Chapter 46
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Kit
Kade’s dark eyes stared into mine. We stood close, almost toe to toe, and the connection between our minds was even closer.
It seethed with everything that had grown between us, a poisonous plant germinated from our mutual hatred and fed by our ever-increasing power.
Now its roots were tangled so deep into our psyches that I could feel Kade’s understanding of what I’d done unfurling within the pitch-blackness of his follicle-free skull.
His gaze dropped from mine to the blade embedded in his lower chest, rammed through the crack Robin had made in his armor. With my hands still wrapped around the hilt, I felt the heaving of his ragged breaths and his blood running over my fingers.
“Morris,” he rasped.
He didn’t need to say anything else. I knew he was seeing the whole picture now—and understanding the false reality I’d created for him.
It was actually one of my more ridiculous warps. Me, conjure a small sun’s worth of Magna Potestas when I didn’t have a clue how he’d been chucking those stupid orbs around? But that was the heart of the trick. Kade thought everything worthwhile required power.
I hadn’t needed boatloads of power to convince him I was about to obliterate him on an atomic level.
I’d just needed to mix a sensory cocktail that incorporated both his physical and psychic perceptions.
And because I’d let him think he could shrug off my piddly little warps with his big archmythic brain, he hadn’t expected me to wrap him in a warp burrito he couldn’t detect.
After all, it’s within the imperceptible margins of our minds where our greatest weakness lives: the unshakable belief that the reality we perceive is immutable.
“You must feel so clever,” Kade wheezed, his blood dripping onto the ground between us.
“Clever enough,” I replied as the psychic entanglement of our minds frayed, death creeping into his consciousness.
His hand clamped around my wrist. “I watched my mother die in my arms because of you.”
His hatred boiled, thick as tar, but beneath it was something else—something cold. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
He bared his bloodstained teeth. “How will you feel?”
That frigid emotion within him crystallized into wicked satisfaction.
It took me a mere sliver of an instant to realize something was wrong—to split my attention away from Kade and detect the faint shimmer of power coalescing in the air around us.
It was too long.
All the energy Kade had gathered to protect himself from my nonexistent super-sphere fused into countless fist-sized orbs and fired in every direction.
Toward my friends. Toward everyone I loved.
Darius, approaching us at a run with Blythe a step behind him, didn’t even have time to flinch before an orb ripped through his chest.
My heart contracted.
The volley of lethal magic continued outward. Over Kade’s shoulder, I could see Zak. He’d just dismounted his fae stallion. An orb connected with his rib cage. Blood and bone sprayed in a slow, violent arc.
To my left, the first note of Saber’s scream rippled in the air. An orb lit the side of her face as it met her shoulder. Fabric, then skin, then muscle, then bone—one after another, they ruptured.
My heart dilated, blood filling its chambers.
Three brightly burning orbs slipped past Tori, one grazing her cheek. The first collided with Aaron’s raised sword and shattered the steel. As its jagged shards pierced him and his companions, the other two orbs found Ezra and Kai.
Normally, Zylas was a blur of speed, yet he barely seemed to move as he reached for Robin. Ever so slowly, his hands caught her already broken body, her blood still drifting in the air from the orb that had torn her apart.
The next beat of my heart didn’t come.
There were still multitudes of the deadly projectiles, but my attention narrowed to a single one as it flew straight at its target.
Lienna.
Her mouth was open, lungs expanded in a gasp. She gripped her cube in one hand, raising it as though to cast a frantic spell, the archmythic rune dull and depleted.
The orb glided sedately toward her chest, perfectly aligned with her heart—the heart I loved more than anything, the heart I would die a thousand times to protect. Anguish overwhelmed me, the space between my last heartbeat and my next stretching into an eternity.
The orb floated closer. It touched the front of her protective vest. The fabric unraveled thread by thread, the layers beneath tore away, and the orb met her skin. Blood burst from the point of contact. The orb deformed, about to explode through her sternum.
With everything in me, with all the power I’d gained and all the skills I’d honed, I willed it to stop.
And it did.
Suddenly my heart was beating again, my pulse thundering in my ears. Kade’s chest shuddered, pushing against the dagger I clutched. Nothing else moved.
I wouldn’t let it move.
The scene was a nightmare so terrible that I never could have imagined it.
Blythe halfway to her knees beside Darius, her blue eyes glassy with shock.
Zak on the ground, a hand stretched toward Saber but his eyes blank in death.
Tori peppered with steel shrapnel, frozen mid-turn toward the mages splayed behind her.
Zylas clasping Robin to his chest, his face splattered with her blood and contorted with indescribable pain.
Beyond them, the horror continued. Vinny in a pool of blood just like on that New York rooftop. Zora trying to pull Tabitha out of the path of an orb as it struck them both. Vigneault dying. Wolfe dying. Girard dying. Tim, who I hadn’t even known was here, dying.
A scream built up inside me. My eyes darted, pain striking me everywhere I looked until my gaze locked on Lienna again, that orb about to steal her away from me.
No.
No, I wouldn’t lose her like this.
The last time I felt pain even close to this, I’d been sitting at Gillian’s bedside, gently shrouding her mind in beauty, peace, and comfort as she slipped away from me. She was the one who’d taught me to believe in kindness and given me a yearning for family—a family that had just been destroyed.
Kade’s fingers dug painfully into my wrist. “How?” he choked.
Suddenly I could feel energy rushing through my body like never before. Without realizing it, I had begun drawing every scrap of power from the earth around me.
Kade had killed his family in his quest for power. He’d wanted to become a god. I’d never wanted that. All I’d wanted was to keep the people I loved safe.
So that’s what I would do. I wouldn’t just warp our uncooperative reality. I would rip it from its foundations.
Energy stormed through me in an ever-increasing current. I looked at the orb about to destroy Lienna, and it fizzled to nothing as I drew its energy into myself.
I drew in the power from all of Kade’s magna-orbs, both the ones frozen in midair and the ones that had already struck their victims. Along with them, I pulled every drop of energy from the earth, and when it had nothing more to give, I stretched my senses for other sources.
Every Arcana artifact, every mage’s internal store of energy, and every psychic’s mental magic was extracted and drawn into me.
Then I used all that power to will those drops of Lienna’s blood to return to her. They slid backward, a perfect reversal of their trajectory until they’d reentered her body. Her skin reverted to its undamaged state. The layers of her protective vest reformed.
Kade gasped, the sound scraping in his throat.
Everywhere, the gruesome injuries rewound—the lives of my friends rebuilt as their wounds closed and the damage was undone. With every millisecond of time I dragged backward, the power drained out of me.
I stretched out my senses one more time, reaching for the thousands of minds all around me. As I had in London, I pulled that energy into me and spent it for just one more second.
Time tore from my grasp, snapping to its regular flow with a backlash like a cosmic crowbar to my psyche. My heart slammed against my ribs. An exhausted, trembling ache suffused my entire body and my peripheral vision fuzzed.
Kade’s dark eyes stared into mine, and his lips moved as he tried to speak.
I pulled my dagger from his chest.
He fell to his knees, blood spilling from his lips, and slumped to the ground, body going still as his life expired.
Blinking through blurred vision, I turned, my gaze sweeping across the faces of all my friends until it reached the one that mattered most.
Lienna.
She was already sprinting toward me. She threw her arms around my waist, and I buried my face in her shoulder, tears streaking my cheeks as I held her tight.