Free Eternal Sacrifice (Mortal Enchantment Book 4) by Stacey O'Neale Page A

skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. Mortals running for their lives. Another showed a massive tidal wave that destroyed a large island. Fires burned. Cries of pain echoed in my head. All of their anguish and fear whipped through me like a tornado. I fell to my knees with my hands over my ears, and screamed.
    Then it all stopped and I heard her voice once more. “That is our future if you prevent the akasha from sealing the mist. Once we are exposed, thousands of our kind will die within hours. With the elders gone the courts will fall, and the unbalanced elements will destroy what is left of this world.”
    A sinking feeling burned in the pit of my stomach. But I refused to accept that this was the only option. There had to be another way. In every situation, there were always possibilities. I just had to make the right choice. “There’s still a chance Merlin can save us.”
    There was a pained smile when she replied, “Why would he agree that your life needed to be sacrificed if he knew of any other way?”
    I paused as I pieced her words together in my head. “Wait. Are you saying Merlin wanted to kill me? Is that why he was imprisoned?”
    “Yes,” she replied, firmly.
    Okay, I wasn’t expecting that to be her answer. All along I thought this was all about Kalin. But now it seemed I was wrong. I needed to know more because I couldn’t make sense of it all. “And my mother helped you?”
    She touched the side of my cheek with the tips of her fingers, and another vision flashed. This one was different than the other. It was a memory. I saw my mother as she raced through a portal that was collapsing all around her. I sensed her rush to find me. Her desperation. And then something I’d never experienced before—I felt her love for me. It was so strong that I nearly broke out into tears.
    “Your mother had come to save you.” She dropped her hand to her side, and the vision disappeared. “She convinced me that she could stop you.”
    This wasn’t possible. It was some kind of trick to justify her actions. My mother would’ve never risked her life for me. She hated me. Kept me away from the court for most of my life because she never wanted me around. All the things she’d done and said over the years didn’t match up to what I saw. I took a few steps backwards as I waved my hand in the air. The images she’d shown me burned in my head giving me an intense migraine. I had to ask just to be sure I wasn’t losing my mind. “She came here to save me?”
    As if she knew what was happening, she rubbed some kind of cream on my temples. My headache instantly disappeared. “Your mother was not perfect. She made many terrible mistakes during her reign. But she was not all that you believe her to be, young king. It was her love for you that brought her here. She was prepared to die to protect you.”
    No, that wasn’t true. She wouldn’t die for me. There had to be another reason. Some ulterior motive for rescuing me. I had to push my feeling aside. I just couldn’t deal with all of this right now. Once I cleared my head, I asked, “How did she convince you to help her?”
    She hesitated.
    “Please,” I begged. “I need to know.”
    A single tear ran down her cheek. “I discovered a mortal baby that had been abandoned. I named him Lancelot. I wanted to raise him in Avalon as my son. However, the mist would have prevented him from aging. Prisma gave him the Ring of Dispel, which protected him from magic, and he aged as a mortal. Those were the best years of my life. Because of her kindness, I owed her a life debt. That is why you were spared.”
    What she’d said seemed to tie together, but how? How was I supposed to believe any of this after the way she’d treated me? None of this made any sense. I rubbed my hand over the back of my neck. This was too much. I had to get back to the reason I’d come. The mission was about saving Kalin, not my never-ending family drama. I unsheathed my sword, pointing the