Epilogue
Bells
BELLS HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT IT. SHE’D JUST TRIED TO stop the knife.
She barely felt her father’s body knocking back into hers. In that split second, face to face with all of Aífe’s fury, something fundamental rocked through her, stealing her breath, dropping her stomach.
And that thing she had always felt, that strange company she kept with death, told her what would happen next.
In a blinding moment, she Saw her father’s death as sharp as a knife to her temple.
It came with the strangest sense of déjà vu.
Flashes of it matching what she’d thought had only been a nightmare the night they’d stayed in Edinburgh and she’d fallen asleep beside Remi, her mind pleading with the Goddess of Fate and Madness.
And then it unfolded.
Bells knew the knife had hit its mark, because of her father’s breathless shock and the glee in Aífe’s face.
As he fell backwards, he fell onto her.
Blood – there was so much blood. She shuddered as she scrambled out from under him to check, to see—
The knife in his chest, and the blood pooling over them, making her sticky.
‘Dad,’ she breathed, hands beginning to shake.
Nicole’s inhuman scream seared her mind with horror. The screams. The screams were so loud.
And her heart, her being, was unravelling right in front of her, threatening to take anything and everything that she was.
She had no words for the extreme life-threatening grief that took its place.
There was no logic to a world in which her father didn’t exist.
She stared at his face, the open eyes, so still.
So lifeless.
It hit her like a freight train. The crushing of the world. The removal of all the air. The destruction of her reality.
Her father had been killed.
Her father had been taken—
He was gone. She knew it, she could feel it.
The sob cracked her down the middle, ripped her open to some desperate kernel gleaming like a lost treasure. But she couldn’t stop it. It happened again, and again, and it was tearing her apart. The sob became a plea, a desperate child’s shriek for her protector, her last parent, her safe haven—
He had been there for every dark moment waking from visions of death, every staggered search for help. He had been the spine of their family, the stalwart protector. As long as he was there, they were safe. They would always be safe with him.
And now—
Now there were no more tears. The tears had stopped because this was—
‘Enough,’ she said.
The word was not shouted, and yet the force of it resonated on some other plain, with some power greater than life and death. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, let this happen.
That kernel of her devastation burned brighter, like a wicked internal flame. Like a piece of her soul. And, as if spellbound, she reached into herself, into that power, and picked it up.
It seared. It didn’t want to be taken.
But this – this would make everything better.
‘Wake up, Dad,’ Bells said.
For a moment, she was a little girl again, clutching her ragged lace-edged pillow, the little girl with the dummy and the eyes sticky from nightmares.
The little girl he would carry everywhere, or run with from an enemy.
Who he would buckle into her car seat and have her hands clasped by the hot, dry grip of Dylan on one side, and the eager clutch of Nicole’s on the other.
And then she was herself again.
No, not herself. Not with this piece of her power in her hands, and a vision in her eyes. This one chance she had to fix something like she’d always wanted.
And it would be only one, unless she was ready to die.
‘I said, wake up.’
The power inside tunnelled out as she pushed, crossing her into some strange other place, a place where the world was thinner; where the walls of her reality turned sheer and shimmered, where visions and reality were merging. Where she could feel the grasp of this moment like a ribbon in her hands.
So she grabbed it and pulled.
‘Wake up!’
The order pulsed out of her. It hurt so much she screamed as she pulled free the knife in his chest, slamming her hand down over the wound.
And then her father’s eyes—
A blast of power had Kyan throwing himself over them.
But Bells wasn’t moved by the force of the explosion that took down the wall on the other side of the pool.
It threw Aífe across the room and sent exploded rock through the space, spearing loyal Empyreals. It ripped at everyone else and threw a piece of rubble against her sister’s head, knocking her unconscious.
The next moment, it was over.
Kyan lay over them, chest heaving, half buried in debris, his hands gripping Nicole.
Bells looked up to find a form as if floating amid the destroyed pool, lambent with an innate dark light.
And yet she knew it was a safe divinity.
Something wicked and mischievous. Something with a capability for such visceral destruction that it now shuddered with unleashed hatred. Yet it was not aimed at her.
Then it formed into a familiar shape and was standing over her.
‘Oh, Bells, little Angel,’ Callum-who-was-not-Callum said. ‘What have you done?’ He smiled softly and she could see through the wink of concern to the divine being beneath.
Then he held out his hand, and she stared at the open palm stained with blood. ‘Let’s show them who we really are, hm?’