Seventy-Seven. Rune
SEVENTY-SEVEN
RUNE
COMING ALIVE WAS LIKE waking up to the world’s wonders.
When Rune opened her eyes, it was dark. But not the darkness of death. This dark was different. Trapped in the black web above her were tiny pricks of light.
Stars, she realized.
All her life, she’d taken them for granted. Why hadn’t she stopped to admire their beauty more often? She should have spent every night staring up at the sky, filled with awe. Knowing that one day, the stars would shine no more.
Rune inhaled. Breath filled her lungs, expanding her chest. It, too, was wondrous. She pushed it out again, into the world, then sucked it back in.
Why hadn’t she known what a precious gift it was, this breath, flowing in and out, over and over, every day?
“Rune?”
Her breath faltered.
Gideon.
His voice poured warmth back into her, melting away the last of Death’s icy hold. She sat up and found him staring at her.
Her Gideon . She wanted to trace every stern line of his face. Wanted to run her fingers through his tangled hair. Wanted to feel the roughness of his cheeks beneath her palms.
The bloody symbols—one for Witch’s Armor , the other for Everlasting —still lingered on his cheeks.
“Alex loves you,” she blurted, wondering where the words had come from. “The day he died, he made me promise to tell you. But I… I never did.”
She felt Alex now, all around her, in the way a dream sometimes lingers in the moments after you wake.
Gideon leaned forward on his knees and cupped the back of her head with his hand. As his forehead touched hers, a shaky laugh escaped him.
“Did he remind you of that just now?” His smile was in his voice.
“I… I don’t know,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around his neck, breathing him in, hugging him close. “Maybe.”
Over Gideon’s shoulder, she saw Seraphine and Antonio kneeling over Cressida’s dead body. Seraphine was whispering something while Antonio held Rune’s spell book aloft for her to read.
Cressida’s corpse burst into black flames. Rune watched them devour the witch queen. Her sister .
Gideon’s arms came around her as she hugged him harder.
When the fire burned out, only a heap of ash remained. Next, Seraphine called up a wind, scattering the ashes into the whirlpool. Washing all remnants of Cressida Roseblood away.
“The other two?” Antonio asked, glancing toward the pool where the corpses of Elowyn and Analise lay beneath the surface. With Cressida dead, her casting signature had disappeared.
The spell protecting them was broken.
“We’ll burn them, too,” said Seraphine, getting to her feet to help drag the sisters out of the water. “Just to be safe.”
Gideon gave Rune a squeeze before letting her go and rising to help them.
When it was done, and all three former witch queens were nothing but ash on the wind, Seraphine glanced at something in the distance.
Rune stood and turned to look. Gideon and Antonio stepped up beside her, watching as six figures appeared at the water’s edge. Each one shaped like a woman, glowing faintly. As if they were made of moonlight.
Rune stared with her mouth agape.
“Is that…?”
Seraphine walked slowly toward them, her humanity receding with every step she took, until she, too, was as bright as the moon.
But she didn’t join them. Not yet. Pausing, she turned to face Rune. The lines of her face were the same, and her hair still billowed like a cloud around her head. But she was flesh and blood no longer; she was something else.
“Goodbye, Rune Winters.”
Her voice was still Seraphine’s, but not Seraphine’s. It was like the wind, howling through a tunnel in the rock. It was the sea in a hurricane. Fierce, mighty.
She touched Rune’s cheek, the pads of her fingers soft as a butterfly’s wings. “Kestrel would be proud.”
And then she was gone. Turning away to join her ancient sisters.
When they were together once more, they disappeared like the stars at dawn. Retreating to the world beyond this one.