Page 142 of A Dance With Fire
Tears slipped down to her temples, staining the ground beneath her. Helplessness threatened to invade her.
Her friends were in danger and there was nothing she could do. It was everything she ever feared would happen. Everything thathadever happened, and she was too helpless, too pathetic to stop it.
Her friends were as good as dead.
Hermatewas as good as dead.
Just thinking those words made everything within her rebel. Her stomach heaved at the thought and she swallowed down the bile. Even her soul hurt thinking those words, because she didn’t want them to be true.
Not Ryker. Not kind, selfless Ryker. Who saw something in her and believed in her, coaxing it out. Perhaps it hadn’t been in the way she wanted, but it had been in the way sheneeded.He wouldn’t coddle; he was brutish, rough, growling, and he’d helped with healing her mind.
He saw her, and it was like hekneweverything she harbored inside. Whether it was because of the bond, because he was observant, or because of something else entirely.
He’d helped her heal.
The magic she used to be so afraid of, he taught her to hone it into something great, into something she never thought it could be.
She’d melted the iron bars off of a cage. She’d melted the iron monsters in the mountains in Tir na Faie.
She wasstrong.
Against all odds, against everything she ever thought she could be, the Fae had made her strong. They’d taught her to wield weapons, to fight against an opponent much bigger than herself, to use skill and magic.
They’d turned her into something she never thought she’d ever be.
They’d made her Fae.
Because shewasFae, she realized with a jolt. She always had been. The power inside her had always been there. Her potential had been there, waiting to be unlocked.
Something indescribable surged through her soul, but she knew what it was just the same. Mana awakening, demanding, and filled with realization.
It burned brightly inside her like the hottest of fires. Spread throughout her body. Mana whispered through her, a sensation of a powerful magic, stronger and fiercer than anything she ever knew.
Acceptance.
Of herself, of what she was, of what she could be.
Tears burned her eyes as everything surged through her at once.
She was enough. She was strong.
And her friends needed her.
Because she knew they wouldn’t stand against the iron monsters on their own. And maybe she was an Elemental for other reasons, but none seemed as important right then as this. As rescuing them, rescuing the males who had unlocked the potential she’d dared to bury deep inside her.
And that fear? It still lived inside her. She knew it always would; it would be there, a sliver of doubt tainting her thoughts. Yet right then, a bright light shoved it away with the knowledge that there were things she couldn’t control.
The deaths of her parents.
The death of the old woman.
Davina.
Orna.
Filomena.
Imogen.
