Chapter 50
CHAPTER
I didn’t waste a second longer watching where that head landed.
With a gasp, I pitched forward onto my knees next to Garvis, Coen dropping to his own beside me. Maybe there was a healer in the bunker or on the ship that Coen could Walk Garvis to in time. Maybe the puncture wounds weren’t as bad as they looked.
But when I trained my gaze on Garvis’s chest, it was to find it drenched in his own wounds, already deflated. His eyes had glossed over, and instead of final words, I heard a fleeting thought waft from his mind like a puff of the purest cloud.
I hope…
“No, no, no,” Coen breathed, shaking Garvis’s shoulders. “What do you hope? Tell me what you hope! Rayna—” He turned to me, desperation clinging to his lashes. “Tell him to come back so he can tell us what he hopes.”
I was frozen, staring at the chest that had not risen again.
Garvis… he hadn’t found his spark yet. Hadn’t traveled or found love or discovered something new. I hadn’t even had time to tell him thank you for saving me—not just now, but with all of those Mind Manipulating lessons he’d so selflessly gifted me time and time again.
He couldn’t be dead.
But when I tried to dive into his mind, there weren’t any more thoughts to cling to. There was nothing but a vague sense of a hundred empty curtains, fluttering away, away, away…and gone.
Death, it seemed, hadn’t been as patient with Garvis as Garvis had been with me.
“I’m so sorry,” I told Coen, a sob muffling my voice. I laid Old Veracious by his side, reached out, and gently slid Garvis’s eyelids closed.
Coen made a sound somewhere between anguish and fury, and I knew that if he could, he would bring Lexington back to life just to behead him again and again and again for what he’d ended.
A voice in my ear tugged my head sideways. I hadn’t even felt the fire ant scuttle up my body and onto my shoulder.
“We’re here,” it said.
Just in time, too. Because the next second, Coen’s eyes flashed open as fat plops of milky mist came drifting down from the dome above our heads. The dome itself seemed to be wiggling downward in ropes of antipower, reaching for us with pale hands.
“We’ve got to go, Rayna,” Coen rasped. “She’s coming.”
“No.”
I turned to find myself facing that same boy who’d watched Mattheus die, too. The Fated General who’d just defeated the last monster in the square was, in this moment, just as terrified. Just as small.
Which meant it was up to me to shove down the biting edge of grief and think for the both of us.
“No,” I repeated urgently, even as more of Dyonisia’s antipower came spiraling down.
“Once she sees all of her exiled ones back in their original states—once she sees him…” I nodded vaguely at Lexington’s dismembered body.
“She’s going to know you were here. And if that happens, she’ll scour Hallow’s Perch in search of you.
You don’t want her to scour Hallow’s Perch, do you?
You don’t want her anywhere near your adoptive family or the others? ”
Coen shook his head, his eyes hanging onto mine as if my words were the only thing keeping him from drowning in the tears surely running down his throat.
“This is what we’re going to do, then,” I whispered.
With our blockades still open for each other, I poured my entire plan—the one I’d been forming since last night—into his mind, barely registering the widening of shock in his eyes in my haste to get it all out in time.
The mist was congealing around us, much like a spiderweb, threads of that milky power swimming closer and closer to us.
But there were still enough gaps in it for me to look sideways at the entrance of the nearest alleyway and note the two shadows stirring just behind that corner. Observing. Waiting.
When I was done, Coen gave a frantic shake of his head.
“I can’t leave you alone with her, Rayna.”
“Hey, hey, hey. Look at me. Look at me, Coen.”
His name—his first name—on my tongue stopped his pacing pupils in their tracks.
I placed his hands around the back of my neck, digging his fingers into the ridges of my brand. Into those five Sorronian words.
“My heart will not falter,” I breathed up at him. “Okay?”
It took him a moment, but when the first rope of antipower touched his skin, Coen winced at the hiss it made on contact and nodded.
“Okay.”
I didn’t think twice. Life was too short to think twice. Lifting myself up to my tiptoes, I fit my lips against the curves of his.
He tasted like copper and salt on the surface, the residues of battle still clinging to his lips. Death. Destruction. Decay. Everything the Fated General was destined to embody.
But as soon as his shock wore away and he yanked me against his chest to kiss me again, that sweet, dark aroma filled my mouth and sent a deep calm down my veins. Now this was Coen. Life. The sparkling starlight in the dark. A fierce, ferocious warmth even amid the cold.
I closed my eyes, basking in the brief moment of bliss.
Until the weight of his lips disappeared from mine.
I opened my eyes to find Coen several paces away from me. Garvis’s body and Old Veracious were gone, my crescent knife was back in my hand, and a crow-led carriage was veering down from the sky.
When the carriage touched down, the wheels sparked against cobblestone. The crows, about three dozen of them in harnesses strapped to reins, broke into a frenzy of squawking.
“Well, well, well. The Mind Manipulator and the Wild Whisperer, trapped in the same web at last.”
Even after all this time, Dyonisia’s voice still grated down my spine.
I watched warily as she used the carriage footstool to step down, her Wild Whispering coachman holding her door open.
The milky mist of the dome had wrapped around Coen and me, thin strands of it sweeping through us from every direction. The essence of it burned where it touched my skin, as if those parts of me were struggling for air. As if they were being smothered.
But Coen was worse. Dyonisia had wrapped him up even tighter, spiraling ropes of power around his mouth so that he couldn’t speak. So that he couldn’t even move.
Her curtain of midnight hair swished to the side as she surveyed Lexington’s dismembered head in the opening of the alleyway beside us, her nose wrinkling with disgust.
“I assume you’ve both figured out my power is the dome itself?”
“Y-yes,” I got out.
“Good. I would have been disappointed otherwise.”
Dyonisia swept her gaze across Coen, lingering on him for a bit with a lip tugging upward in smug victory, then to me.
“What you might not have figured out, though,” she said, stepping closer, “is how intelligent my power is. It can sense both of your magics in my little web right now. Usually, I give Wild Whispering and Mind Manipulating powers a pass on the smothering effects, but right now… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t fancy you asking those crows to attack me. ”
I said nothing, even as a creeping sense of dread slunk over me.
The crows—they were squawking and cawing in their reined harnesses, but I… I couldn’t understand them.
And my blockade had dissolved, but none of Dyonisia’s thoughts wafted out to me. I couldn’t find Coen’s mind or fall back into my own. My Mind Manipulating power was gone, too.
Like she’d said, Coen and I were trapped in this web together.
If only Nara’s pills had been ready in time. If only I had Object Summoning so that I could ram that poison down her slender throat.
“What do you want?” I dared ask.
Dyonisia gave me a smile masked in tight skin.
“You. I want you, Rayna.”
She took another step closer. I flinched back, but the sting of her antipower held me in place.
“But,” she continued, “how could I ever have you if you were in love with the enemy—my dear sister’s greatest weapon?” She nodded at Coen, still locked in that same position a few paces away. “How could I turn you into my own weapon if you chose him and the massacre that is to come from him?”
“Massacre?”
“Yes.” Dyonisia nodded, her lips puckering with sincerity. “Look what he did to those poor exiled ones today. He mutilated them. And he is prophesized to destroy the entire world if my sister asks him to.”
My heart broke into a furious rhythm at what she was confessing to me.
“You knew who he was the whole time he was at the Institute.”
It wasn’t a question, and Dyonisia didn’t bother nodding.
“It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.
Six kids suddenly exist in Hallow’s Perch where they hadn’t before?
Please.” She tutted a laugh. “My mistake was my curiosity. I wanted to see if their Branded powers were more extraordinary than humans due to their faerie blood—I planned to take them in after their Final Tests, but you made sure they got away in the nick of time, didn’t you? You and your little spider spy?”
I swallowed all my protests. If I was going to stick to my plan…
“Well, you have him now.” I lifted a finger—all I could manage in the web—toward Coen. “I passed your test. Here he is.”
“Test?” Now Dyonisia actually lifted her chin in laughter. “Test? Don’t you see, child? This wasn’t a test. I don’t want Coen Steeler anymore. I want you. Your mission was just a way to turn you against him—to make you hate him as you should. But it looks like that backfired on me, didn’t it?”
She gestured at Coen, then at Lexington, and I understood: she knew we’d killed him together.
She knew we’d fought together back in that village square.
She knew I’d fallen back in love with him.
Why else would I be in Hallow’s Perch, defending his home village?
Why else would we have been standing side by side, covered in blood that was not our own?
“It didn’t backfire,” I tried to lie.
Dyonisia’s perfectly white teeth glimmered in a smile.
“Oh, trust me. It did. But I am nothing if not a firm believer in a little discipline. Prove to me that you choose me—that you choose this island—over the Fated General. Prove to me that you are willing to sever his bloody destiny before it hurts the people you love.” She examined her nails.
“Or I will enjoy dropping a bomb of my own power on Alderwick. And this time, I’ll make sure it suffocates every last drop of magic, no matter which form that magic takes. ”
Fabian and Don. She’d threatened them before, and now she was threatening them again, but in a more tangible way. I could almost see the dome condensing over my tiny home village, prepared to fall.
Tears blurred my vision now as I looked at Coen.
His edges were warping through the mist. His warm brown eyes were fixed on me, though, and I found my answer within them.
Dyonisia flicked a finger. Her power released me, and I stumbled forward, gripping my crescent knife tightly in a fist.
Protect him.
Save him.
“Kill him,” Dyonisia said.
“I—”
“Kill him. I’m not in a very good mood, you know.
My best Mind Manipulator is dead, one of my elites has abandoned me, and all of my monsters appear to have fled.
” I barely had time to feel relief at the realization that Kimber and the exiled ones, at least, had escaped her clutches.
“Prove to me that I shouldn’t give up on you, child.
Prove to me that I shouldn’t just scrap this whole island and start anew. ”
My blood chilled at those words, and I turned to Coen.
My muscles screamed at me to stop.
I resisted their cries, dragging myself forward, until I was positioned right in front of his blurring form.
I love you, I whispered into the void.
For Hallow’s Perch and Alderwick and the rest of the island, I could do this. No matter what Dyonisia claimed, this was a test she didn’t realize she was giving me, and I was determined to pass it.
So I plunged my crescent blade into Coen Steeler’s heart.