Chapter 23: The Edge of Destiny - The Shadow of a Vicious King

POV: MAX

The Pat’s Pottery, Pots, and Potions sign swings above my head as my key twists into Devi’s lock with the same rehearsed ease as usual.

I step inside, the metal of E’s lantern thrumming softly beneath my palm. The artifact gives me goosebumps the way it always does—comforting and unsettling all at once. Heat sinks into my skin, sewing an intimate thread through my chest.

“Devi?” I call, even though I already know she isn’t home. “Percy?”

Three small round tables sit untouched in the corner, the stools neatly tucked in. There are no half-drunk cups on the counter, no crumbs on the floor, no signs of her regulars lingering longer than they should.

Without Devi in it, the tea parlor feels hollow. The familiar smells of lemongrass, smoke, and old magic sit heavy in my lungs, stripped of the life she usually breathes into them.

This place is the safe haven I used to visit after a hard, grueling day at the hospital. A reprieve from unfair deaths and unwritten rules and the constant pressure to be careful.

But today, there’s no movement behind the counter. No gossip. No Percy buzzing in with questions I pretend not to want to answer.

The weight of their absence forms a lump in my throat as I move past the glass-bead curtain toward the back. The soft chime of the undulating glass echoes in the stillness, a handful of beads cluttering the floor, despite there being no holes in the curtain. Weird. Nick heads straight for the washroom while E lingers in the kitchenette.

I deposit his lantern next to the crystal ball on the table and shiver from the sudden cold.

“Found something!” Nick shouts, and I hurry over to the small restroom between the front and back of the store.

The trash bin by the sink is overflowing with bloody bandages—carelessly discarded and stained with dried blood. My stomach cramps.

“She was hurt?” I grind out. “Mabel didn’t mention anything about an attack. She just said Devi left for Faerie.”

“She didn’t burn these,” Nick adds, holding up the dark bandages. “Which means she was in a hurry.”

Damn. I shouldn’t have left so quickly when I went to deliver the groceries. I should have unlocked the door and investigated, but I was too wrapped up in my own shite to see what was right in front of me. Too busy dealing with a sham wedding and a difficult fiancé.

“Devi wouldn’t vanish without telling me, not if she could help it. Whatever took her from this house wasn’t planned—or friendly.”

All the small lies I told myself to keep life simple, safe, and ordinary thud in my ears. While I was arguing about cakes and wedding dances, Devi was bleeding somewhere. She needed my help, and I didn’t look closely enough to notice.

My stomach twists as we search the rest of the downstairs in gloomy silence.

The kitchenette is stripped bare. The backroom is empty except for the usual candles and crystal balls. No Percy. No notes. No trace of the life that usually hums through these rooms.

Then we climb the narrow stairs to the loft.

Devi’s bed is made. The swift morning breeze creeps in through the cracked, open window, a puddle of water darkening the floor beneath the frame. Nick rummages through the upstairs kitchen and cupboards while I check the dresser and wardrobe. A few items are missing—small things, easy to overlook. But not for me. I’ve raided her closet too many times not to notice what’s gone.

At the back of the wardrobe sits a crate, square and solid, and a surge of excitement eclipses the worry in my blood. “I think I found it,” I call out.

Age darkens the wood, and the latch is worn smooth from use. Nick’s hurried footsteps boom behind me as I crouch and work it open. The hinges protest when I lift the lid in a dry, rusty whine that scrapes up my spine.

The growing flutter in my stomach coils into a knot.

The crate is empty.

Fuck.

I stare at it for a beat longer than I should. The size is right. The shape, too. This was meant to carry the spindle.

“It’s gone,” I say at last, closing the lid.

Nick runs an impatient hand through his hair. “Devi must have taken it with her. Fucking hells.”

I shake my head. “No. Devi was already taking a huge risk going back to Faerie. She wouldn’t have gambled with something so precious.”

“She would,” he cuts in. “If she thought she could barter it for her freedom, she absolutely would.” His gaze flicks to the open wardrobe, then to the window. “It’s probably why she left without a word.”

“I know her better than that,” I snap. “If she left, she had her reasons, but I’m telling you, she wouldn’t part with something Mabel asked her to safeguard. She wouldn’t barter it away, never.”

“You think you know her better than I do?” Nick huffs.

We stare at each other with our eyes narrowed.

“I was here. I mean— I eavesdropped on their conversation,” I admit.

He laughs, but it is no happy sound. It’s the sound of Revolutionary Nick, the hardened soldier who picked up his backpack and left us to take the fight to the Reds, as he called it.

“You mean after everything you let yourself ignore for years, you know Devi well enough to be sure of what she would or wouldn’t do? When you couldn’t see what was going on right under your nose?”

A big frown wrinkles my face. “What are you talking about?”

“The blood, the glass beads, the stench out in the streets… It wasn’t the first time Devi was attacked, Max. Not by a long shot.”

My chest tightens. “Don’t use that tone. You weren’t even there.”

“You might’ve been physically present, Max, but your mind was always at the hospital with your patients—and lately tangled up in that farce of a wedding.” His jaw clenches. “Och. I’m glad that madness is over.”

I bristle. I was already beating myself up for missing the signs, for being too self-absorbed, but Nick wasn’t even in the same country. He wasn’t anywhere near Kerri when she died. He doesn’t get to lecture me about being present.

“That’s not fair,” I clip.

“Devi had you bring her groceries because she was stuck here for the foreseeable future. She wasn’t supposed to be using her magic outside these walls, but she helped one of my sources track down two witches and murdered a whole lot of people,” he goes on. “Didn’t you read about it on the news? The men were slaughtered by an invisible force, for crying out loud.”

The story shook the whole city. An entire human-trafficking operation brought down by the wrath of gods, they’d said.

I open my mouth, then close it again. “That was Devi?”

“Yes,” Nick says, gesturing dramatically. “She used her magic, and her curse retaliated.” His eyes flick to the puddle by the window. “She probably came home battered and bleeding, and someone knew how to take advantage. Do you really think Devi Eros had one of the most powerful artifacts ever made in her possession and just left it behind?”

He doesn’t wait for my answer.

“You built yourself a neat mortal life. Meanwhile, everything that actually matters—saving witches, returning to Faerie, and avenging our mother—got shoved aside,” he adds.

His gaze lingers on the empty crate, like he’s too disappointed to meet my gaze anymore.

“You have no right to judge my choices. You left us,” I croak.

“Aye,” he says quietly. “I left. Because someone had to stop pretending all this…inaction was alright.”

Unsaid grievances permeate the air between us.

I don’t remind him that he walked away without a word.

He doesn’t admit that watching me choose a medical textbook and scalpel over a grimoire felt like betrayal.

I hear it in the silence, anyway.

Nick and I love each other to death. We’re twins—cut from the same bloody cloth, bound by the same heart-wrenching losses, shaped by the same violence. Whatever broke our family did so unevenly, splintering us in different directions, but the fractures, those uneven edges in our souls, still fit together perfectly.

It’s impossible to stay in the same room for long without colliding when every disagreement taps into something older, deeper, and unresolved. We argue because we care too much, because neither of us ever learned how to disagree without feeling like we’re betraying the other.

E hovers in the doorframe. “Just check under the floorboards,” he says.

Nick blinks. “Under the floorboards?”

A faint, unmistakable edge of pride slips into E’s voice. “Near the bed. That’s where Devi keeps the important stuff.”

I drop to my knees in the area he indicated and press my palm against the boards, running my fingers along the seams. Most are solid, unmoving. I test another, then another, tapping lightly with my knuckles, listening for the hollow note beneath the wood.

My pulse jumps as one plank shifts ever so slightly under my hand.

I wedge my nails into the narrow gap and pry it loose. The piece of wood lifts with a soft creak, revealing a dark rectangular hollow, and I reach into it carefully.

A few glass vials clink together, and my fingers brush a stack of papers and several plastic bags filled with dried herbs.

“Anything interesting?” Nick asks.

“Wait.”

I adjust my stance and dig deeper into the hole.

Nestled in one corner is a slender length of metal.

As I reach for it, the air snaps with an uncomfortable burst of static electricity, and my fingertips sting. I fish it out with reverence, drinking in the sight of it.

Fae runes wrap around the spindle in steady, deliberate patterns, their lines smooth and continuous as they curl around the whorl and up to the needle.

The artifact is made of solid gold, but something darker stirs beneath the surface. A fiery glow moves through shallow channels carved into the metal in slow pulses, gathering in the grooves before thinning again, as if heat circulates through a living, beating core.

Nick whistles under his breath. “I can’t believe it. The Spindle of the Gods.”

A faint vibration tickles my skin as the runes shimmer with a hint of fire, leaving my fingers cold, as though they’re drinking something from me in return, and I grip the spindle tighter.

A treacherous warmth pools low in my stomach.

I feel dizzy. Breathless.

What mortal hasn’t yearned for immortality? Not just to keep pace with time, but to step beyond it. Free from decay. Free from death.

Even the Fae can’t escape the void.

This artifact might, yet I know what that hunger cost.

The search for forever nearly tore Faerie apart, burning through entire realms, forests, and cities alike, all reduced to ash so no one would ever come searching for eternity again. This spindle is the most dangerous kind of promise. Every smooth curve is steeped in sacrifice, in lives traded and futures erased. Whatever power hums against my skin was paid for in blood.

I push to stand and roll the spindle in my palm. “Mabel used to say not all wheels spin all yarns. She said it to remind me that not every problem can be solved with the same tools. But standing here with this relic in my hand, I wonder if she was trying to make a point.”

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” E says.

Nick smiles from ear to ear. “All right, Casper. You’re not all bad.”

He looks like he did on Christmas morning, wonder written all over his face, his grin a little too wide. I know that look. Beneath the excitement, his mind is already moving, testing angles, weighing outcomes. Thinking about leverage. I feel the same pull, the same dangerous curiosity, and it unsettles me how quickly it comes.

The small, treacherous hope I’d carried—that this could somehow bring E back to life—shrivels under the weight of reality.

When something exists in only one copy and promises eternal life, everyone will find a justification to use it. A cause worth fighting for. Worth killing for. I glance down at the spindle in my hand and wonder if touching it was a mistake.

A part of me wants to put it back where I found it and pretend none of this ever happened.

E moves closer. “I don’t like it. I don’t know what that thing is, but you shouldn’t be touching it.”

I swallow hard. “What do you mean?”

He pauses, then his bite of power ripples across the room. “What is it made for? You never said.”

“It’s leverage. That’s what it is,” Nick answers in my stead. “And if we didn’t come looking for it, hoping to get it out of this world before the Mist King comes for Max again, we’d be fools.” His voice hardens. “She’ll never be safe here as long as he’s lurking. And we can’t give it to him.”

The spindle shimmers in the early morning light, and icicles of guilt spear through my chest. E doesn’t know what the spindle is for.

A colder thought slips in, uninvited. Would E still recoil from it if he knew what the spindle was for? If he understood what it could offer him?

Flesh. Breath. A heartbeat of his own.

Would he crave it?

Would it whisper to him the same way it does to me, promising more than shadows and borrowed warmth? I hate myself for wondering whether that knowledge would change him—or worse, if he would choose it over me.

“We should put it back in the crate before we move it,” I say at last. “At least until we figure out what we’re doing.”

Nick exhales, his victorious grin fading into a thin line. “Yes. Something that powerful has to give off a spike of magic.” He eyes the spindle with a frown. “Best not to announce to every god and monster within range that we found it.”

He retrieves the crate from the wardrobe and sets it down beside me. I tuck the spindle back into its rowan bed and rest my hands on the sides of the crate for a moment.

Nick’s emerald-green eyes burn with excitement. “It’s time to plan our departure, Maxie. To go to Faerie and fight our battles ourselves.”

I knew this was what we were building toward, but the prospect of actually packing for Faerie riles up my anxieties.

My knee-jerk instinct is to deny him. “I can’t just pack up and leave. I have patients, responsibilities…”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Your mortal friends will be happier with you gone than with you dead, Maxie. And right now, those look to be our only two options.”

He rubs the stubble on his chin, and a spark of sadness shrouds his face. For a second, I wonder if he’s about to offer to go without me—as though I would ever agree to that—but then he sighs.

“This life was never ours, was it?”

It hurts, but I know exactly what he means. “No.”

I thought my efforts to fit in made a difference, that I belonged with mortals through sheer effort—something Nick lacked, hence his unhappiness—but I was only better at pretending.

My gaze lingers on the pointed end of the spindle in its cradle, so fine it looks fated to prick a finger. I imagine how easily it could pierce skin, and the brief sting that would follow.

A bead of blood would be such a small offering for something that promises so much in return. The choice whether or not to bring that priceless artifact to life could be reduced to one careless moment, one drop given without fully understanding the cost.

I tell myself I’m only studying it, only being cautious of sharp edges, but a part of me longs to cut myself on its needle, to see what kind of peace it would bring.

Could I use it to spin a thread strong enough to tie a soul back to its body, if said body could be found? My mind flashes beyond E, to Aunt Kerri, then my mother…

I can picture the moment perfectly, when a wheel begins to turn, when the fabric of life yields, and the gods themselves hold their breath, waiting to see which way destiny will break.

I close the lid of the crate, the hinges whining before the wooden box seals with a resounding clunk. “Enough dawdling.” I stand and brush the dust from my pants. “Let’s go to Faerie.”