look?
"I have you." His words were deep, accented in a way I'd never heard before, each syllable carrying a lilt that made the common tongue sound musical. He bundled me up in furs similar to his own, sliding his arms beneath me and lifting me from the snow as though I weighed nothing at all. "You're safe now."
Safe. That word again. This time from a creature that shouldn't exist, in a place that shouldn't exist, after a rescue that shouldn't be possible.
I should demand answers. Should struggle. Should do anything except let him carry me away from wherever the hell I'd come from.
But I couldn't. My body had given up the fight, leaving me limp in his arms while he held me against his chest. The heat from him bled through my soaked clothes, warmer than any human, warm enough that my frozen skin drank it in greedily while my mind tried to process what he was.
Fae can't be trusted, a distant part of me remembered. Stories say they'll trap you with pretty words. They'll take you to their world and keep you forever.
But he was warm. So warm. And I was so tired.
"My shelter isn't far," he said, his words dropping to a low murmur that vibrated through his chest and into mine. "I'll get you warm. Give you dry clothes. Food." His accent thickened on certain syllables, making them sound lyrical, almost hypnotic. "You're going to be all right. I promise you."
The words blurred together. Shelter. Warmth. Safety. Promises I had no reason to believe from a stranger, from a fae, from someone who'd found me at the exact moment I needed rescuing.
Too convenient, my paranoid brain tried to warn me. This is too convenient.
But meaning slid away before I could grasp it, lost in the haze of exhaustion and cold and the impossible reality of being held by a fae male who shouldn't exist.
I must've drifted off, because when I pried open my eyes again, we were walking through a forest. Ice and snow weighed down the dark green needles of trees that stretched impossibly tall overhead, and the scent of fresh pine filled my lungs with each labored breath. The trees sheltered us from the freezing wind that had whipped across the ice field, their branches woven together to form a canopy that blocked the worst of it.
The cold stayed brutal, but at least it wasn't trying to flay the skin from my bones with every gust anymore. Small mercies.
The male looked down at me, and a smile quirked his full lips when he saw my eyes open. "Glad to see you awake again."
"I'm glad I woke again," I managed, the words rasping out of my scraped throat, and blinked at the blazing smile that spread across his face.
It transformed him. Made him look younger. More approachable. Less resembling the dark stories I'd heard whispered in the territories I'd traveled through.
Don't trust him, I reminded myself. Don't trust anyone.
But I was so tired of being alone.
He walked us deeper into the forest while I drifted in and out of awareness. The trees grew closer together, their branches woven overhead, creating shadows that made the cold heavier somehow. More present. More alive.
Little purple lights flickered between the trees, catching my attention from the corner of my eye. I thought I'd imagined them at first, thought my tired brain was inventing things again, but they kept appearing. Bobbing through the shadows, weaving between branches, drifting closer to us with what looked to be curiosity.
The purple glow pulsed gently, brightening and dimming in a rhythm that reminded me of breathing. They were beautiful. Mesmerizing. I found myself wanting to follow them, wanting to see where they led.
"They're faeries." The male's bass timbre vibrated into me, breaking the spell. "They'll lure you into the forest if you let them."
"Faeries?" I'd never heard of such things. "They're not glow worms?"
"We don't have glow worms here."
Here. The word stuck in my mind, gathering implications I was too exhausted to examine. Where was here? Where had the ice taken me?
The lights wove around each other in patterns that looked deliberate. Playful, almost. Dancing through the shadows to see what we would do.
Then the male shouted at them.
Not words I understood. The language was harsh, guttural, full of sounds that scraped against my ears. But I didn't need to understand the words to recognize the tone. Vicious. Sharp enough to cut. Violence wrapped in language and thrown at these creatures that had done nothing but drift too close.
The lights winked out so fast it was as though they'd never been there. Vanished into the shadows between one heartbeat and the next, leaving nothing but darkness behind.
My heart hammered against my ribs, fear spiking through the exhaustion that had been dragging me down. That flash of cruelty had been real. This male had violence in him, close to the surface, ready to be used at a moment's notice.
Dangerous, my instincts screamed. He's dangerous.
His gaze dropped to me, and the change on his face made my skin crawl. His brow smoothed, his jaw relaxed, and a ready smile quirked his full lips, the violence gone from his expression entirely, replaced with concern so convincing it would've fooled anyone who hadn't been watching.
"They're pests, and if you don't yell at them, they'll stick around." His tone was conversational, almost friendly. "They feast on dead flesh, so they lure people into the cold and wait for them to die. I'll protect you from them. They won't bother us anymore."
His tone had gone gentle again. The violence might never have happened. But it had. I'd seen it in his eyes, heard it in his words, recognized it from all the other dangerous men I'd encountered in my life.
I needed to be wary around this male.
I kept my expression neutral, didn't let the fear show on my face. That was another lesson I'd learned young: never let them see you're afraid. Fear makes you prey.
"Thank you." The words tasted of ash on my tongue, of lies, of surrender. But I forced them out anyway, because that was what you did when you were weak and needed someone who might hurt you to keep thinking you were harmless. Grateful. Not a threat.
A hut appeared through the trees as we continued on, emerging from the forest as though it had grown there naturally. Small. Rough-hewn wood that looked weathered by time and cold, half-buried beneath snow and ice. Smoke rose from a stone chimney, curling up into the gray sky.
The promise of warmth after so much cold and dying was overwhelming. I wanted it so badly my body ached with the wanting.
It was also convenient.
Too convenient, that paranoid whisper again. How did this male find you? He looks at home in this forest, and by the time he'd reached you, you were half-buried in snow in the middle of an iced-over tundra that stretched to the horizon. How did he find you at the exact moment you needed rescue?
There might be a reasonable answer. Might be. But I couldn't afford to assume the best. Not when the alternative was being caught off guard by someone who might mean me harm.
Still, I was at his whim now. I couldn't afford to anger him. Not when the alternative was freezing to death in a forest of snow-laden trees without any idea where I was or how to survive here.
The male opened the door, and heat spilled around us, wrapping me in warmth so sudden and intense it hurt. My face burned. My fingers screamed as blood rushed back into extremities that had been numb for too long. The temperature difference was so extreme that I whimpered, unable to stop myself.
The interior was simple. A single room with a fire crackling in a stone hearth, the flames dancing and popping in a way that made my frozen heart lurch toward them. Shelves lined the walls, covered with jars and dried herbs whose names I couldn't begin to guess. Everything was tidy. Orderly. Nothing out of place.
Furs piled on a low bed in the corner, thick and soft and inviting.
One bed.
One bed.
He set me on my feet, and I put my hand on the wall to steady myself as the room spun around me. My legs didn't want to hold my weight. My whole body didn't want to cooperate, still half-convinced it was dying and should surrender already.
The male turned to close the door, sealing us inside together, and when he turned back to face me, his expression was kind.
Concerned. Everything about him screamed helpful and trustworthy.
But I'd seen that flash of cruelty. That hadn't been my imagination.
"Thank you. For rescuing me." I kept my tone guarded. Polite. Grateful.
He shook his head, dismissing the effort of walking calf-deep through snow and carrying me all this way. "I'm glad I found you in time."
"And how did you find me?" I made myself hold his gaze, searching for the lie I was certain would come.
"I heard the ice breaking." His accent softened the words, made them more believable. "Sound carries differently here. Everything echoes. I was checking my traps when I heard the crack." He tilted his head, those dark eyes studying me. "It was pretty loud, you understand. I've lived here long enough to recognize what ice sounds when it breaks. I went to investigate." His jaw tightened, the only sign of emotion breaking through his measured calm. "By the time I reached the plateau, I found you lying in the snow. I thought I was too late. Then I saw you breathing."
A reasonable explanation. A believable explanation. The kind of explanation designed to put me at ease.
"You have traps out here?" I asked.
"For food." His tone was matter-of-fact, almost bored. "Rabbits. Sometimes fox. Anything that's learned to survive in the cold." He glanced toward the shelves lined with jars and dried herbs, the gesture casual, unhurried. "You learn to use everything out here. Fur. Bone. Meat. It's not much of a life, but it's survival." His gaze returned to me, warm and reassuring. "I'm glad I found you."
I wanted to believe him. Gods, I wanted to believe someone had finally found me, finally saved me, finally cared enough to pull me from the cold. But wanting to believe didn't make it true. That was another lesson I'd learned the hard way.
"What's your name?" he asked.
I should give him nothing real. Should invent a believable story and stick to it, protect myself the way I'd protected myself for years. But my thoughts were too scattered to invent anything convincing, and I'd have to keep my full wits about me if I gave him a false name and didn't answer when he called me.
I settled on the truth, hating myself for it as the word left my lips. "Lyriana."
His smile widened. Approval flickered across his handsome features, and my stomach twisted at the sight of it. He was pleased. Why was he pleased?
"What's yours?" I asked, because fair was fair. If he had my name, I deserved his.
"Kieran." The name rolled off his tongue with ease, a sound he'd spoken a thousand times. "It means 'dark one' in the old language."
That was a strange thing to tell me. People didn't usually go around explaining the meaning of their names, sharing the stories behind the sounds. Then again, he wasn't human. Perhaps fae did things differently. Perhaps this was normal for them.
Or perhaps he was trying to tell me what he was.
I licked my chafed lips, needing to understand where I was, needing to find a path away from here if I couldn't walk it yet. "Where are we? What is this place?"
Confusion crossed his face, his brow furrowing, those dark eyes studying me as though I'd asked an absurd question. "We're in Faerie." He tilted his head, and the firelight caught his sharp features, making the blue of his skin glow with otherworldly beauty. "Where did you think you were?"
Faerie.
Not Earth. Not some frozen corner of the world I'd been thrown to. Not anywhere that made sense.
Faerie.
I was in Faerie.
The word echoed through my mind, bouncing off the walls of my understanding and refusing to settle anywhere rational. Faerie. The land of the fae. The world that had been sealed off from Earth for a thousand years, since King Cedar turned his back on humanity and closed the barriers.
Faerie.
How was that possible? How was any of this possible? The shockwave that had thrown me from my cell, the endless ice, the dying and waking and dying again, and now this? Now I was in a world that shouldn't exist, rescued by a creature that shouldn't be here, trapped in a body that had almost given up?
I stared at Kieran, at his blue skin and pointed ears and impossibly beautiful face, and my last coherent thought before exhaustion finally claimed me was simple and terrifying:
I'm not on Earth anymore.
And I have no idea how to get back.
MAGIC CAPTIVE COMING SOON