Chapter 53 Tessa #3
She ran, her power clearing a way as she followed those pleas. Scrambling up a small hill several feet from the mayhem, she reached the top and her heart stopped. She didn’t find Kat or Axel, his voice still pleading somewhere nearby, but she did find Tristyn.
On the ground with a blade in his chest.
“Tristyn!” she cried, sliding down the hill and rushing to his side.
She dropped to her knees, looking him over.
Black pants and shirt. Leather armor like Eliza wore.
Sheaths empty where they’d once held blades.
Numerous cuts and scratches, and his eyes were a faint sage green when she took his face in her hands.
“Tristyn? Tris, can you hear me?”
“Wild fury,” he gasped, coughing with the exhale. “Didn’t expect…you to find me.”
“What do I need to do?” she demanded, panic in her voice as she released his face to focus on his chest. “Pull it out or leave it? I can— I’ll get Cienna. We can—”
Tristyn coughed again, wincing with the movement. “There’s nothing… I failed,” he rasped.
“No.” The word a denial, she shook her head frantically. “No. No more. I will not—”
Tristyn’s icy fingers grasped hers, squeezing. Or trying to.
“How?” she demanded. Screamed it at him. “You’re a deity! You can’t just— No. No!”
“Can you tell her—” He coughed again, blood coming up with it. “Tell her I’ll save her that dance, yeah?”
“No!” Tessa cried. “You tell her. You tell— Tristyn?”
Because his eyes were no longer glowing. They were still and vacant, and his chest wasn’t moving. And he couldn’t just die. He was a fucking deity. He couldn’t. He—
A roar pierced the air, breaking through her panic, and she looked up to find a midnight blue dragon with black wings and a dragon a few shades lighter.
Xan and Aiyana. It was the two of them against twenty or more seraphs.
Black flames met magic attacks, both sides taking hits.
Aiyana dove suddenly, as if going after something, but then she banked hard, narrowly avoiding a. ..
Tessa pushed to her feet, running several feet and peering around a small clump of bushes. Seraphs were there, loading a contraption with bolts of white stone. That was what Aiyana had barely avoided. They had weapons against the dragons.
In her next breath, her power erupted. It crackled in the air, latching onto any seraph it could find.
Veins and wings lit up as Tessa took their last breaths, watching them all scream and writhe before her.
Too consumed by her fury to notice that her power was killing, but it wasn’t taking.
Those deaths weren’t refilling anything.
“Kat? Kat, where are you?”
She spun around. Where in the fuck was he? It sounded like he was right here. Like he was—
Another sound had her spinning to find a body rolling down the small hill, coming to a stop face down in the mud. Dark hair. Tall. If that was Axel…
Her feet were moving of their own accord, and she felt like she wasn’t in her body. Felt like she was hovering above, watching herself walk far too calmly across the space to the unmoving body. Watching her muster all her strength to roll him over.
And then watched her magic explode when she found not the younger St. Orcas brother but Theon.
She was screaming, and she was burning with fury. This wasn’t… He was as powerful as she was. He couldn’t be.
No.
No, no, no.
She’d save him the same way she’d saved Luka. That was what she’d do.
Her hands on his chest, she ripped at the gear he was wearing.
His shirt. Her power shredded through it all as she lost all control.
Lost herself completely to her magic. Anyone who came near met an end, and she wasn’t even sure if they were all Achaz forces at this point.
If Theon was taken from her, they were all enemies.
If Theon was taken from her, she was going to destroy the realm herself. If this didn’t work, she was—
Tessa paused, her gaze landing on his left arm. His left wrist where a union mark was…missing. That couldn’t…
She glanced at her wrist where the Union Mark was still fully intact.
She blinked, trying to understand. Because that Mark wouldn’t fade in death. And even if it did, hers was still there. And she could…feel his power. Strong and unyielding. Not as strong as it could be because he’d been using it all day, but still…
This wasn’t right.
Tessa pushed slowly to her feet, her heart hammering and breaths coming too fast. The world around her was blurred on the edges as she took in the surroundings.
Her Chaos was churning in her soul, stretching and taking.
Feeling that other power pulsing around her.
Then, as if reaching out a hand, it peeled back a layer of magic.
That was Dex on the edge of the clearing, watching her with a smirk on his face. In his hand was a stone collar, just like the one she’d seen in her last vision. He was just standing there as if waiting for something.
She looked down where Theon’s body lay, only it wasn’t there. Dragging her gaze across the space, she found Tristyn’s body gone too. No screams from Axel. No roars of dragons overhead.
This entire thing had been Dex luring her away from the others. Altering her reality. Making her expend her magic on nothing. That was why her reserves weren’t refilling when she’d set it free earlier.
Tessa watched him a moment longer. He hadn’t seemed to realize that his magic wasn’t affecting her anymore. Her own Chaos had countered it so carefully, had turned it back on him, that he thought he was still watching her lose herself over Theon. His own reality altered.
Trembling with a fury she couldn’t have described if she’d tried, she pulled a dagger from a swirl of her magic. A long, thin onyx blade with a hilt just as dark. A blade that had taken the life of Brecken.
A blade created to end seraphs.
A blade Tristyn had brought to her after he’d taken care of Brecken’s body.
A blade she’d been saving just for this.
It wasn’t until she was standing directly behind him that she let her magic shatter his completely. Let it sink in with claws and teeth. Let it shred that power to nothing.
Dex straightened in alarm, likely at not finding her sobbing over a body. His head swiveling around frantically, she waited until he turned.
Then she plunged that blade into his chest.
“Tessie?” He gasped, eyes dropping to the blade she still had her hand wrapped around, then slowly dragging back up to her face. “What are you doing?”
Her smile was sharp as she gripped the hilt and twisted. “Cleaning up my own fucking mess,” she snarled.
Dex staggered, dropping to his knees, and she stepped back. Reaching up, he yanked the dagger from his chest, examining it before asking, “Where did you get this?”
She was circling him now. Hunter and prey. Light and dark swirling at her fingertips.
“Apparently you didn’t clean up your own messes very well,” she sneered. “Oralia was rather slighted that you kept denying her a power.”
“Oralia gave you this?” he demanded sharply, and her smile grew when he tried to hide the pained gasp he sucked in.
“She killed Brecken with it,” Tessa said darkly. “And after I killed her, I kept it.”
The tips of his pristine wings were already turning grey as death came for him, but this wasn’t enough for her.
“After all these years, this is what it’s come down to,” Dex spat, chucking the dagger aside. “When I’ve been there for you. Tried to help you. Laid the fucking world at your feet.”
The bark of laughter that left her was shrill. “I didn’t need you to lay the world at my feet. I’m taking it all on my own, Dexter.”
“A puppet of Arius,” he said with disgust, sagging onto his hands and knees as death seeped into him more and more. Those eyes too dark against the sickly grey skin. Feathers decaying. Cheeks sinking in.
“I’m no puppet,” she said darkly, circling back to stand in front of him.
Summoning a black sword, she used the tip of the blade to tilt his chin up.
“You, however, know all about being a puppet, don’t you?
What was Achaz going to give you? Had he promised this world to you the same way he promised it to Rordan? ”
He pressed his lips together in a clear refusal.
“I’d answer that question, Dex,” she sang. “I can become incredibly…wild.”
His lip curled back, but he couldn’t hide the wince when he dragged in another breath.
“Last chance,” she offered, her blade still poised at his throat.
“You are a disappointment,” he growled. “And for what? Achaz will deal with you himself. The outcome will not change. Look around you, Tessa. When has the outcome ever changed?”
But then he was bellowing in pain as the blade sliced not through his neck—no, that would have been far too fast for him—but down his back, cleaving a wing and letting it fall to the ground.
She left the other wing, bringing the blade down on his arm, slicing it clean off at the elbow. Then a foot. An ear.
“All you had to do was do as you were told,” she mocked with each swing of her sword. “Answer a fucking question.” She struck out with her foot, forcing him onto his back, and then she shoved her blade straight through his gut, pinning him to the earth.
“I’m done being who you wanted me to be.
Now? I’m who I was meant to be,” she snarled, letting her power wind around what was left of his limbs, his torso, up his throat.
She wasn’t waiting for the blade to take his last breath.
She wanted it. Wanted him to know that his life would only fuel her more.
Standing over him, she shoved her power into every crack of his soul. Listened to his bellows of agony. A song that gave her life.
And when he fell still and silent. When vacant dark eyes were staring blankly at nothing. When her chest was heaving from the adrenaline of everything, she whispered coldly, “To fury you lost.”
“Tessa?” a low voice said carefully. Black flames and silky darkness licked at her soul, calling her back. Calling her home.
She turned, finding Luka and Theon standing there, both wide-eyed and staring at her in a way she couldn’t read.
“So fucking vindictive,” Luka growled, prowling forward while Theon stayed back, alert and clearly keeping others away.
“We felt…too much coming from you,” Theon ground out, his magic undulating around him. “Grief and agony. Heart-wrenching sadness. And then…”
“Fury,” Luka supplied. “Ungodly fury, and then we found a goddess exacting her revenge.”
She smiled weakly, working to take back control. That same unsettling feeling from this morning was back.
“Look at you,” Luka went on, circling her now. “Once more covered in blood.”
Look around you, Tessa. When has the outcome ever changed?
Luka paused, feeling her sudden panic. “Tessa?”
She spun, taking in the surroundings.
The stormy skies casting everything in grey.
Dead grass and scorched earth.
Bodies everywhere.
Blood and mud.
The rain.
It hit her then.
That thing that had been nagging at her since they’d come here as she looked around at the fighting and the fallen.
This was her vision.
Every godsdamn time.
This was it.
And they never won.
Not a single time.
A hand cupped her chin, forcing her to look into emerald depths. “What is it, Tessa?” Theon demanded.
“Only one can be left standing,” she whispered, just as blinding light erupted.
She scrambled, casting her power out to grab Theon and Luka. She felt them both, their power reaching for her too.
Then that light swallowed them whole.