Ninety percent of me had expected Dannie to move out of my reach, so I was somewhat shocked when I made contact, claws digging into her soft feathers. On a regular being, my claws would have torn through in an instant, but there was nothing regular about Dannie.

Her body felt soft, but beneath the façade of softness, the rest was stronger than any substance I’d ever come in contact with. Nothing would tear through her in this state, and I had a split-second freakout wondering how we could possibly steal the stone from her, until I remembered the fortress was designed to weaken her.

That had been the entire point of this dangerous spell in the first place. We could not get the stone from her without her energy being weakened, hence why I was acting as a distraction.

“Mera, my sweet Mera,” she trilled, her hands coming up to wrap around my wolf neck. “Why do you so recklessly throw your life away?”

I shifted back in an instant, surprising her when I chose to return to my physically weakest form. Her second surprise came when I shot a blast of power at her, and she loosened her hold enough for me to get away. I would have landed hard if Inky hadn’t caught me, the mist then raging up into a sparking barrier between us and the goddess, giving the others the last few seconds they needed to finish their cage.

On Shadow’s command, they gathered the cage in their hands, ready to attach it to the goddess. Dannie let out a loud chuckle; it was the oddest bird-human sound as she watched the golden coils swirl around them.

“You need to listen to us,” Shadow said, and for the first time, someone had all of her attention—the son she might still love deep down. “You can fix this. You can reject the stone from your energy and allow the true balance to be restored. The fae magic you use has no place in the Shadow Realm.”

She paused, tilting her head, a look of consideration creasing the corners of her eyes, obvious even on the bird face. “The power it holds is from the realm,” she chirped in her power-laden voice. “Power that was stolen from my creatures. Stolen from the mists. Power that I will be able to return when I am the only one who controls it. You must see that this is the best solution for the realm… and all of the worlds. What if another Ixana happens?”

She’d retained her logic, which hurt, because my Dannie was still in there. And the thought of trying to destroy the Dannie I’d known in Torma was breaking me.

Shadow didn’t seem to be burdened with the same worry, his previous statements nothing more than another distraction, giving Reece a chance to weave a tiny sliver of the fortress net around Dannie’s tail.