Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
W hat happened next was a blur.
There was movement and shouting. Fire and metal. Pain, then blood.
More shouting. More blood.
So much blood .
I laid on my back in the sand, fat raindrops splattering across my face, and a warm sense of acceptance spread through me. I couldn’t help but smile.
What I’d done was reckless.
Irrational.
Irresponsible.
Desperate.
Possibly pointless.
And I didn’t regret it for a second.
“Diem,” Luther choked out at my side. His voice sounded hoarse. Pained. “What have you done?”
A strong arm slid beneath me and lifted me from the ground. Another hand brushed across my chest—and stopped.
Stopped on the gleaming hilt of a dagger, rising from the center of my chest.
Two blue-grey eyes moved into my vision. They were sad, so very sad, but filled with the most breathtaking sea of twinkling sparks and inky depths. The evening sky and the daylight, colliding together into a cloud of broken, glittering shards.
I wanted to tell those eyes something. Something important. But when I tried to speak, a coppery tang flooded my throat.
“It should have been me,” he said roughly. “I should have told you.” He pulled me into his body, hunching over me.
“Magic,” I managed to gasp out.
He looked at me, confused, distraught. Not understanding. Rain soaked through his long, dark hair, matting it to his blood-flecked olive skin.
“You idiots,” the King snarled in the background. “I said to kill him , not her.”
A weighty presence spread across my body, squeezing me, holding me, caressing me, consuming me. It was immensely strong, its fierce grip impossible to fight. It dragged me in and held me close, refusing to let me go.
“Now I have a mess to clean up,” the King grumbled. “I don’t need Sophos sniffing around looking for her body to run their tests on.”
“M-magic,” I stammered again. My eyelids drooped. The strange sensation was warm, inviting. It felt safe. It felt like home . I wanted so badly to stop fighting and surrender to it forever.
Luther laid me out on the sand and yanked a scarf from around his shoulders, hurriedly folding it into a square. With quivering hands and tortured eyes, he pulled the blade free, and hot liquid spilled across my chest. He covered the wound with the fabric, leaning his weight into it.
“Firm pressure, right?” he asked, his eyes frantically searching mine. “But not too much?”
I wanted to nod, but there was something else I needed to say. Something so crucial, so vitally urgent, even more important than my own life.
A chill swept across my skin, and the orange glow around us disappeared. The King had dropped his wall of flames.
He sighed loudly. “We’ll kill them both and incinerate the bodies with dragonfyre. If anyone asks, they were never in our realm, understood?”
Luther’s eyes darted up, then back at me. He took my hands and placed them over the makeshift bandage. “Keep holding it,” he ordered.
He brushed the hair away from my face, his touch lingering on my skin a moment longer. Then I watched as the cold mask of the Prince fell over his features. His focus shifted to the Ignios guards and his fist tightened, his mouth forming a harsh line.
He reached for his weapon and stood.
The powerful presence engulfing my body pulled away—just slightly.
“Luther,” I breathed. “ Your magic .”
A deep rumble of thunder rolled over the sea.
Slowly, so slowly, his face turned back to me. Our eyes locked, his widening slightly in understanding. His scimitar tumbled to the ground at his side. His nostrils flared, and his chest expanded in a long, shuddering inhale.
And then Luther Corbois unleashed.
Light and shadow ignited across the beach in a dazzling explosion of fury and magic. I rolled my head away at the blinding force of it, only to see glowing whips snake over the sand and impale the Ignios guards. Pale blue fissures webbed across their skin, seeming to tear them apart from within, and the air grew thick with the smell of burnt flesh.
Dark vines laced with thorns curled up their legs and tightened until bone crunched and blood oozed from a hundred punctures. Their agonized screams turned garbled as shadowy tendrils punched through their guts and emerged writhing from their mouths.
I looked away, unable to watch the slaughter continue. I didn’t judge Luther for what he’d done, but I could take no pleasure in it, either.
On the other side of the beach, the King stared in blank horror as my Prince massacred his guards with vicious, bloody ease.
His gryvern, however, was watching me . Still staring in that penetrating way, its reptilian eyes still pulsing with some profound feeling I couldn’t yet place.
There was so much anger trapped within the beast. A vast, lava-filled cavern of rage bubbled under its ancient skin like a volcano churning against a ceiling of rock. As the Ignios guards’ shrieks fell silent, I wondered with a tremble what might happen if the Ignios gryvern ever unleashed.
The King dismounted and summoned two gauntlets of fire that engulfed his lower arms. “Kill me, and my gryvern kills you.”
“As long as I die knowing my Queen is safe, that’s good enough for me,” Luther snapped.
The King sneered. “I’ll remember that when I’m carving her up over your corpse.”
I’d always known Luther was powerful.
I’d heard the whispered gossip. I’d felt it in his aura, seen it churning behind his gaze. I’d sensed it in the way even the most confident of the Lumnos Descended avoided his notice.
Though I’d only seen him use it in small amounts, I never had to witness the full extent of his power to know it was something extraordinary.
But as I watched him reduce a Crown of Emarion to a sniveling heap in a matter of seconds, extraordinary seemed far too inadequate a description.
It was unthinkable I beat him out for the throne at all.
A faraway song played in my ears as Luther’s magic consumed the beach. Unlike before, when I’d seen him shape it into objects or weapons, this was an eruption of pure, glittering day and violent, vengeful night. It came in a deluge from every angle, swirling around the King and his gryvern and trapping them within an enormous whorl of liquid dark.
Even the earth couldn’t escape his wrath. The falling rain sizzled to steam as it collided with a crackling swarm of white-hot sparks that flowed from his palms. Granules of sand flew into the air, tossed by the rumbling tremors that rippled with each deadly blast of shadow. I could almost hear the roar of Luther’s godhood in the deafening thunderclaps that trembled in the clouds.
The King’s once-mighty flames looked pathetic in comparison. They glanced off Luther’s magic and vanished, as effective as embers in a snowstorm. The whites of his eyes grew large as he abandoned his attacks and shifted all his effort to his shield, but that, too, was no match for my Prince. A seemingly infinite swarm of obsidian hands clawed razor-sharp nails along the shimmering barrier, and though the battle had barely begun, it fractured and gave way.
The King scrambled to hide beneath his gryvern, whimpering a plea for help, and Luther paused his assault. “Any final words you’d like me to pass on to your successor?”
The gryvern snorted angrily and snapped its wings. It hissed, eyes narrowing on me, and I finally understood what I’d missed before.
“Stop,” I cried out.
Luther’s head whipped to me. His eyes were wild, ablaze with pale blue light. For a moment, I saw nothing of the Prince I knew, his mind lost to the frenzy of his rage.
“Don’t.”
The vortex of crackling starlight spinning around him stilled in mid-air. His expression turned incredulous. “You want to spare him? ”
With my heart slowing and my lungs full of blood, it was far too much to explain that it wasn’t the King’s life I was saving, but his. That the Ignios gryvern, obliged to avenge its King, was offering me a trade—the life of the man it despised for the life of the one I adored.
My head collapsed back onto the sand. “ Mercy ,” I gasped.
Luther’s shoulders sank. He gave the King one final look that quaked with an enduring promise: someday, somewhere, retribution would come. He turned away and came to kneel at my side.
My gaze met the gryvern’s. Take him, I said in silent request, knowing somehow the beast would understand. I wish I could have saved you instead.
The gryvern loosed a frustrated howl into the sky. It snatched the cowering King into its talons and took flight, disappearing over the dunes.
Luther’s magic dissolved, and the beach turned eerily quiet, save for the soft patter of falling rain. His hands returned to my wound, his fingers threading into mine as he pressed hard on the makeshift bandage. The rage that had overtaken him in battle melted away, replaced with a frantic concern.
“You’re going to heal,” he swore, his voice rough. “You have to.”
My chest burned as I choked for air. I needed some way to make him understand. Suddenly, so many pieces were falling into place—but getting him to agree would be damn near impossible.
“Magic,” I mouthed.
His eyes scoured my face. “ My magic?”
I nodded weakly.
A twinkling blanket of woven light spread from his hands and covered my body, draping me in his warm, protective energy. A feeling of peace settled in my spirit and silenced the excruciating ache scoring through my chest. The pain, the discomfort, the fear—in the caress of his magic, it all faded away.
I felt calm. I felt safe.
And I fought against it with everything I had left.
“Attack,” I managed to rasp. My lungs wheezed with an alarming rattle. I pulled my hand from beneath his and pointed to myself. “ Attack .”
Luther’s horrified expression was exactly what I’d feared. I wasn’t sure he was even capable of what I was asking him. It was carved into his marrow to protect me, not hurt me.
He wrapped an arm beneath me and held me against his body. His other hand, slick with my blood, curved around my neck.
He shook his head. “I can’t. I won’t.”
The world began to blur, the sounds of the sea becoming muffled and distant. When I opened my mouth to speak, the only thing that came out was a rivulet of blood at the corner of my lips.
Agony wracked Luther’s features, his heart crumbling in his eyes. The indecision tearing through his chest was as visible as the scar that marked his skin.
With considerable effort, I managed to lift my palm to his heart. “Trust,” I mouthed.
He let out a sigh and nodded slowly.
Lowered his forehead to mine.
Laid a tender kiss on my lips.
And attacked .
Tentative at first—prickles on my arms, light jabs at my feet. He watched me from beneath lowered lashes, probing my reaction, before increasing his power.
The tingling sensation returned. Hot and cold, fire and ice, roaring through my veins. My heart stuttered, then picked up its pace.
Whatever Luther read in my expression, it bolstered his faith. He abandoned his hesitation and slammed his magic into me full-force with a blast of searing light. Glowing cords braided around my chest and squeezed with the brunt of his might.
My vision spotted, but the tingling endured. It was exploding, shattering, overwhelming. My wound began to itch. The blood cleared from my throat, leaving me gulping for breath.
My godhood stretched its hands toward the light. It sang a quiet entreaty, hopeful and serene. I knew I should wait, take more, but I couldn’t hold back any longer.
I surrendered to its call.
A soft, harmonic melody filled my soul. Luther’s aura no longer felt stunted, but gloriously, ethereally fulfilled. My magic burst beyond my skin to meet it, tumbling happily over his attacks like playful lovers having a romp.
Luther sucked in a sharp breath, and I knew he felt it, too. Our gazes met and shone in wonderous fascination. For a moment, one fleeting moment, our hearts beat together as one.
“Fuck, is she alive?”
Taran’s voice shocked us both from our daze. He ran up the beach and threw himself onto the sand beside us, glaring at our many bleeding wounds.
“Their ‘ plan ’ was for us to leave her behind,” he said to Luther with a growl. “I didn’t realize until we crossed the border. I came back as soon as—”
“I know,” Luther said. “They tricked us both.”
Alixe jogged up behind him and stared at me with apology and alarm. “Is she...?”
They all looked at me. All I could manage was a deep draw of breath and an exhausted nod.
Taran looked around at the graveyard of Ignios corpses. “Where’s the King?”
“Alive,” Luther answered with a glance at me. “He left with his gryvern.”
“Then we should get as far away as we can before he comes back,” Alixe said.
Luther cradled me and fought to stand. His knees shook under the effort as fresh blood spilled from the myriad gashes and burns marking his flesh.
“Let me take her, cousin,” Taran said gently.
Luther tensed and gripped me closer. My heart squeezed—I understood all too well. When he finally relented and placed me into Taran’s arms, I whimpered out a quiet protest of my own.
Alixe coaxed Luther into letting her take his arm over her shoulder, and together, the four of us hobbled through the rain until a painful surge snapped across our skin to mark the border. As the flames on my body slowly faded, Taran scowled down at me, a harbinger of the fight I knew was coming the moment I wasn’t knocking on death’s door.
“Thank you,” I whispered, smiling.
He rolled his eyes, though he held me a little closer.
“ Fucking Ignios ,” he muttered.