Chapter 1: Feyre

The cabin was howling. So were the mountains around us.

I jolted awake. My eyes darted instinctively to the right, to where Rhys slept beside me and found nothing but a pulsing, writhing darkness in his place. I knew that darkness all too well. This was the third night we'd spent together in the cabin since the barge party and Nesta's disastrous outburst that had left us both reeling…both sinking back into a battle with our own twisted memories.

"Rhys," I called out, moving toward him into the churning mass of inky blackness.

No response but the groaning of the wood all around us. I extended my hand, searching for him, running gentle claws down that adamant wall in his mind as I did so. I was met with icy resistance from both angles—cold skin drawn over tense muscle as my fingers found him in the dark; frozen terror down the bond, and such hopelessness that I had to stifle a sob. His wings, usually a force to be reckoned with, were nowhere to be found, but his hands ended in long black talons, and I narrowly avoided the claws at the end of each one as he thrashed away from my touch.

You're dreaming, Rhys. I whispered to him down that thread of connection, sending waves of my own calming darkness to accompany the words.

We're safe. We're alive. We're together.

Come back to me, Rhysand. Come back to me.

Words that were familiar by now. Words that we'd used before to banish the nightmares that had haunted us off and on again since the king of Hyburn had met his end on that fated hill. Since Rhys had met his end as well.

I curled toward the taut, strained muscles of his back, and stroked the lines of the tattoos down his shoulders, repeating those words over and over down the bond, making it a chant…a refrain sung against his cold neck. His power swirled and raged around us as I clung to him, but it seemed to recognize my touch…my power in play with his, and so I lay with him, embracing his darkness and listening to the mountain moan outside.

Slowly, the words seemed to penetrate the barrier of midnight around us. Slowly, I began to feel heat spread into those finely muscled shoulders once again—to see the tension in his arms slacken, allowing me to slip my own arms past them and around him. I held him until the tendrils of darkness began to shiver and fall away in rivulets, but it wasn't until I felt the walls around his mental shield yield for me that I allowed myself a sigh of relief.

"Feyre?" My name spoken like a charm used to bring him into the awakened world.

"I'm right here."

He trembled as he let my words wash away the last of the shadows that had gathered around him. I kissed his neck gently, watching his talons fade back into fingers. Finally, he turned to face me, and his wings appeared behind him again, full and marvelous in the moonlight.

"Thank you," he said as the house began to settle around us again. "Was it bad?"

"Not too bad," I lied. An avalanche rumbled its last in the distance and Rhys raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

I shrugged. "At least you didn't bring the cabin down around us."

"Never!" A tenuous laugh. "Cassian and Az would never forgive me if they had to build it a third time. They did nothing but swap insults and complain the entire time they were helping with the first rebuild."

"Didn't Mor and Amren help?" I remembered wondering if this had been the favorite retreat that the two inner circle females had burnt down during a particularly infamous argument. It seemed my suspicions had been confirmed.

"Oh, they did more than help," he assured me, the glint slowly returning to his violet eyes as the nightmare faded. "After Mor goaded Amren into burning it to the ground, there was no way they were getting out of doing most of the hard labor. But they were both so ashamed of what they'd done in the first place that they had both chosen wisely to suffer in silence."

I huffed a laugh, trying to imagine Mor and Amren silently hauling the size logs that had been used to make the great room of the cabin up the side of the mountain under their High Lord's furious supervision.

Rhys's smile faded though, as he looked out toward the night sky and lapsed into a contemplative silence. Reluctance flowed down the bond as that silence grew, and I knew what came next. I sighed, knowing that the impending conversation probably should have happened that first night, when the nightmares had driven us from our new home and into the mountains. Still, I lay motionless, dreading it.

"She needs help, Feyre."

Nesta.

I shivered. I was not ready for this.

I was not ready to admit that it had been my own well-intentioned meddling between Nesta and Amren that had caused the rift between them on the barge at the end-of-summer party we'd hosted three nights ago. Not ready to remember how my sister, without even the slightest effort…with nothing more than my own hand on her shoulder…had rendered me completely defenseless. Not ready to think about how she'd done the same to Rhys—the most powerful High Lord in Prythian's history—when he'd come to my aid and had grasped her by the arm to separate us. And I was certainly not ready to relive the visions that I had seen…felt…lived in the short moments that my hand had been in contact with Nesta's shoulder before she'd retreated to the exit.

"I know," I agreed, shaking off the memory.

"What she showed me…what she has in her head…" He shuddered and his power flowed around us like a dark current. "She wasn't even aware of the visions that she was passing to us. I'm not even sure that she was sober enough to remember anything at all."

I swallowed hard, determined not to ask, but, "What…what did she show you?"

Rhys remained unmoving, staring toward the window. For a moment, I thought that he wouldn't answer—wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer he would give, but then his brow creased. Darkness tangled in his wings, and he looked at me, eyes deathly somber.

"She showed me your death," he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. "It was…through your eyes. I felt you. I was you, there under the mountain. Silent and burning as your arms…your legs…your spine was shattered. I felt every tear of your flesh…every crack of your bones."

My skin went clammy and my heart threatened to leap from my chest at the memory, but I remained silent.

"More than your pain, I felt…your mortality. The inevitability of the death that was coming for you. The certainty that your human body would never heal from what she had done. Your terror…and your acceptance. You…you welcomed it."

I felt his reverence, and his eyes filled with it. But it was gone too soon, replaced by something dark…too close to rage.

"I felt your neck break."

And that was all I could take.

"Stop, please," I whispered. I couldn't hear anymore. Couldn't live it again…had already relived it enough in my own nightmares. I had not forgotten a minute of it. Would never forget, and now, neither would Rhys.

Thanks to Nesta and whatever gods forsaken power she had taken from the Cauldron.

"I'm sorry," he said, pulling me closer. "That level of detail was…unnecessary."

"Don't be," I replied. "I'm not traumatized. I'm angry."

Rhys had confessed to me once before that he'd felt me die. Through the bargain. Through the bond, but never from inside my mind. We had shared so many experiences that way…through the most intimate connection provided us by our Daemati powers, but that was an experience that he had never asked for. One that I would never share with him…and Nesta had gone through every one of his defenses and had passed on my death straight through my eyes. She'd done it without the slightest effort…without even knowing that she was doing it. In fact, I was fairly certain that she still had no idea why we had pulled away from her so violently…had disappeared so suddenly, leaving her to deal with her own cold anger. The terror and revulsion that had been burning up and down the bond from both ends was something that Rhys and I had both barely managed to conceal as Nesta had jerked out of our reach and made her way dejectedly toward the exit. I thought of the horror…the guilt in Rhys's eyes at the moment that Nesta had broken contact, and it was not disgust that flowed into me at the memory, but fury.

She'd given Rhys my death. My death!

"And she gave you mine," he said.

I cringed. "How did you know?"

"Your shields went down the second you touched her. I saw every image she passed on to you. I don't know how she was able to come by those memories…if the Cauldron is somehow able to pass on those experiences to her still, but her account was quite…accurate."

"Then you knew you would die from the moment you suggested I use your power! That's why your shields were up. It wasn't because of the battle! It was because you didn't want me to know what it was going to cost you!"

His lips curved into a guilty grin and he gave a shrug of dismissal that would have infuriated me if my left arm hadn't been draped across his bare chest, the swirls and whorls of deepest black on that arm extending up toward my shoulder announcing our bargain to the world. More than a bargain. A promise that he could never sacrifice himself without my knowledge again.

We go together.

"If there had been any other way to reforge the Cauldron…"'

"You probably would have found a way to sacrifice yourself anyway," I finished for him rather more curtly than I had intended.

Rhys's knowing smile did not reach his eyes as he pulled me closer to him. We lay in silence for a moment, listening to the mountain.

"She's dangerous, Feyre," he whispered.

"I know," I replied. "But I was dangerous once too."

It was a weak defense, but the only response I could come up with as the memories of both of our deaths lingered so close in the air around us. I had been dangerous…and wildly out of control of powers I'd been afraid to even admit to. It had been Rhys who had forced me to acknowledge those powers—to hone them day after day until I was no longer a chaotic mess of magic. Until I had become something more refined. It was only because of Rhys…his patience, his perseverance, that I had become the being that I was today. Which was…what was I now?

"You're lethal beyond measure," Rhys responded with a dark grin. A twist of his power crept into those words—into his embrace. "Beautiful. Frightening. And absolutely lethal."

My mate. My equal. I grinned back, heat spiraling toward my core in spite of the subject of conversation.

But his lips tightened. "Her power is Cauldron made. No one knows how much she took from it in her fury. It may very well be greater than mine."

I shuddered. I'd seen Rhys mist hundreds in one breath…steal the light from entire cities. He had shattered minds without effort and had reforged the cauldron with his powers. And those powers…the greatest in living memory, were possibly surpassed by Nesta's. My silent, angry sister, who had been dangerous as a 21 year old human with no training, no money, and no influence. I did not want to imagine how deadly she could be with the full force of immortality behind her. With the blade of her own mysterious powers screaming to be wielded.

"What can we do?" I asked. "She won't open up to anyone. We don't even really know what happened to her."

"We know that she was kidnapped," Rhys began. "We know that her choices were taken away, and her humanity was torn from her. She was forced into power that she most certainly did not want and now has to adapt to an immortal body that she no longer recognizes as her own."

I sighed miserably. "Do you think it's even possible to come back from that?"

Rage in those bright violet eyes. "You came back from that."

"You brought me back from that," I corrected, thinking of his endless compassion as I struggled to find myself in the darkness. Thinking of Mor's bottomless well of strength and sunshine, Cassian's merciless effort to find the warrior he knew had been inside me…Azriel's patient tutelage…Amren's omniscient acceptance. "You all brought me back from that."

Rhys's arms tightened around me. "We'll call it a group effort," he sighed.

It was true. Under the tutelage of every inner circle member, my powers had become something immense and beautiful, each kernel given me by the seven High Lords of Prythian flowering into a glorious gift that I could now wield without fear. All of my friends—my family—had worked so hard, dedicated so much time only to teaching me…to bringing me back from the brink of complete oblivion.

But Nesta had no one. She had pushed me away since before I could remember. After the war, she had pushed away even Elain and Amren. She had no one…no one to break through those iron walls. No one with the strength and patience to match her blow for blow as she clawed her way out of her own nightmares.

"Does she?" Rhys asked. "Have no one?"

For a moment, I was taken aback...and then my heart dropped into my stomach.

Cassian.

Nesta had Cassian. She'd had him since the moment her mortal eyes had met his powerful immortal ones in cold challenge.

I didn't need to speak for Rhys to understand the reasons why my skin went cold at the thought of Cassian standing alone against the storm of fury and hate that Nesta barely kept in check. Rhys certainly didn't need to voice his turmoil. It gathered around him in angry swirls as if called from the corners at last. I thought guiltily of the lengths that Rhys has gone to for me…the risks he had taken to bring me out of the mountain—to bring me back from my own oblivion. To urge me, teach me, watch me struggle every moment—all of it while feeling the burning rage and hate that he was convinced I had harbored in my heart for him. Rage that had turned out to be so fleeting when it all played out…and nothing at all compared to the inferno inside Nesta. If Cassian was that person for her…

"Then Gods help him," Rhys finished.

"I've been trying to get through to her since just after the war, and I've gotten nowhere. She hasn't even spoken to Cassian in months. How would he be able to help her if she'd sooner rip him apart than let him through her front door?"

"He won't be able to help her," Rhys replied. "Not as long as she can hide in that apartment and deny what she is, or stifle it with wine and sex."

I scowled at the cunning look painted across his face. He had a plan. He'd been planning this whole confrontation!

"What are you proposing?" I asked ominously.

"An intervention," he answered. "A small one. Among friends."

"Nesta doesn't have friends," I countered. "She's gone out of her way to eliminate friends from her life."

"She has Elain," Rhys shifted positions anxiously, avoiding my eyes. "And Amren. And you, even if she doesn't wish to acknowledge that."

I rolled my eyes dubiously. "If me, Amren and Elain are all you have to offer, she won't even bother to show up."

"She will if I send Cassian."

I opened my mouth to protest…closed it again. Nesta would. Cassian, it seemed, was Nesta's weakness. She had never turned down an invitation from him. She would hem and haw and make every excuse not to go, but in the end, if Cassian asked, she would come. I knew this. Rhys knew this, but I was almost certain that Nesta herself did not realize it.

"Fine, then she'd show up," I admitted crisply. "And leave as soon as she realized what was happening, probably showing anyone else who touched her some version of their death, and then hole up in her apartment with a year supply of wine and never answer the door again."

That guilty look again. "Not if the apartment was no longer there for her to retreat to."

I froze. What he was suggesting…

Nesta was struggling—rightfully so—and certainly not making the best choices in her path to recovery, but they were her choices. And Rhys…Rhys…was suggesting taking that away from her.

"No," I said coldly.

"Feyre, she isn't coping. She isn't recovering. She is sinking further into a hole that she will not be able to dig out of, and we are enabling her by providing the funds for her to do so."

"She's fighting! She just needs more time to realize that she—"

"You've given her months, Feyre," Rhys insisted. His voice was too calm…too even. My own rising temper reacted in kind.

"That's right! Months! Only months!" I was almost yelling now, and I realized I had pulled away from him and was now perched almost defensively on the edge of the bed. "How long do you think it should take to recover from being abducted, assaulted, and turned into something you've been taught to hate your entire life? What timeline would suit you better?"

The insult of what I'd said shone brightly in Rhys's eyes, but he remained silent, no doubt remembering the nightmare of his own past that had triggered this conversation in the first place. He sank back onto the bed, his wings pulled in tight, frustration marring his perfect features…and something else. Memory, perhaps? He looked exhausted. My anger drained from me and I climbed back onto the bed, slipping naturally into his arms, willing this argument to be over…at least paused until we could approach it tomorrow having slept enough to think straight.

His arms wrapped instinctively around me, and his next words were soft and loving.

"Do you remember what I told you about our power? About the Siphons that most Illyrians need to release it? About what happens to it without release?"

I remembered.

Insane, he had said. Actually insane.

Rhys looked down at me. "Those first few weeks after I'd called in our bargain were torture in more ways than you can imagine. I would lie awake after sending you back to your life with Tamlin, feeling the pieces of you fall away again little by little…and sensing that power growing inside you. I could feel it through the bond, writhing and churning and…angry inside of you. I knew what it was, and I knew you had no idea what it could do to you if you kept it locked inside, and that you hated me so deeply that there was no way I would be able to convince you to work with me directly to hone it.

"And so I sent you back, knowing that the one week I had with you would not be enough time to release the amount of power you needed to compensate. And each day that passed, I would wonder if this was the week that Beron's fire gift finally burned through your sanity and you took out the entire Spring Court in one final glorious inferno."

I swallowed, suddenly unable to look away. I hadn't known.

Rhys had sent me back not only knowing that I would run straight into the arms of another male, but also seeing through our bargain…our bond, that my powers had already begun to manifest themselves without my knowledge…without my control. He'd sent me back not knowing if it was the last time he would ever see me alive again. Sane again. And every second he'd had with me was an effort on his part to get me to acknowledge them. Every moment was spent encouraging me to use them, even when I'd been too tired and depressed to move. Not for his own benefit, as I'd believed from the beginning, but because he'd loved me. Because he was my mate.

And Nesta was my sister. Stuck in the same downward spiral. Hating me just as much as I had once hated Rhys. Unable to see past her own pain. Unwilling to see her own powers growing. Powers that could possibly rival Rhys's. Dangerous.

So dangerous and explosive.

Rhys nodded gravely, reading my thoughts as I left them wide open to him.

"After you…died. After you became Fae, you would have chosen death before acknowledging that a piece of me burned inside you. That you'd received a piece of everyone who had watched you suffer under that mountain. The Spring Court had become your security…your solace, and you never would have chosen to defy Tamlin and embrace the powers inside you that came from your enemies. And so I took that choice away from you. To keep you alive. To keep you sane, even if it meant that I had to watch how much it hurt you to be in this place against your will, I took away your choice."

Rhys looked away. His eyes focused on the distant wall. "It was not my best moment."

"It wasn't mine either," I admitted hoarsely.

But his point had been made. I'd been dying in Tamlin's manor, I could not deny that. Rhys had seen that, and he had practically begged me to fight back. To cling to anything that could have kept me in the world of the living for the three weeks that I was not in his care…and I had done absolutely nothing but sink further into my own abyss. I shuddered, not wanting to imagine the state I would have been in if Rhys had left me to make my own choices at that time.

I recalled seeing Nesta on the barge for the first time in over two months. How gaunt she had been…how pale and weak in spite of the angry challenge that never faded from her eyes. Had she been battling her own constant nightmares? Had our deaths been playing over and over inside her mind just like the deaths of those two innocent fairies had played in mine? She would never admit to that, even if it were true…would never trust herself enough to face that part of her. Not while there was still the choice to suffocate it in males and stale wine.

Not while there was a choice.

I sighed miserably.

"Give me one more month," I pleaded. Rhys's eyes narrowed in impending protest as I continued. "Give me the chance to reason with her. Let me tell her what happened to me after…after I died. Let me show her what I did to myself. What she's doing to herself. If she'll let me share those things…"

"Then she'll have them in her arsenal to use against you whenever she desires." Frustration burned in those violet eyes as they met mine.

She would. But…

"She deserves the opportunity to choose a different path before that choice is taken away from her," I insisted. I grabbed his hand. "You gave that chance to me."

He had…several times. And every time, I'd chosen Tamlin. I hoped he wouldn't remember that.

Rhys's brow furrowed. "One month," he replied reluctantly, and his hand tightened around mine. "She deserves the choice. For what she did on that battlefield and for what she had to endure inside the Cauldron, she deserves to choose her own path forward. But I can no longer continue to enable the path that she is on past that deadline. Feyre, if she doesn't…"

"One month," I repeated in a tone that I hoped conveyed all of my desire to put an end to this conversation. One month to regain my sister's trust, convince her to speak to me again, get her to listen as I relayed to her everything that I'd spent the last year trying to forget, convince her that she's headed down the same path, and hope that she does the exact opposite of what I did and chooses recovery instead of having it forced on her…nothing to it.

"No problem at all." His smile was rueful as he pulled me into his arms again, wings tucked in comfortably behind him as we settled into the enormous bed. "Now can we please get some sleep? It's not often that we have the mountains entirely to ourselves, and you have no idea what kind of a day I had planned for us tomorrow."

An unabashed series of images flashed down the bond giving me a pretty good idea of just what would be on the itinerary when the sun rose. It seems that I would indeed need all the energy I could get. My toes curled as Rhys's lips grazed my neck, and all thoughts of Nesta vanished completely from my mind.