Shadow ran his hands across my arms, his touch soothing. “We’ll figure out where they are,” he told me. “Neither is easy to kill, and that must mean they’re out there, unable to return for some reason.”

That didn’t sit right with me. What in the worlds could be strong enough to stop either of them from returning to the library? I had a bad feeling that this was still to do with Dannie, and I wasn’t sure we were ready to take her on yet.

For my bonded friends, though, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

27

The food showed up soon after, and even with everything on the platter being my favorite—speaking love without the words was apparently Shadow’s specialty—I couldn’t enjoy it like I normally would.

None of us enjoyed it; instead, we were a sober bunch of beings as we attempted to concoct a plan to beat an unstable goddess.

“Would the physical stone be gone now?” Sam asked after we’d thrown questions around for an hour or so. “Absorbed into her energy completely?”

Len shook his head. “Absolutely no chance. It’ll have settled inside, finding and forming its own base within Dannie’s energy, but it’s still whole and complete.”

“Could we cut it from her?” I asked. “Like… open heart surgery, but the god version.”

The fae took a beat to consider this because clearly that very “human” way of thinking had not been forefront in his mind. “I guess, hypothetically speaking, if we could capture Dannie and subdue her energy long enough to pierce her skin… Yeah, probably not.”

I glared at him. “Not helpful. There must be a way to remove the stone. How do you bond them to your family? Or is it to a single fae? I’m assuming not in the same manner Dannie used.”

“Absolutely not,” he said in a hard voice. “It’s forbidden to take one into your energy as she did. It more often than not ends in death through an overload of power. If any try it and succeed, the family come together to kill them.”

“Why aren’t they coming together to kill Dannie then?” I pressed quickly, wondering if we’d overlooked a powerful ally in this war.

Len shook his head. “Fae deal with Faerie business. The stone is now the Shadow Realm’s problem, and in that regard, they’ll have nothing to do with it.”

“It’s everyone’s damn problem,” I replied with a huff. It was the end of the worlds. Plural.