I hoped I was doing the right thing. The Mages were licking their wounds, but they wouldn’t be for long. They’d framed us and expected the Humans to keep us busy, and yet we now had their ace in the hole. We’d taken the man who’d been fueling this war. He was Danu’s prisoner, and Bilé could no longer give them information to use against us.
That was a huge gain for us and a huge loss for them. It wouldn’t stop them though and we knew it. They were dead set on the path they had chosen to walk, and when they finally showed up, we’d fight them. I only hoped that now with the babes born, that it would be soon. I wanted this over with and I wanted them safe from the lunacy of it all.
“Did Ristan say anything to you after the blessing?” I asked softly after a few moments had passed. Ryder grimaced briefly.
“He told me that he wouldn’t be coming with us to the Guild. He also isn’t willing to allow Olivia to go back, either. I’m not even sure what to think about it, but I do know if we force the issue, he won’t forgive us for it anytime soon. He is still trying to figure out what her involvement with the Mages was. I offered to interrogate her and so did Zahruk, but he feels that if he can’t read her, that we probably can’t and he wants a little more time to find out on his own. He did say that if he gets nowhere with her, he will bring her to me.”
“I know things looked bad based on what Alden and Ristan told us, but what if she turns out to be innocent? Do you think Ristan will allow her to leave?” I asked thoughtfully, and Ryder snorted with a smirk.
“You are about to get a front row seat to how Fae and Demons feel about betrayal; more so, how he feels about it. No matter what happened, she betrayed Ristan and Alden and he won’t let her leave until he has exacted his revenge. Ristan will get the truth from her, and until he does, none of us will really know what happened at the Guild. I will not interfere and I hope you don’t plan on it,” he raised an eyebrow at me.
“Hell no. If she turns out to be a Mage and was helping them, I’ll put her down like a rabid dog myself, just like I did to Chandra. I’ve been thinking about that as well,” I said softly as I replayed the time I’d murdered the girl right in front of Ryder. “Looking back, so much of what the Guild told us was basically a lie. It’s too much,” I whispered.
“They’ve been fed lies, yes, but they chose to blindly follow what they’d been told.”
“I did it as well. I never questioned anything until you,” I said guiltily. “How many innocents did I murder for them?”
“Don’t think of it like that,” he said as he moved my hair from my neck and placed a gentle kiss on the soft column. “There’s no undoing it, there’s only learning from it, becoming stronger because of it, and moving forward to better it.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
We stood with Alden in the room where we’d gathered the children of the Guild. His eyes watched them as they played with toys that Sinjinn had created from glamour. There were only a few who were up and moving, while the others watched from where they sat on a soft sofa that Eliran had created. The sofa was a soft creamy ivory, and had places to hold the medical IVs that held saline. Where he’d gotten the saline from was anyone’s guess. The man loved Human medical technology and was always incorporating it with traditional Fae healing at every chance he got.
Some of the children had been injured in some sort of an explosion that happened during the fall of the Guild and some were just dehydrated, as they had been in hiding for at least two days, without food or water from what we could tell. None of them would speak to us yet so it was hard to figure out exactly what happened to them.