Read Online Infinity by Andria Buchanan - Free Book Online

surrender that doesn’t involve me taking over my aunt’s throne and banishing her to the Bleak.”
    “Allie—”
    “No!” I threw my hands up between us. “No! I’m doing this. I’m ending this now.”
    “But—”
    “I’m ending this because I’m sick of it, of her. I’m fed up. Done with spending my nights pacing the floors, waiting to hear that you died. That Mercedes was killed or you were attacked and I was never going to see one of you again. I am done being afraid of losing the only people I have left. So I’m taking my army across that border, and I’m going to let my aunt feel what it’s like, the fear and the worry of knowing your people are under attack. The dread that comes from waiting to hear that the people you love are never coming home to you.
    “I’m going to surround the Palace of Night, and when it finally falls, I’m going to take her crown, and I’m going to drag her to the top of the tallest tower and make her watch as her lands burn . Then I’m going to lock her in the nothingness between worlds and watch as Kuolema and the rest of the Dragons of the Bleak rip the flesh from her bones.” I paused for a beat. “You want to know something else?”
    “What?” His voice was deep, and he flicked his eyes up to stare at me, not bothering to hide his sadness.
    “I’m going to enjoy every single second of it.”

Chapter Six
    Later that night, long after an almost silent dinner where we all barely ate, I found my best friend sitting in the back of the formal gardens next to the large Silver Leaf Maple that she’d bonded with. She was cradling the Orb of the Dryads in her hands, staring into it, her head back against the tree’s still-scorched trunk. “Mercedes?”
    “Yeah?” She looked up at me.
    “Are you—” I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t ask if she was okay because none of us were okay. There was no way to be okay anymore; I didn’t know if we ever would be again.
    “There’s nothing.” She rubbed her forehead back and forth against the blackened bark and didn’t look at me, letting her hands cord through the grass underneath her fingers, taking it from parched and wilted to a vibrant green with nothing more than a touch.
    “I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s nothing there, in my mind. Before, there was always this, this knowing feeling at the back of my skull.” Mercedes pulled her fingers from the grass, and it withered again.
    “A feeling? You mean like telepathy or something?”
    “I couldn’t read the other dryads minds—I didn’t want to read their minds—but I knew they were there, that they existed. We were linked together, and we could touch everything, anything that was alive was open to us, its thoughts, its feelings, and the things that made it sing.”
    “And now?”
    “Now there’s nothing. There’s emptiness in my mind. I’m alone in my own thoughts, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
    “We’ll figure it out.” I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to my side. “I don’t know how we’ll figure it out, but we will. Maybe there are dryads across the border. Once the invasion is over—”
    “No.” She pulled away from me, and I could see tears running down her cheeks.
    “Mer—”
    “No. I don’t want to bond with another tribe over the border in Bathune. I don’t want to give up my connection with my tree. This is my home, and they were”—she let out a small sob—“they were my second chance at a family.”
    “I know.” I looked down at my own hands, helplessly clasped together in my lap, unsure what to say. A new family—that’s what we’d made here in Nerissette. Mercedes, Winston, Rhys, Timbago, John, Talia, the dryads, and all the rest of the people of Nerissette. We’d made ourselves a family, and now outsiders were trying to tear us apart. They were picking us off one by one.
    “I don’t know what to do. I mean, I thought we were safe with the Fate Maker