Chapter Twenty-Seven

Kalona

Kalona couldn't tell how long he'd been in Nyx's realm.

At first it'd been such a jolt to be wrenched from his body by the Darkness Neferet harnessed that, physically and spiritually, he'd been unaware of anything except the awe and fear of having returned to Her realm.

He hadn't forgotten the beauty of the place - the pure wonder of the Otherworld and the magic it held for him. Especially for him.

He'd been different when he'd belonged there.

He'd been a force for Light, protecting Nyx against anything Darkness could conjure to attempt to sway the balance of the world toward the evil and pain and selfishness and despair on which it thrived.

For centuries uncountable, Kalona had protected his Goddess against everything except himself.

Ironic that it had been love that Darkness had used to bring him down.

Still more ironic that, after he'd fallen, Light had also used love to entrap him.

He wondered briefly if love could possibly do anything worse to him than it already had. Was he even capable of it anymore?

He didn't love Neferet. He'd used her to free himself of the earth's imprisonment, and then, in turn, she'd used him for her own means.

Did he love Zoey?

He didn't want to be the cause of her destruction, but guilt wasn't love. Regret wasn't love, either. They also weren't strong enough emotions to make him want to sacrifice the freedom of his body to save her.

Moving through the Goddess's realm, the fallen immortal had put all questions of love and its painful trappings from his mind and focused on the task at hand.

The first step was to find Zoey.

The second was to be certain she could not return to the earthly realm, so that he could reclaim his body and fulfill the oath he'd sworn to Neferet.

Finding Zoey hadn't been difficult. He'd only had to concentrate his will on her, and his spirit had ridden the tide of Darkness directly to her - to the fragmented pieces of her soul.

The human boy he'd killed was there with her, or rather he was with the part of her that was most purely Zoey in this lifetime.

It was odd to see him comforting her - reassuring her - and then, somehow, instinctively, guiding her to the Goddess's sacred grove. A place so purely made of Nyx's essence that, as long as the balance of Light and Dark remained in place in the world, no evil could ever enter it.

Kalona remembered the grove well. It was within it that he had first realized his love for Nyx. In that terrible time before he chose to fall from Her, it was the only place he could go to find even a small measure of peace.

He'd tried to enter again. To follow Zoey and Heath and be finished with this burden Neferet's machinations had laid upon him, but Kalona had been unable to breach the barrier of the sacred grove.

The attempt had left him weak and breathless, reminding him all too well of the way he felt whenever he was entrapped by the earth.

This time it was the peace and magic of the Goddess's earth that had rejected him, and not imprisoned him.

He had been too much a part of Darkness for Nyx's grove to accept him.

Kalona half-expected Nyx to appear before him at any moment - accuse him of being the interloper he so obviously was - and, again, cast him from her realm.

But the Goddess did not appear. It seemed Neferet was correct. Had it been his body and soul that Nyx had banished, Erebus himself would have met him to do his Goddess's bidding and, with the all the powers of a pine consort, driven his spirit from the Other-world.

So Kalona was allowed this freedom, this Goddess-be-damned choice to return and glimpse what he most desired but could never have.

Anger, familiar and safe, boiled within the immortal.

He stalked Zoey and the boy. It didn't take Kalona long to realize that by simply forcing them to stay within the grove, he would eventually accomplish his task.

Zoey was fading away from herself. She was becoming an unresting Caoinic Shi', and as such, she would never return to her body.

The thought of Zoey turning into a being not living and not dead, eternally unable to rest, gave Kalona a curiously painful feeling.

Feeling again! Would he ever be rid of it? Yes. There must be a way. Perhaps Neferet had been right.

Perhaps it would be as easy as ridding himself of Zoey. Then he would be free of the guilt and desire and loss she evoked in him.

Even as the thought came to him, Kalona knew he would not be free of her if he left her here to become a wraith, a mere shade of herself. The knowledge of that would haunt him for eternity.

Kalona reconsidered as, from outside the grove, he watched Heath by Zoey's side, attempting to comfort her when comfort was impossible.