Page 100 of Truthfinder’s Promise

“I do.” Meredith understood how easily she might have become someone like her. Someone twisted by pain and helplessness, who finally found a way out and didn’t care who paid the cost of that freedom, so long as it wasn’t her. “I don’t blame you for your origins. But I blame you for them.” She gestured to the Shifters. “And for everyone like them. And I will tell you the truth in your heart, and give it to you. You want this to be over. You’ve wanted it all to be over for a long time now, but you didn’t know how to let go.”

The feelings were there, burning in Analisa’s eyes. The need to be done, and the opposite need to cling to life. Meredith saw the truth she’d whispered to Jensen on that first night now written in Analisa’s soul: All I know is we have to keep going…Because otherwise, what the fuck was it all for?

Analisa didn’t know how to stop. Meredith’s power reached for the remaining thralls, and they dropped. These were her oldest, and they spun to ash before they even hit the ground. Meredith looked at Jensen. “Maybe she doesn’t deserve it, but make it quick. For me.”

She turned away as the Shifters shot forward, burying Analisa beneath a mound of furry bodies. She reached for the circlet, but as her fingers brushed the cool metal she couldn’t bring herself to take it off. Not yet.

The world was so wondrous through its gaze. Hypnotic. Here was every truth she’d ever wanted. Physical, objective truths that weren’t mutable based on what people believed. She just wanted to see a little more, to know a little more.

Jensen snapped Analisa’s neck in one powerful bite. He would never excuse the things she had done, what she had become, but he understood why Meredith had asked what she had of him. And he’d seen too much of pain to want more of it, to think that causing it in kind could do anything but darken the stains on a person’s soul.

He left the Shifters to vent their own pain and fury on a dead woman, and searched for Meredith. She stood by the front door, her hands clutching the circlet, but she didn’t lift it off. A faraway light burned in her eyes. With the hem of her dress coated in blood and the circlet on her head blazing power, she looked like some ancient goddess come to dispense vengeance.

She was beautiful, as a goddess. But he thought she was more beautiful as just Meredith.

Take it off, darlin’.

But her hands fell to her sides, empty. She turned and walked out. He tore after her. If she noticed when he reached her side, she gave no indication.

Outside, the conflict was winding down. The lawn to his left was filled with handcuffed men and women, and he scented the same magic on the metal restraints that had kept Meredith from accessing her Aspect inside the house.

She paused, turning in a slow circle and froze, her gaze fixed on a figure coming slowly but determinedly toward them.

Julian.

The bastard had survived his trip off the balcony, then. He had a hitch in his step and his right arm hung at an awkward angle.

Jensen’s hackles rose. He stepped forward, growling, and found himself seized in that same fist of power that had held him the night Julian had taken him.

Meredith shook her head. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Julian, your holds have a weak spot.” Her Aspect wrapped around Jensen. Pressure built, her power struggling against Julian, and then the hold on Jensen vanished. He gathered himself to leap but Meredith said, “He’s mine.”

Power snaked from her like a whip and coiled around Julian. He jerked, his eyes bulging. Meredith spoke a single word. “Confess.”

Her voice rolled like thunder, magic booming with the word, and Julian began to speak. The words tumbled out of his mouth one atop the other, as if he couldn’t get them out fast enough, like he was trying to excise some horror from deep within him. But the more he spoke, the more panicked he became, babbling faster and faster, his face twisted in a rictus mask of pain. The things he said made Jensen’s stomach turn.

Aspect poured from Meredith, like an endless fountain seeking to flood the world. And it did. As it brushed over Jensen, he found himself thinking on things he did his best not to. Defining moments in his life, times when he’d made choices that had been difficult to live with. Times when he’d made the wrong choices. The hard moments that had made him who he was.

Guilt rose up, threatening to crush him. He shook his head, growling. That wasn’t all he was—the failures, the wrongs. He was his successes, too. He was the good choices, and the striving to be better than he was. He was the desire to help rather than hurt, to protect but not smother.

He was both sides of himself, and he could accept that.

The magic let him go and he inhaled sharply. Freed from his internal struggle, he found the night alive with voices. With confession. The full assault of Meredith’s power had struck Julian, but what he couldn’t absorb had filtered out, affecting everyone else. And Meredith’s power wasn’t stopping.

He reached beyond the exhaustion of the battle and the two shifts he’d already done, and forced himself to change. Human again, he struggled past the lethargy weighing him down—he’d done too much, and his body badly wanted to shut him down so it could recover.

“Meredith? Darlin’ you need to stop.”

She blinked. The Aspect spilling from her ebbed but didn’t stop. Not fully.

The circlet. That was where the problem lay. He just needed to rip it off her head and everything would be fine.

He reached for it. A hand grabbed him. He ripped his arm free, swung on instinct, and stopped just shy of punching Jace. It was a damn good thing he’d recognized him in time to pull the punch, because while his fist might have stopped five inches from Jace’s face, that was only one inch from the wall of solid ice that had sprung up between them.

Hitting that would have hurt like a bitch. He dropped his hand and the ice wall melted into water that streamed off to splash on the ground a few feet away.

“She has to take the circlet off,” Jace said.

“What do you think I was going for when you came up?”