“So she has nothing left to lose,” Griffin snarled, turning away so he wouldn’t have to look at the Chimerans as he thought it all through.

“No,” Bane said. “She doesn’t. And it all started with you.”

“What do you want me to do about it now, three years apart and with her gone?” Griffin snapped over his shoulder.

No response. Because Bane didn’t know. He was sick with worry over his sister—even though he wasn’t officially allowed to feel such—and he’d chosen to take it out on the man who was easiest to blame, even if the blame wasn’t entirely Griffin’s to shoulder.

Griffin got it. And he couldn’t say that he wouldn’t have done the exact same thing, being in his position.

The story made sense in his mind. His heart didn’t want to believe it, but the terrible squeeze and aching in his chest told him that it was true.

If Keko had taken off from the Chimeran valley yesterday morning, by the time she called Griffin she could have gotten to some town with a phone. Their conversation had seemed so cryptic at the time, but made a world of sense now. She’d known exactly what she was doing, what she’d wanted. What she had to do to get it. She’d sounded like someone saying good-bye when they knew they would never come back.

Goddamn it, why was the chief so quiet? Did he feel nothing for this woman who’d given him years of service and was of his own blood?

Griffin spun in an uneven, frustrated circle, scrubbing cold hands through his short hair. Did he wish he hadn’t known? Did he wish she’d never called him? Was there anything he could do?

“Keko will—” Bane began, but that’s as far as he got before the earth ripped open a short distance away and a voice poured out of its depths.

“THIS WOMAN MUST BE STOPPED.”

The voice crackled up through the forest, shaking the bare trees and making the stars go blurry. It was made of a million sounds at once: angry as fire, ethereal like a whisper, melodic like bells.

In the distance, Griffin saw the other Secondaries around the bonfire mobilize, scrambling for the forest, running toward the sound. Running toward Griffin and the two Chimerans.

In the foreground, a sapling shivered and tilted to one side, crashing into another. Under the moon, at the very edge of where the firelight reached, an irregular circle of cracked mud and scrubby brown grass shifted. He stumbled backward, out of its circumference. The ground churned as though in a blender, rocking and spinning and turning in upon itself.

The air and water elementals coming from the bonfire finally reached him, skidding to a stop when they noticed what was happening.

From the hole in the earth, dirt and roots and stones crawled on top of one another. Grass and mud wound around an invisible form, piling higher and higher, until it assumed the shape of humanoid legs. Clay and sand pushed up and around the legs, forming a torso. Branches shot out to form arms, little twigs for fingers. The dirt rounded atop the neck to form a head, and yellow-green grass sprung up from the scalp, curling around the face that started to appear decidedly female.

As the small nose pushed out from the round cheeks, the eyes turned otherworldly green, and the hair transformed to white wispy silk, he recognized that face. Aya. Daughter of Earth. Not completely of the natural world, but not entirely human either.

By the stunned and silent expressions shared by everyone around the broken circle, no one else had ever witnessed such an appearance of an earth elemental. Not even the premier. Before, she had always simply walked out of the shadows on human legs to join them around the fire.

“Listen to me.” Aya’s voice tumbled back into a normal register, closer to the feminine tones Griffin remembered from years earlier.

She turned to Griffin and the Chimerans, the movement incredibly fluid. As she did so, her body changed, solidified. Her skin turned the warm brown of a tree trunk, then shifted to the burnished tan of sand, only supple and humanlike. A foot made of roots pulled free from the clinging earth. By the time she set it back down it was solid, her toes curling over the mud. Leaves wove themselves around her body, cloaking her in a loose garment of glistening brown. The more Aya moved, the more human she appeared. More human than the last time Griffin had seen her, as though she’d developed further into this body, if that was even possible.

She raised a twig arm, and the leaves and flowers at the tip shifted into fingers. She pointed one at the chief. “Kekona Kalani must be stopped.”

The chief blanched under the weight of Aya’s declaration, his mouth going slack, his shoulders slanting toward the churned-up earth.

The premier pushed ahead of the Ofarians. “What did Kekona do now?”

Aya’s green eyes flashed with an inner light that reminded Griffin of deadly ice. She answered the premier but kept staring at the chief. “Kekona seeks power to change the world.”

Bane shoved forward. “That’s not true.”

“No?” A very human lift of pale eyebrows. “Kekona is looking for the Fire Source, the root of Chimeran magic. She thinks it’s harmless—you think it’s harmless—but that root is buried deep in the Earth’s core. It’s part of the foundation of this world, and the Chimerans have only been allowed to borrow it. If the Source is disturbed in any way, it will alter life. It will create death. If Kekona touches it, fire feeding fire, she could destroy continents or create new ones. Massive destruction that the Children of Earth would have no way to counter.”

The silence that fell over the wood was as ominous as Aya’s words. More revelations, more shock. And by the horror and distress and utter paralysis making twisted masks of the Chimerans’ faces, this was something not even they knew.

And Keko was already gone.

“The Children of Earth guard the Source. It’s one of our many duties, to keep the power sacred and safe, to protect it from disturbance and to protect the Earth from its wrath. I’m telling you now, if you do not find Kekona and stop her, my people will hunt and kill her, just as they did the last woman to lay claim to what was not hers.”

The Chimerans shared a look. “The Queen,” Bane whispered, reaching big hands up to clasp around the back of his head.

The premier thumbed back his cowboy hat. “Kekona has caused enough problems for the Senatus and for all Secondaries. She must be dealt with.”

“No,” Griffin protested, because Keko’s own people had not. “Don’t.”

Aya turned to him. The top of her white hair barely came to Griffin’s shoulder, but her presence was massive. “Don’t what?”

“Just . . . don’t kill her.”

Aya’s eyes flashed green again, but in a different way. Griffin couldn’t pinpoint exactly how.

“She must answer for her actions outside of Chimeran law,” said the premier to Aya. “Will you allow us to go after her?”

After several long moments, Aya ripped her eyes from Griffin to consider the premier, and though there was no wind among the trees, her leaf cloak and spider-webbed hair undulated. “I could return to my people Within now, tell them what’s happened, and give the order to hunt.”

Griffin wanted to object again, every muscle in his body straining forward.

“But a thousand years ago,” Aya continued, “there was no Senatus. No cooperation between our races. I’d hate to erase something we’ve built so determinedly without careful consideration. Can I trust you, Premier, to find Kekona before she reaches the Source and give her suitable punishment?”

“You can, Daughter. Absolutely.”

“Wait—” Bane started.

Aya nodded, ignoring the Chimeran general. “If you don’t succeed, if Kekona reaches the Source, she is ours and there will be no compromise. Agreed?”

The premier shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “Agreed.”

“You don’t want a war with us,” Aya added with a glance at the earth under her feet. “We will swallow you.”