Chapter 36 #2
His lips rounded in a plea he never birthed before I snapped his neck the way Dorian had snapped my mother’s.
All fighting stopped as Kendrick dropped to his side and lay still. His face was frozen in a mask of fright and I stood and watched as the wind kicked up.
It fluttered against his lashes, his open eyes, and tugged pieces of him with it when it moved on. His body became ash as time caught up with him and took back everything he’d stolen. The true cost.
The last bits flew away and any evidence that Kendrick Grimaldi had ever existed disappeared.
The old me would have spat on him as a sendoff. I probably would have cried for good measure, for everything he’d put me through and what I’d lost along the way. If there was a world out there where he’d be forced to endure every ounce of pain he’d inflicted—
Well, I’d be satisfied if he ended up there.
Orbs danced together overhead, a trio of shifting violet hues. I glanced over at the approaching figures. Dorian Jade was flanked by a cadre of direwolves bound by thick chains. They strained against the leashes and snapped their teeth at open air.
“You again?” He braced for me to attack him, before his gaze landed on the spot where Kendrick fell. “Pity. He was a brute but effective. You weren’t quite subtle about his murder, were you?”
I offered no bellow of challenge. No indication his taunts rattled my bones or made me shrivel away from him. I merely raised a hand.
Dorian grinned, smug to the bitter end. “Well?”
Once, I wanted to make him fucking scream. Now, I just wanted him gone. Permanently.
This is too easy.
I offered him nothing, no words of defiance, no explanation or justification. The glow wrapped around him. Magic grew until flashes of light had anyone nearby ducking to avoid being blinded. Dorian did scream, but only once. The sound cut short as I pressed my power fully into him.
When the light finally receded, a marble statue rested where flesh and blood had stood. Vines burst from the earth and bound his legs, arms, and shoulders, flowering once they rooted in place. I nodded, pleased with the result.
There would be no ultimate fight. His final stand ended before it began.
A twist of my fingers shifted the direwolves into statues too. Then I formed a garden fountain around the lot of them. Blue water trickled up from the ground and trails of it snaked from Dorian’s fingers like spouts. Water filled the bowl and I snapped my power off the moment it reached the lip.
The courtyard was silent. I realized I’d attracted a crowd.
Even Captain Hezarwick stood with the others, watching in awe as I lifted a hand and the glow spread, stilling the last of Dorian’s fighters, releasing them from his tyranny.
No more, this is done. There would be no more begging for mercy, no more looking to Jade for answers from his hateful tongue.
A smile spread and I glanced into the cloudy sky. Are you still proud of me?
“Oh my goddess—Tavi? No. It’s—Tavi!”
Mike crashed into me, his grip brutal at the small of my back as he hauled me against him like he was afraid the air might steal me away again. His chest was slick with drying blood, heat and iron and him—goddess, him—flooding my senses. Summer forest. Moss. Living green things.
It hit like a blow, and the bond between us, the one I’d thought impossible, stirred. It snapped and woke, not a thread or a pull, but a claim.
He was mine. Dying hadn’t changed anything.
The bond between us tore through me, instinctive and absolute, and my heart answered with equal force. His.
My hands fisted in his shirt to drag him closer even as he already had me pinned there, like neither of us understood the concept of close enough anymore.
His wild, uneven pulse hammered against mine until both found their rhythm. Mike choked on a breath. “You’re warm,” he rasped into my ear, voice breaking, disbelieving. “You’re…fuck, you’re real. Tavi?”
“I’m real,” I said, and couldn’t hide my joy.
Mike jerked, clutching me harder, then his hands flew to my face. “Don’t leave me again. Okay? Don’t do it, please.”
“I won’t.” The assurance was fierce and instinctive. I pressed closer to him. “I’m not going anywhere again. I’m here.”
Whatever he saw on my face wrecked him all over again. “You came back to me.” Relief and reverence, disbelief. Something dangerously close to devotion.
My chest tightened. “Where else would I go? You can’t get rid of me so easily. I’m like a cockroach.”
His breath broke like I’d struck him. “I called to you,” he said, hoarse. “I didn’t…I didn’t know if you—”
“I heard you.” In a dream. In my soul.
“I looked everywhere for you once I healed, but you were already gone.” His voice went low. “Kendrick had you, didn’t he? You belonged to him.”
I didn’t pull away. “Never. I belong to you.”
The bond surged again, hotter this time, sharper. Answering. Yes.
His grip tightened. “You turned Dorian Jade into a planter.”
I grinned. “He’s better as a decoration, don’t you agree?”
And then I kissed him and it was hungry and fierce and claiming. A death’s worth of absence collapsed into a desperate, searing point of contact before his mouth opened with a broken sound.
His hands tangled in my hair to pull me tighter and fuse us together. Heat flooded through me, through him, through the space between us until I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began.
Alive. Mine. We were here together. At least until the world forced itself in again with the drone of too many voices, too loud.
“She holds all three magics—”
“That’s Spirit—”
“She crossed to the Summerlands—no one crosses back…”
“A goddess!”
The word slithered through the air, heavy and wrong.
I broke the kiss on a sharp breath, but Mike didn’t let me go. His forehead dropped to mine, his grip still iron-strong, like the idea of distance between us had become unbearable.
Around us, the crowd shuffled and then stilled. And then one by one, they knelt.
Not to Crown Prince Michael Thornwood.
Not to us.
To me.