Chapter 50 #2
She huffed a shaky laugh, leaning her forehead against his chest. “I was aiming for its mouth.”
Brand joined her, laughing at the absurdity of it. “Practice makes perfect. We’ll make a warrior of you yet.”
“I fucking hope not.”
Pet and Sorcha loped into the square, their fur splattered with black ooze. Luna squealed, a shudder running through her as she tossed out a shield to coast along their bodies, scraping it away. That’s when they noticed Sorcha was hobbling, her foreleg bent in the wrong direction.
“Shite, Thad is hurt. Put me down, Brand.”
He did, hoping to the Sisters she didn’t look around her and notice the others who hadn’t been as fortunate. The sorrow would have to wait for after, when they could allow their mourning to begin. For now, he could still hear the chorus of battle in the area of the city nearest the shore.
Mag shifted, uncaring of his nudity or the muck and shattered rocks beneath his feet. “Vann and Lyriat have it well in hand,” he said. “Last one.”
Brand kept his eye on Luna, crouched in front of a panting Sorcha as her prismatic power flared. She’d be needing him and the gift he could offer her, but there’d be no sleep for her tonight.
As if on cue, the violence died down and the cries became audible. The weeping and wailing, like ghosts haunting the decimated streets. The reek of death and pain. It was easy to ignore in the thick of it, to block it out and focus on the task at hand.
This. This was the worst part. This was when she’d be most needed.
Luna kept one hand on Sorcha’s flank as they ambled over, a limp in her own step now. It was the wary, almost suspicious, feeling down the bond that got to him first, though. A guarded trepidation that set his own mind to spinning.
“Mag?”
“Aye?”
“Do you feel like that was… Do you get the impression…”
Fuck, Brand didn’t want to say it out loud, like speaking a curse into existence.
It had taken them hours to fell the first dreadbeast. Now, in the same amount of time, they’d taken down a dozen? A dozen that had been far, far larger and more disastrous.
The sense that it’d been too easy intensified when he saw Luna stop dead in her tracks maybe fifteen yards away, head tilting as her gaze went distant.
Magnus winced, hands going to his ears with a curse.
Dread, swift and staggering, twisted in his gut like a rusty knife.
And then he heard it.
That same high-pitched, keening whistle from the chasm edge. Ominous. A promise of looming destruction from not one, but twelve difference directions.
“Luna! Your shield!” Brand bellowed, uncaring that his voice splintered as he surged into motion to reach her.
He was too late.
With an explosion that must have rocked all of the Montrealm, every last dreadwyrm imploded.
A wave of absolute ruination followed, leveling half the city around him. Brand was thrown mid-step, his body flying across the square and slamming onto a pile of rubble. Even his horns hadn’t been enough to protect his head, a sharp corner cracking into his skull hard enough to steal his senses.
He’d thought the sounds before were haunting. They were nothing in comparison to when his ears popped clear and he was bombarded by so many screams that it wrenched a sob from his lungs.
Lyriat’s roar rose above the din, a broken, devastating sound that only wrecked him further.
Luna.
Brand could barely see through the billowing dust, a cloud of deep sienna that may as well have been blood. Stumbling, dizzy, he tripped down the broken boulders beneath him and followed the bond where it led, that tension pulling them together.
Feeling it was the only thing keeping him sane. Surely, if anything had happened to her, it would be gone.
Surely.
A howl went up, followed by a growl. Sorcha.
Something dark flew past him, and those growls turned to violent snarling. Snapping barks meant to threaten. When he heard Lyriat’s cries of alarm, summoning any who could stand, he didn’t care anymore that he was practically blind—he ran.
Brand broke through the veil of red, the wasted square clear before him.
There, in its center, was a writhing mass of black hovering over Luna’s prone form, completely unperturbed by the feral Sorcha. It seemed to turn to him, and then it spoke—layered, like a chorus of clawing nails. “Catch me if you can, Brandir.”
“No. No!”
It lifted her body, swallowing it, and flew up the high road towards the castle. He kept his eyes on it only long enough to see it disappear into his own fucking tower.
Brand didn’t think as he sprinted for the portal on the other side, hoping it had survived. He had to get to her.
Brand burst into his chamber, half-crazed and searching.
There was little relief in finding Luna sprawled on the bed, even when he saw the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Something else was there. He could feel it.
Brandishing his greatsword, he took tentative steps towards her. Scanning. Sweeping. His muddled senses alert. He was all too aware of his exhausted limbs. The throbbing at the base of his skull and the blood trickling down his back.
There. Movement in his peripheral vision had him whipping his head towards the fireplace on the opposite wall.
The shadows, seemingly innocent as they clung to the nooks and crannies of their bedroom, began to writhe—just like the ones in the Dread Chasm. They pulled from every crevice, gathering themselves into a pool on the floorboards like a shifting sea of evil.
Heart pounding, Brand raised his sword and put himself between it and Luna.
He spared a glance back at her, at the crooked, almost lifeless heap of her, just to be sure—
With a blast of fetid air, a great screech rent the room and the shadows sprang at him, whipping his flesh and leaving oozing gashes in their wake. On a savage bellow, he swung his sword in a downward arc, his blade landing with a booming thud that shook the high tower.
Light poured from him as his muscles bulged, cutting, slashing, stabbing, his biceps burning with the effort.
It was like attacking a valley mist—pointless, hopeless. The infinite darkness of it dodged and dissipated, reaching out in lightning-fast wisps to rip at his flesh, wholly unaffected by his labors.
Sweat and blood poured from his brow, breaths ragged.
A pale flash of movement caught his attention. “Luna, don’t—”
He was too late to avoid the single, thick tendril that snaked out from the center of the mass, wrapping around his neck and lifting him from the floor.
Luna loosed a guttural shriek, the sound a battle cry even as it ripped his heart from his chest. He was meant to protect her. Meant to shield her from all harm. Instead, his legs flailed uselessly beneath him as the shadow pulled him closer.
It loomed over him, wafting a rotten stench of burnt flowers that promised only despair. He drained as it squeezed, his light abandoning him as the rage left his body and he reverted to his lesser self.
The involuntary transformation was agonizing. Horns and fangs forcibly shoved back into his flesh. Skin tightening and clamping down on his muscles as they spasmed.
His sword slipped from his impotent grasp, disappearing back to the ether before it could clatter to the ground, too much of his hope with it.
Luna vaulted from the bed, white-hot threads at her fingertips.
Her long tresses spun into the air as an orb formed in her hands, a perfect match to the silver swirl in her vengeful eyes.
She was magnificent in that moment, landing with preternatural grace as she unleashed her colossal power, blinding him and washing the room in pounding light.
The shadows shrieked and cowered beneath her onslaught, blast after blast slicing through its inky depths. Hemorrhaging magic as it poured and poured from her in defense of him.
He wanted to scream when he saw the first stumble. The first gasp and her pallid skin. The signs of her weakening.
But, by burning fucking Solyrian, how she’d fought.
Brand strained with everything he had left, trying to get free—until the shadow began leaking itself into him, filling his body with lifeless weight.
With the sound of Luna’s labored breath in his ears, a crooning note sounded, laced with a chorus of countless wails as it grated and echoed through the chamber.
“Shhh, Brandir. Calm,” a voice of the same whispered. “Rest. This was a hard day for you.”
Shock tore an unwilling whimper from his burning lungs.
“You’re surprised, but you shouldn’t be. I promised I would never leave you.” With blinding speed, a second arm of shadow branched into massive talons and latched onto Luna’s torso, wrapping over her shoulders and around her waist. “Not like she did.”
“Please,” Brand wheezed, hardly a sound at all.
“I’m so sorry. I know what she means to you, but I need your help, remember?”
He couldn’t. He couldn’t fucking remember—not what she was implying, not why that voice was familiar beneath its layers—and that was the problem.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to do that if you’re worried about her.”
“No, no, no.” He felt his lips move, but there was nothing to hear.
Luna gasped as the talons squeezed, followed by the worst sound he’d ever heard in his fucking life—the tell-tale pop of his mate’s spine snapping in half.
As the crack shot through the room, he tried to cry out—he fucking tried—but the shadows were choking him. Forcing their way down his throat.
The darkness lifted Luna upwards, her body bowing like a marionette until she was thrust towards him in a dizzying blur and jerked to a stop mere inches away.
The force of it flung her arms and legs forward, a single, perfect finger sliding against his cheek before a series of deafening snaps told him her limbs had just been wrenched from their sockets.
Tears flowed down her cheeks, and he would have given anything to be able to comfort her. To wipe those tears away and whisper in her ear. To not have that violent brush of her hand be the last time he felt the bliss of her moonlight skin.
He’d just gotten her back. Just had the best night of his life. How was this happening? How?
The shadows halted their invasion, allowing him a single breath before he felt the first razor-sharp fingers of it tunneling through his insides, raking over muscle and mind.
His gaze locked with Luna’s, a tear slipping down his cheek as a dark cloud crept in from the edges of his vision.
He tried to blink it away. To hold on to the blessed sight of her even as he fought his pain and hopelessness.
Puffy, reddened eyes stared back at him, blue as the sea and holding a wealth of tenderness in their depths. His favorite fucking color.
“I love you,” she whispered, smiling despite the fearful trembling of her lips.
No. That wasn’t supposed to be the way he first heard those words from her perfect mouth.
He tried so hard to reach for her, to offer her anything in return, but a stark cold was wending its way through his veins, his body shaking as consciousness began to slip away.
He’d thought the Veil would be softer, more welcoming. Had expected Luna at his side when he crossed over, her hand in his own ages from now as they went together into their joyful eternity.
Not this weeping loneliness slashing its way through the hole in his chest. Not this freezing lethargy.
One last look, then. One last glimpse of her before he died so he could take the sight with him.
Brand forced his lids to open and found himself sprawled on the floor, the wooden floorboards scraping against his back as the sickening sound of Luna’s choking sob seized his attention.
“I know this seems unfair, my perfect boy, but you must say goodbye.”
Luna was snatched backwards into the seething black mass on a blood-curdling scream, thrashing and baring her fangs. Even fractured and ruined, she resisted, her wild eyes darting and searching until she found him and calmed.
“She’s done all she can for us.”
Nothing in this world—not the creature, not even the Sisters themselves—could have stopped the roar of denial that shredded his vocal cords and took half his soul with it when one of those spikes of shadow thrust down through her torso before tossing her aside.
An enormous wave of black surged upwards and the glass dome above shattered along with his heart, pelting him in countless, jagged pieces as darkness finally consumed him.