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In the end, there wasn’t really a choice to be made. I had to keep my promise and return home to my faywens, and Alisdair would have to keep his, by letting me go once daybreak crested the horizon.
“What do you know of the Taken?”
Meallan surprised me again with the sudden question.
“The Taken?” I shivered thinking of them and drew my coat tighter. “I don’t know anything about them. Seems that no one does.”
“That is true and untrue. There is something about the creatures that we can’t know, can’t understand, and can’t talk about. They don’t seem to be born, and they cannot die.”
Another sound turned my head. I frowned, squinting through the dark but seeing nothing. Not even shadows.
“Of course they can be killed,” Meallan amended. “But they don’t die. Not of natural causes or old age. Not by sickness or disease. They just are until they aren’t anymore.”
“Fascinating,” I replied, not the least bit interested. “Why are we talking about them? I’d rather not. Something about those creatures...” I shuddered. “They frighten me.”
“They frighten everyone. It’s what they were made to do.” Meallan stopped. Hands grabbed and lifted me around the waist, helping me over an obstruction I couldn’t see. “Beings of pure fear. The wolves have always been curious about them. Where they came from, why they haunt this land.”
“Because of the curse,” I said.
“That’s the obvious conclusion, but I don’t believe so.” I felt his eyes on me in the dark. “The change is good and right. It brings the fae to the pinnacle of their speed, intelligence, strength, and power. Nothing as foul as the Taken could come from the change.”
I eyed the faint impression of him. “Good and right? Do you really feel that way?”
“I do.”
“Even though the last stage of the curse is losing your speed, intelligence, strength, and power, and becoming a mindless beast that tries to eat people and live in a tree?”
He laughed. “My queen, that is the last stage of everyone’s life. Fae live for hundreds of years, but in the end, sickness, old age, and disease take our bodies and minds. At least faeriken get to live life at the top of the food chain before that happens.”
“I guess.” Although I didn’t sound too sure. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I simply want you to understand us. The wolves,” he explained. “My pack. My people. I know you must’ve heard a number of unflattering things about us, but it’s not true. We’re treated as evil outcasts because we dare to like who we are. We embrace it instead of cloaking ourselves in self-loathing, and pretending we’re still fae.”
Thud.
I whipped around. I was certain that time. Someone was out there—close by.
Alisdair?
“All we desire is to stay as we are, and live the life that Meya intends for us.”
“Meya didn’t intend for you to be cursed,” I responded immediately. “That was fae treachery, not her divine hand.”
“Meya created magic, magic birthed curses. Everything is traced back to her divine hand.”
I shook my head, pressing my lips together tight. Every fae worshipped Meya, but some of them worshipped her a little too hard, and a little too fervently. I learned a long time ago that there was no point arguing with a zealot. But still, it steamed me to even think someone would suggest that it was Meya’s plan for Emiana to destroy my life, steal my body, break my mind, and endanger my mom and two sisters in the process.
She could never be so cruel.
“Even the Taken,” Meallan continued. “There’s a reason they were placed here with us. They’re the key.”
“The key? The key to what?”
He laughed. “I told you. The key to living forever. If we could understand them—understand how and why they never get sick, old, or diseased, we could harness that ability for ourselves. Even more if we could understand how they strike terror with their mere nearness. We’d have eternal lives, and every day of those lives, no one would dare approach us to end them.
“The powers of the Taken combined with the strength and power of the faeriken would create a new, stronger, and the best race of fae.”
My stomach heaved. “You would actually want to look and be like those vile things?”
