A Shade of Vampire 83 A Bender of Spirit - Bella Forrest Page 0,2

it. Just show me how to tap into my memories, and I’ll do it.”

“There’s one thing we’ve not made clear here, and I’d like to know,” Tristan said. “What will happen to Valaine once we free Unending?”

Phantom smiled. “She’ll still be there. Valaine and Unending are one and the same, in a sense. Valaine is one side of our sister. When she remembers who she truly is, chances are she’ll remember every life, every aspect of herself, including the whole that is Unending.”

“So, I’ll still be me, only… amplified?” Valaine asked.

“Or enriched, for lack of a better word,” Widow replied. “Nothing is lost. It’s just that everything is regained.”

“Okay. Let’s get cracking, then,” Valaine said.

I hadn’t seen this side of her in a while. Determination shone brightly from the blackness of her eyes. Her brows were slightly furrowed, her lips pressed into a thin line. As the wind blew over the hilltop and the trees whispered behind us, her hair danced in the breeze like threads of silk. The ghouls kept their distance from her, but I could see some of them watching. They seemed wary, their beady eyes fixed on Valaine. They feared and revered her. They could sense her true nature better than those of us among the living.

This was a complicated mess we’d gotten ourselves into, but I felt only gratitude at the sight of us all brought together this way. My team and I had struggled on our own for too long on Visio, and knowing we hadn’t been the only ones did make me feel better. The veil had been lifted, and I could see clearly now. I understood what kind of world this really was, what had been done here a long time ago, and what we could do to fix it.

As Kalon took my hand in his, offering a faint but reassuring smile, I was energized and eager to get the ball rolling. The Spirit Bender was gone, and there was nothing he could do to break us. Whatever he’d left behind had its limits, as he was no longer around to adjust and adapt, and there was only so much the Darklings could do before we freed Valaine.

Tristan

She was the Unending, and the thought scared me.

It didn’t stop me from falling even deeper in love with her, even if my reason demanded some restraint. It reinforced my initial suspicion that there was more to Valaine than met the eye. She was merely an Aeternae facet of a greater being that had been around for a very long time. I didn’t want to differentiate between them, to consider them separate entities—Unending was Valaine, and she would continue to be Valaine. At the same time, Valaine would continue to be Unending. And once her memories returned, she’d be both and more at the same time…

There was darkness inside her, yes. But there was light too, and plenty of fire that raged and yearned to fight, to push through, to taste the freedom she hadn’t had in eons. There was beauty, and there was loneliness. Unending deserved more than what she’d been dealt over the past five million years, and if this was her exit point, I planned to be right there with her.

Of course, it did reshape our dynamic. I’d thought I’d fallen for a noble and highly intelligent Aeternae, not the very first Reaper that Death had brought into existence. I’d fallen in love with the Aeternae, sure, but there was obviously more to her, and I couldn’t exactly separate Valaine from the rest. Technically speaking, I’d fallen in love with both. Too late to turn back now, I thought. This was one bell I definitely couldn’t unring.

“What does Valaine need to do in order to dig into her past lives?” I asked, looking at Night and Morning. They’d seemed to be more knowledgeable about Valaine’s peculiar condition.

“She needs to enter a trance-like state,” Morning said. “There’s no guarantee that it’ll work, but it’s something I know I’m able to help her with. Reapers store their memories deep within their souls, due to the vast number of years they live through. In order for us to retain our sanity and not just our experiences, we’ve learned to make the most of the almost infinite inner space in our souls.”

“Think of us as massive storage containers, neatly fit into this form,” Night added, pointing both thumbs at himself. “From the outside, this is all you can see. On the inside, however, the rules of