He fully faced me. “The sickness they carry is a darkness of spirit, one that corrupts and controls, but if you ignore them and the cruelty they spread, you won’t fall victim to their plight.”
“So it’s not like a contagious disease,” I clarified.
“Not like your human world, no. It’s a corrosion of life.” He glanced at the paling sky, his expression thoughtful. “Think of it like being told you’re worthless your entire life and finally believing it. What happens?”
“You become depressed.”
“Well, yes, but I mean beyond that. Surely you’ve heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where if you believe something enough, you’ll make it happen.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“That’s what these tormented essences do. They warp you into believing you’re evil, despicable, a failure, until all you want to do is die. And then maybe you forget to eat. You forget how to live, thereby killing your body while your spirit remains.”
“That’s a horrible way to go,” I whispered.
“It’s a horrible thing to observe,” he countered.
“But I thought the Spirit Fae all died in one day,” I said, recalling the story Exos once told me. “That my mother and Mortus fought, and nearly ninety percent of the Spirit Fae died as a result?”
He tilted his chin once. “Yes. But it was as if they all lost the will to live at once, and just stopped. Their spirits rose, leaving their bodies to rot, and that’s what we buried. Only, the souls eventually came back, but their hosts were no longer viable, leaving them in this constant state of turmoil.”
“So could they ever be rejoined?” I asked, picturing hundreds of zombie bodies being repossessed by dead spirits. That sounded… bad.
Fortunately, Cyrus negated the idea with a swift shake. “No. There’s nothing that can be done for them now. We just have to wait for their spirits to move on, except they seem unable to, as the circle of life has been so vastly disrupted. As I said, you’re the youngest of our kind. No other females have been able to conceive since that day, and what’s worse, it’s spreading.”
“To the Earth Fae.”
“Indeed,” he agreed, giving me a nudge to move forward again. “One trip to the death fields won’t hurt you, Claire. You just have to remember to tune them all out, and don’t believe anything you hear.”
I took several steps before a thought struck me so hard in the chest I stumbled again. “You think Mortus has been keeping Exos here?” The words came out on a gasp, Cyrus’s grip on my hip the only thing keeping me upright.
He gazed down at me with a tired expression, one that bespoke of his own fears—ones he’d clearly been hiding even from himself.
“You tried to find him last night,” I realized out loud, reading the true exhaustion and knowledge in his gaze, felt it creeping along our bond as he fought futilely to hold it back. “You couldn’t sense him above the chaos of the voices.”
He didn’t reply because he didn’t have to. I sensed everything I needed to through our fresh link—the guilt, the exasperation, the utter notion of failure, and the most important one of all, regret.
“You don’t want me to have to do this.” It was right there at the forefront of his thoughts, the hatred at what he needed to do, but his loyalty to Exos outweighed his regard for me. And it was something I had to respect, to understand, and I did. “You’re doing the right thing, Cyrus.”
“Am I?” he asked, cupping my cheek. “Was binding us the right thing?”
It provided me with fresh insight into his decisions, helped me respect some of his choices even if I didn’t agree with them. “I guess we’ll find out,” I said, placing my hand over his. “Take me into the death fields, Cyrus. I’ll let you know what I sense.”
He dipped his head to whisper his lips over mine. “Thank you, Claire.”
A tenuous agreement formed between us, one founded in a like-minded goal—to find Exos.
As we walked, I wondered if this openness between our minds was normal, because I hadn’t felt that way with Titus during our first stage. Same with Exos. But I could read Cyrus clear as day, and he’d made it obvious he could access me just as easily.
“It’s not,” he admitted, again hearing my thoughts, or perhaps openly assessing them. “But water is a fluid element; it’s clear and concise and always consistent. It makes sense that our bond would resemble those qualities.”
I could understand that—the purity and clarity of water thriving between us.
It was the complete opposite of the opaqueness at the end of this path, standing maybe ten feet away. I gulped at the sight of it, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Power lurked beyond that threshold.
Not the good kind, but the bad. I could feel the inky quality rubbing along my skin, giving me the sensation of wrongness and urging me to turn around.