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She trembled, a cold sweat spreading across her skin. Her heart rate picked up, and she thought she might pass out. She gasped and clenched her hands into fists. Her knuckles were white where she grasped the spear tightly in her hand. This wasn’t painful but disorienting and uncomfortable. As if she had always been walking underwater and was now on land.
She flexed her fingers and felt light as a feather. Fiery blue light threaded with gold suffused her entire body, a swirling glow that slithered and pulsed as if it had a life of its own. Then, as the last of the power of the sword unleashed upon her, the magic burst like fireworks, breaking apart into a million little pieces before settling back into her skin.
Then he finished. And she felt lighter. As if she had been in chains and now was set free.
“What . . . did you do to me?” she whispered.
“I revealed who you truly are . . . what you truly are.”
Lorcan’s eyes went as wide as saucers as he jumped to his feet. “It can’t be. They’re all dead.”
“Not all of them, apparently,” Graves told him.
“What . . . what am I?”
Fear crept into her voice. Finally, the answer to all of her questions. And yet, she almost didn’t want to know. Couldn’t bear it. Yet, at the same time, she had to know.
Lorcan dropped his arm, lowering the gun to his side. His voice was reverent as he told her the information she had she had always wanted.
“A wisp.”
Chapter Sixty-One
“A what?”
“A will-o-the-wisp,” Lorcan told her. He looked like he was going to bow his head and swear his allegiance. “The last of your kind.”
Kierse’s eyes flicked back to Graves. “A wisp? Like a little ball of light? Like in the stories?”
“Not a ball of light. That is just all the stories remember—that wisps lure people into the dark. But real wisps are of the Fae.”
“Fae? Like a fairy?”
Her fingers went to her ears, and she gasped. They were no longer completely round. The tips were pointed at the ends. But not just that . . . everything felt different. Like all of her limbs were stretched and smoothed over. The glow had remained on her skin as if she could now see exactly where her absorption-magic levels were at rather than just feel them.
Graves nodded. “They were very powerful magic users who came over from their world millennia ago. They were aligned with the Druids for centuries until their kind disappeared.”
“They were slaughtered,” Lorcan growled. “Hunted down and massacred. One by one until there was nothing and no one left.” Lorcan took a step forward as if he needed to touch her to make sure that she was real. “But now, you are here. You are a miracle.”
Kierse stepped back at his sudden change of heart. One minute, ready to kill her; the next, admiration mingled with devotion. She couldn’t handle that. She couldn’t handle any of it.
She was a wisp. And wisps were Fae. And . . . she was the last wisp.
Then something else filled her heart. A revelation she hadn’t considered. Graves had known, and he hadn’t told her. This wasn’t a secret about his history or his past. This was a secret from her.
She whirled on him. “How long have you known?” She could see the machinations working in his mind. See him trying to find a way to get out of this conversation. “How long, Graves?”
“I have suspected since we saw Mafi that night you absorbed magic.”
Kierse took it like a blow. “You knew that night. You said that you had heard of someone like this. Did you mean a wisp then?” He clenched his jaw. All the answer she needed. “Wisps absorb magic. And yet, you never shared your suspicions with me. Why?”
“I suspected, but the wisps never had your limitations.”
“But you could have used the sword,” she pointed out.
“I didn’t know you were bound. Or that your magic and your self were tied up by whoever did this to you.”
“You mean you didn’t trust me to know about the sword.”
“That’s exactly what he means,” Lorcan said.
“I broke what was there and revealed the truth under the lie,” Graves said. “I always planned to do it tonight.”
Bound. He had broken her binding. Now she was truly a wisp in more than just name. Still . . . she couldn’t dissolve the anger. The real Kierse, the one who had been left on the streets and abused by Jason—that one was still furious. She didn’t know whether he had actually planned to tell her the truth or not tonight. Only that he had purposefully withheld this.
“But you suspected that I was a wisp,” she said, lethally calm.
“He didn’t tell you for a reason,” Lorcan said. “He knew you would go looking for what you were capable of.”
