Chapter 46
Forty-Six
“Kill her!” Malakai shouts at Davrin, though his attention is riveted on Falcen, almost hysterically gleeful as Falcen changes before his eyes. “That’s all you need to gain full control!”
Davrin drags me backward, his purple-veined arms like iron bands around my waist. “Sorry, Skid Mark. I have nothing against you, but you heard Keeper Malakai.”
Falcen’s warning growl rises to an ear-splitting roar. He launches into the air, wings beating with such force that the sand below him erupts into a blinding cloud, making me squint and avert my face.
But I still have enough sight to spot his massive form cutting through the gritty haze, heading straight for us.
Davrin curses and shoves me aside, bracing for impact. But Falcen soars past him, talons extended toward a different target.
Malakai.
The Keeper backs up, eyes wide while summoning a barrage of soul-spheres. They orbit his body in a defensive constellation.
“Kill her and control him!” he commands Davrin through the glare of his magick. “Now, boy!”
Davrin charges at Falcen again, black-purple light streaming from his fists. “You’re mine, you fucking mongrel!”
“Get everyone out!” I scream at Rook when I spot her near the arena’s edge.
She listens, turning to usher younger students toward the same gateway Falcen entered through.
Falcen’s wingspan creates a backdraft so strong, I’m knocked to my knees. Sand blinds me as I roll to avoid being trampled by fleeing students, guards, and Keepers.
When I wipe my eyes clear, Falcen hovers in the air over Malakai, no longer recognizable as the man who found me in the woods. His uniform is in shreds, his entire body gleaming with dark iridescence, his deadly sharp talons turning each finger into a scythe.
“You did this to me,” Falcen snarls, voice layered with inhuman registers.
Malakai scuttles back, soul-spheres spinning as he keeps his attention on Falcen.
“We perfected you,” he corrects. “It’s your stubborn resistance and the tie to the girl who caused the corruption to spread faster!”
I scramble to my feet, cobalt light streaming from my veins as I summon my halberd again. Davrin leaps for me, but I swing hard, connecting with his shoulder. He staggers, purple veins blazing across his face.
“Run, Verily!” Rook screams from the open gate, motioning for me to join her.
But I can’t leave.
Malakai summons another barrage of soul-spheres, larger, brighter, deadlier. “Stand down, Elite Reaves! This is a direct order!”
Falcen laughs, a sound so broken and wrong it chills my blood. “I am not your Elite anymore.”
Falcen dives toward Malakai, his wings cutting through the air before folding tight against his body, streamlining his plummet toward Malakai.
The Keeper’s face contorts with fear, his confident sneer dissolving as he fires sphere after sphere at the descending monster.
Each shot misses, Falcen twisting midair with impossible grace. His arm extends, talons black and gleaming in the arena torchlight.
“Control the beast!” Malakai screams at Davrin, panic breaking his voice. “I made you to manipulate him, not stare gobsmacked at him!”
Davrin’s veins erupt with light as he extends his hands toward Falcen. A wave of magick shoots from his fingertips, racing upward. It catches Falcen mid-dive, wrapping around him like chains of lightning.
Falcen falters, wings spasming as he fights the invisible restraints. His roar turns into a pained howl. He fights, thrashing in the air, but the weight proves too much.
He crashes to the arena floor, sand exploding around him.
I scream his name, running toward him, his wings lying twisted at awkward angles, membranes torn and leaking black fluid into the sand, but Davrin intercepts me with alarming speed.
His hands lock around my arms. “You’re coming with me.”
Falcen struggles to rise, wings twitching, talons scraping furrows in the sand. Each movement seems to cost him tremendous effort, as if Davrin’s magick has turned his limbs to lead. Black blood oozes from a dozen wounds across his scaled body.
I’m dragged closer to Falcen, my heels carving twin trails in the sand. I kick and twist in Davrin’s unnaturally strong hold, but it proves useless.
“Look at him,” Davrin says to me, voice dropping to a mock whisper. “Your handsome Elite. Your protector. He can’t even stand.”
Falcen raises his head, and I swear I still see the man within the beast when he holds my stare, his eyes saying more than his mutilated mouth ever could.
Falcen lunges only to collapse again.
“Excellent work, Elite Rider Koll,” Malakai calls, striding off the balcony and into the arena’s center with renewed arrogance.
Davrin’s lips curl into a smile as he kicks my side, sending me sprawling next to Falcen. I reach for him, fingers stretching toward his scaled face, but Davrin stomps on my wrist. Bones grind together, and I bite back a scream.
“Get up,” Davrin commands Falcen, his voice resonating with strange harmonics. “On your knees.”
Falcen’s body jerks, almost as if he’s having a seizure. His wings slam against the sand, gouging trenches, and his fangs grind until blood sprays from his mouth. Davrin’s magick coils tighter around him, digging into muscle, twisting him like a toy on a breaking string.
The sounds he’s making. As if watching Falcen endure such agony isn’t torture enough, I’ve heard those groans before.
Heathen’s body shuddered as his soul-weapon blinked out, his eyes rolling white while I stretched my budding magick to the brink, struggling to revive him. Falcen had dragged me away then. He’d told me to stop. He’d taken the sin of ending it onto himself.
Now it’s him sharing Heathen’s fate. No longer human, more than a halfling, but not enough of a Void creature to survive.
And no one moves to spare him.
One of Falcen’s eyes remains stubbornly blue amid the corruption, fixed on mine with such visceral anguish I can hardly breathe.
Sand grinds into my cheek where I’ve fallen, and pain radiates up my arm from my crushed wrist. I push up with my good hand.
Blood streaks my palm, bright against the soul-magick crawling under my skin, my anguish scorching Ember’s every nerve.
She doesn’t want me to save him. And I want to burn this academy to the ground if it means I can keep him alive.
This is the shape of his end. Let him fall into it. Allow him the peace of rising to meet Lux, she says.
Falcen’s body jerks again, harder this time, his spine arching until I hear something give. A sound rips out of him that doesn’t belong to him anymore. Davrin’s hold buckles with the force of it, his arms trembling as his magick strains to hold on.
“Hold him,” Malakai snaps, but his rebuke is quiet, as if this is the only moment in his life that’s ever mattered.
“I’m—trying—” Davrin grits out, sweat rolling down his temple as the veins along his arms flare brighter.
Falcen convulses, head snapping back, blood frothing at his lips. That single broken sound slashes through me worse than any wound I’ve taken tonight.
You refuse to allow me to use my magick to keep him alive, I say to Ember. But you’ve said nothing about using my magick to do the opposite.
Verily, don’t.
“No,” I rasp to Malakai, dragging myself closer across the sand. My good hand slips against the smear of Falcen’s blood, the grit embedding in my skin. “He’s not yours.”
I rise to my knees in front of Falcen, pressing my palm to the rise and fall of his chest. His heartbeat slams unevenly against my touch, racing, failing.
“Falcen.” My voice fractures around his name. “I can’t keep you from this. But I can stop the pain.”
“Get the fuck away from my new pet,” Davrin snarls, risking splitting his attention and spreading the fingers of one hand toward me.
“Stand down, Rider,” Malakai cuts in. He tilts his head, his cunning, bicolored stare bouncing between Falcen and me. “Let the remnant try. I’d like to see how she thinks she can save what is truly unsalvageable.”
Falcen shudders under my hand, his body caught between spasms and collapse, every convulsion pulling him further from what he was. The sight of it makes me want to cry, because I’ve seen it before, in another pit, from another boy who didn’t come back.
“I’m not trying to save you,” I whisper so only Falcen can hear, hot tears trailing down my cheeks.
Falcen reads the truth in my crestfallen expression with a clarity that smashes every lie I’ve ever told myself about not being in love with him.
I see myself reflected in his inhuman eye—gold, blue, black, an eclipse devouring the last light at the edge of night.
Falcen knows what comes next. He welcomes it.
Not because he wants to die, but because suffering as the academy’s creation is worse than ending as himself.
My fingers splay across his hard, scaled muscle, his stuttering heartbeat trapped beneath the mutated armor the academy forced on him.
The secret gold in my blood boils up, out, through.
It floods my hand, chasing along the seam where Falcen’s skin has split into scales and claws, hunting the black rot that writhes under his hide.
It’s agony, like pouring my own soul into a wound that will never close.
Ember shrieks, thrashing inside me. Stop. You don’t know what you’re absorbing.
I clamp down harder. Then tell me.
I cannot. I am bound. You weren’t meant—
Her voice buckles, shreds, then drops to nothing. Falcen groans, sagging into me. I cradle him, pressing my mouth to his, and push. Gold floods from me, tunneling deeper, slicing through the threads that bind him here.
Malakai and Davrin are distant, ravenous maws. Davrin snarls his surprise behind me, but I ignore him. Malakai’s voice is a distant insect somewhere behind the wall of gold ringing my mind. I only care about the rattling, dying breath of the man I love.
“Veilbreaker,” Falcen manages to whisper against my lips.