“My library.” I gasped, and then I was sobbing, my hands coming up to cover my eyes as I tried to suck in deep breaths. When I looked up to Gaster, his expression was as broken as I felt. “I missed you,” I rasped. “I forgot you.”

He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around me, holding on with about ten times the strength you’d expect him to have. “I missed you too, Mera. But we’ll figure out how to fix it.”

The memories continued to return, mostly in jagged images, and I had to work through them slowly because the rush was overwhelming.

“We were in the Shadow Realm,” I murmured, “and we’d just defeated Ixana, Shadow’s mate, who was the one to start the entire series of events two thousand years ago…” My words died off as I found the final key to my story. The final betrayer.

“It was Dannie,” I whispered. “Dannie is Shadow’s mom, and a goddess born of the Nexus. She tried to save us. She ate a powerful stone from Faerie so that Ixana couldn’t use it, but the power corrupted her. Changed her. It turned her into this phoenix-goddess hybrid obsessed with keeping the balance. To her, that meant I needed to go back to the shifters and be the alpha-mate.”

The more I spoke about it, the clearer the memories grew. I quickly repeated everything to Sam so she was following along as well.

“A goddess,” she gasped. “A goddess who’ll still be determined to keep this balance? What are we going to do?”

I knew what I needed to do. What I needed, period. My pack. My real one.

The flutter in my chest burst to life, but this time, there was no fear or confusion that followed. Dr. Google had been wrong; it was no heart attack. I was feeling my bond with Angel. And the itching on my palm in the exact same spot I used to have a purplish mark, was for Midnight, my bonded mist. I’d been feeling my pack, who were missing out there somewhere in the system of worlds.

“Where’re Shadow, Angel, Simone, and Midnight?” I asked in a rush. Simone had been in the library, so her memory had likely been spared, but the rest of them had been in the Shadow Realm with me. I scrambled to my feet. “Gaster, please, you have to tell me where they are.”

He opened his hands, his face wreathed in devastation. “The only one whose whereabouts I know for sure is Inky. He’s clearly been guarding that hallway from Earth to the Shadow Realm the entire time.”

Like he’d called him, the mist zoomed down, and this time, when I saw him, the feeling of being followed by an ominous cloud of scary was gone. It was my Inky.