Back when Haven killed me, I rose above my weak chakra. I overcame my weakness, made the right decision, and because of it, I came back to join the living. I’m unkillable now.” I lift my shoulders, knowing it may sound weird, but then, weird is all relative here. “I’m a true immortal. Here for the duration. I’m not going anywhere, and I really prefer that Damen doesn’t go anywhere either.”

“And you?” She turns to Damen, totally unfazed by everything I just said. “Do you agree with this? Do you feel as she does?”

He frowns, glares, teeth gnashing together as he grumbles an unequivocal “Of course I do!” Then he squeezes my hand, eager to leave.

But even though I’m eager to leave too, for the moment, my curiosity’s piqued and I want to see where this leads. Wondering if I might already know when I say, “This way out that you refer to, is this for us or for you?” My eyes narrowing as I recall her earlier words, when she begged me to release her, but from what, she never made clear.

Is she stuck?

A prisoner of the Shadowland but without the glass cage?

The answer coming in the form of her usual riddle when she says, “It is for you, for me, for all of us. Once I learned the truth, I was already too old and frail to make the journey. But now you are here. Returned just for this. I can see it in your eyes, in the light that surrounds you. You are the one. The only one. The fate of many lies in your hands.”

“So… basically you’re saying that my journey isn’t even close to being finished? That there’s still a heckuva lot more you expect me to do?” My gaze narrows as I try to determine just how I feel about that, mostly veering toward being very much against it.

She nods, her clumpy old eyes never once leaving mine. “You are so close. It is best to keep going from where you now stand. Where destiny is concerned, each step leads to the next.”

“Oh, sure,” Damen says, the sound of his voice startling me in that it’s even gruffer than I would’ve expected. But to Lotus’s credit, she doesn’t react, doesn’t wince, doesn’t flinch, just continues to stand there, observing him with her usual calm. “Sure, we’ll get right on that.” He shakes his head. “Sorry, Lotus, but you’re gonna have to give us a little more to go on. Ever and I have been through the wringer and we came out on top, got the one thing we wanted—the one thing we needed to make our lives complete, and now you think you can just show up, toss another cryptic riddle our way, and steer us out of our much-deserved victory celebration and back into more trouble—trouble that you alone have created?” He glares. “Think again.”

“Seriously,” I add, encouraged by his argument. “Why should we even consider doing this? Why can’t you find someone else, one of the other immortals, maybe? Haven’t we been through enough already?”

But instead of answering my question, she tilts her head in Damen’s direction and says, “Damen, is it really I who created it? Or was that you?”

Damen meets her gaze, but clamps his lips shut, refusing to speak. And when it’s clear he has no plans to address her, I nudge him with my elbow and say, “What’s she talking about? What is it you’re not telling me?”

He swallows, squirms, kicks at the ground, puts it off for as long as he can before he takes a deep breath and says, “She claims to be one of the orphans. Claims I saved her from the black plague over six hundred years ago when I made her drink from the elixir.”

I balk, eyes practically popping from their sockets as I glance at the two of them. Finally finding enough voice to say, “And? Is it true?”

Wondering why no one saw fit to mention this before. Wondering if this is what she showed him that day when I watched them share a silent communication.

Damen shrugs, swipes a hand over his brow and gazes all around. “No. No way. It’s impossible. She’s making it up,” he says, obviously more flustered than he lets on. Pausing for a moment, long enough to gather his thoughts, sighing loudly as he adds, “Honestly? I don’t know. I’ve been racking my brain since the day she first told me, but I just can’t recall. It’s her word against my memory and there’s no way to know for sure. Usually it’s the eyes that give it away, being the window to the soul and all that—but hers are so damaged, they’re completely unrecognizable. She’s not the least bit familiar to me.” He shakes his head, takes a moment to scowl at Lotus, his face softening when he turns back to me. “Ever, you’ve got to remember we’re talking over six hundred years since I last saw these people. And the only reason I didn’t mention it before is because I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily, especially when there’s no way to prove it either way. Besides, my only concern is for you—for us—right here in the present, and well into the future. The past no longer concerns me. Other than Drina and Roman, I have no idea what became of the other orphans. I have no idea where they ended up—”

“But Roman did know,” I cut in, remembering what Haven told me, about what Roman told her, the stories he wrote in his journals.

Damen and Drina may have moved on, but Roman stuck around, kept in touch. Eventually discovering a way to re-create the elixir, and when the effects began to wear off, sometime around one hundred and fifty years later, when the immortals began to show the ravages of aging, he tracked them all down and had them drink again, repeating the sequence every century and a half, until now. Now that he’s gone, there’s no one to look after them. Not to mention there’s no telling just how many he decided to turn on his own. If the number of unrecognizable souls we just released from the Shadowland was any indication, it’s safe to assume there are many, many more.