2. Valerian
Valerian
The ward will not break, and I am running out of clever.
“Again,” Luka snarls, already halfway to panther, black smoke bleeding off his shoulders. “Hit it again.”
“Hitting it again does nothing,” I tell him, which is true and unwelcome, and he shows me his teeth for it. “This isn’t a wall, you great idiot. It’s keyed to him. To his tier. We could throw ourselves at it until the realm burns out and it would hold.”
“So we find another way.” Gavriel’s voice is a low grind. He has the Auric Shield out, the small gold disc glowing hot in his scarred fist, and it’s pulling him, dragging him towards the black stone like a hound on a scent. “She’s in there. It’s dragging me to her. She’s alive.”
Alive. The word steadies me the way nothing else could.
Because I’ve held that word before, and I’ve lost it before.
Twice now I’ve watched her die. Twice I’ve done the thing that nearly kills me, reached into a dying soul and refused, by will alone, to let it go where I can’t follow.
I told her once that in eons of living I’d never truly loved before her, and it was true.
It’s a terrible thing to learn in your third century, that you had a heart the whole time and simply never met the thing that could break it.
Now I’ve met it. It’s a mouthy bookseller in ridiculous shoes, and she’s on the wrong side of a ward keyed to a Demon older than me.
I will take this fortress apart with my bare hands and my last drop of blood before I let it keep her.
But bare hands won’t do it. Blood might. I take a breath of the stinking air and make myself think instead of feel, which has always been my job in this ridiculous, beloved little war-band. Luka feels. Gavriel guards. Azaan charms and, when he stops pretending he can’t, plans. And I think.
“Azaan,” I say. “The seam.”
He’s already circling, head cocked, blond hair lifting in a wind only he can summon.
“There’s always a seam,” he murmurs. “He’s old, but old means confident, and confident means lazy.
Even a perfect ward has to breathe somewhere.
” He stops. Points to the base of the black stone where the shadows meet the ground.
“There. It’s thin where it meets the earth. The earth’s mine before it’s his.”
“Can you open it?”
“I can widen it.” He grins, and it’s not his flirting grin, it’s the other one, the one that reminds you he can pull the air out of your lungs from across a battlefield.
“You’ll have to hold it while I do. Blood magic in the gap.
Gavriel, that shield of yours is going to want to be first through. Let it.”
“Wasn’t planning on being polite,” Gavriel says.
I kneel in the muck of Sanguisca, press my palm flat to the seam Azaan’s found, and reach for the blood in my own veins, the deep well of it that’s finally, gloriously, full again after months of running on fumes.
She did that. Bringing her back, bonding to her, loving her, it filled us all up.
And now the being who wants her most stands between us and her, and he’ll learn what a full tank costs him.
“On three,” Azaan says. Wind screams down into the crack. My blood answers, violet light spilling from my fingers into the dark. “One.”
Luka drops fully to panther, four hundred pounds of muscle and fury, hellfire licking along his spine.
“Two.”
Gavriel raises the shield, and it flares gold, so bright it hurts, so bright the shadows recoil from it.
I think of her mouth, her filthy laugh, her ridiculous shoes. I think of her dying in my arms with her blood on my hands, twice, and me holding her soul in this realm by will alone because I could not, will not, live in a world she’s left.
Not a third time.
“Three.”
The seam tears open with a sound like the world clearing its throat, and we go through it into the dark, all four of us, to bring our Queen home.