He slaps a hand over my throat, tries to squeeze his fingers around it, but doesn’t get very far before he lets go and approaches the ledge.
“The role you played was minor at best,” Leandro yells. “Now go ahead and do it. Kill the girl, and be done with it!”
Leandro continues to berate him, as Cade paces precariously close to the edge. Twitching and mumbling to himself as I scramble to my feet, retrieve my gun, and take aim.
Just about to shoot when Cade whirls on me and says, “Dammit, Seeker, put that thing down! Do not make me choose!”
Choose?
I hold my breath in my cheeks, delaying the shot. So caught off guard by the words, I’m not sure how to react.
Did he really mean choose between Leandro and me?
“Clock’s ticking, Cade—do it already!” his father shouts, as Cade seems to visibly crumple before me. His shoulders sagging, his head bent, gaze downcast. He digs his knuckles into his eyes. Pinches hard at his cheeks. All the while mumbling a string of unintelligible words under his breath. Making him appear deranged and distorted, like a person gone completely unhinged.
“What the hell have you done to me?” His eyes are shadowed and bloodshot as he glares at me accusingly.
And suddenly, with that one simple question, it all falls into place.
The reflection in his eyes.
His reluctance to kill me.
It all makes sense.
And it proves Dace was right! There’s only one force more powerful than evil—love.
Cade is a perfect example of that.
He’s changed by love. It’s the love in his heart that won’t allow him to kill me.
“I haven’t done anything. You brought this on yourself,” I say, reminded of something Phyre said the day we discovered her in possession of Dace’s soul. When she saw the piece of darkness in Dace, and wondered if Cade contained a piece of his light.
At the time, I was too worried about saving Dace’s soul to pay much notice to her philosophical musings, but now I realize her suspicions were right.
“When you fed off the love Dace and I shared by using it to strengthen yourself, what you failed to understand is that darkness cannot exist in the same space as light. The love you ingested obliterated your darkness, it changed you from the inside.”
A look of pure horror crosses his face, but little does he know, that’s only part of the story. What I fail to voice is my suspicion that when Dace made the soul jump into Cade to steal a chunk of his darkness, he left behind a piece of his light.
Just like the dream, their connection is no longer relegated to the mystical, it’s veered into the physical.
Part light, part dark.
The yin and the yang.
Connected.
Bound.
Each containing a piece of the other.
Leandro continues to rage from across the gorge, which only se
rves to confuse Cade more.
“Don’t listen to him.” I raise my voice in an effort to drown out Leandro’s. “There’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, it’s pretty miraculous if you think about it. You’re getting a second chance to do the right thing and redeem yourself. Don’t fight it, Cade. Don’t fight me . . .” I lower the blowgun to my side and approach him slowly. He’s so unstable there’s no telling how he’ll react.
“Back off, Seeker!” He swerves out of my reach and looks across the canyon with a face full of longing. “And stop looking at me!”