I gulp. Struggle to breathe. Staring at the bounty all spread out before me—a generous heap of hard-to-find, complex ingredients I’ve been searching for all of this time—the answer to all of our problems right here for the taking.

And yet, even though I know I should be happy, if not completely ecstatic, I can’t seem to stop her words from repeating in my head, can’t dampen the doubt she raised when she said: Or is it?

“Something wrong?” Her rheumy gaze moves over me. “Have you changed your mind? Is there something else you’d rather have?”

“Ever—” Damen drops to his knees right beside me, willing me to face him, to say something, to offer some sort of explanation.

But I can’t.

How can I explain it to him when I can barely make sense of it myself?

He’ll only get angry.

Won’t understand.

And, on the surface at least, I can’t say I blame him.

But this goes so much deeper than that. This harks back to the journey—my destiny—the very reason I keep reincarnating.

And suddenly I know. Suddenly, I’m thoroughly convinced that drinking from the antidote is just another distraction—it’s not the answer we’ve truly been seeking.

In the end, it won’t solve a thing.

Won’t solve the one thing that needs to be solved more than anything else.

Sure it will allow us to be together in the way that we want—but that’s all it allows. It’s like slapping a Band-Aid on a big gaping wound—it does nothing to heal the damage of what’s already been done.

It does nothing to change the fact that we’re on the wrong course.

Once we realize how we’ve cheated ourselves out of the lives we’re meant to live by choosing physical immortality over the immortality of our souls—the antidote is no longer the issue.

If Damen and I are truly going to be together then we’ll have to reach far, far deeper than that. We’ll have to admit that our problems didn’t start the day Roman tricked me—they started several centuries earlier when Alrik couldn’t bear to lose Adelina—then culminated when he reincarnated as Damen, perfected the elixir, and changed the course of our souls forever.

If Damen and I are truly going to be together then we’ll have to release ourselves from that path, we’ll have to reverse the choices he made in the past, we’ll have to pay off that huge karmic debt by making this journey to the Tree of Life, obtaining its fruit, and offering all the others a chance to release themselves too.

Only then will we be free to move on.

Only then will we get our true happily ever after.

Otherwise, I’ve no doubt another glaring obstacle will just find a way to present itself, and on it will go, for evermore.

I take a deep breath, but find I don’t really need it. It’s like I can feel that purple glow radiating inside me once again. I’ve never felt more sure of myself.

“There is something else I’d rather have.” My eyes meet Lotus’s, the two of us holding the look for what feels like a very long time. “I want to fulfill my destiny. I want to complete my journey,” I say, my voice solid, steady, more certain than ever. “I want to complete the task I was born to do.”

I can hear Damen beside me, his sudden intake of breath, and I know without looking that it’s partly due to my words, and partly due to the fact that the ingredients have now disappeared.

But I don’t look. For the moment anyway, my gaze stays on Lotus. Seeing her standing before me, granting me a curt nod along with a slowly curving smile when she says, “As you wish.”

Chapter twenty-seven

Long after Lotus has left we remain quiet. Damen lost in thoughts of outrage and blame, while I prepare for the moment when I’ll have to explain.

The silence broken when he looks at me and says, “Ever, how could you?” Four simple words that cut to the bone, but then, they were meant to. He shakes his head, squints, tries to make sense of it. “How could you do that?” he adds. “How could you just throw it all away? Seriously. You’re going to have to explain it to me because it just doesn’t make any sense. All this time, you’ve been blaming yourself for our inability to be together. All this time you’ve been blaming yourself for Roman’s tricking you. Even after I explained, even after I told you that by making me drink you actually ended up saving my life and sparing my soul from getting trapped in the Shadowland, you were still convinced you were at fault, to the point where your sole focus was reserved for obtaining the antidote. So desperate to get your hands on it you were willing to delve into things that put you at great risk. And now, now that you finally succeed in getting the one thing you’ve been searching for all of this time—you choose to throw it all away so you can go on some crazy old lady’s journey to look for some tree that, I’m sorry to say, does not exist!” He looks at me, hands flexing by his sides, gaze filled with all the words he held back. “And so, what I need from you now, what I need from you more than anything, is to answer the why. Why would you do that? What could you possibly have been thinking?”

I stare at my feet, allowing his words to flow through me, to loop around in my brain, to repeat over and over again, but even though I heard the question, even though I know he waits for an answer, I’m still stuck on the phrase: Some tree.

He called it some tree.

He questioned its very existence.

And I’m amazed he can’t see it. Amazed he can’t understand that it’s the tree, not the antidote that offers real and lasting salvation.