Chapter 42
T he emptiness in my hands where my songbird should be is a sensation I’ll never forget. Hands that have hurt her, and hands that have nurtured her.
Fingers that locked around the delicate skin of her throat, claws that once traced the peaks and valleys of her collarbones. Hands that bound hers in iron, and hands that batted away her nightmares in the darkest of hours.
Hands that should have protected my Mate and did not.
Hands that failed her so completely.
I don’t look over the cliff. I can’t . Can’t bear seeing the brightest light in my life snuffed out from the darkest shadows that haunt it. I should have never pursued her. I knew the risks, and I did it anyway, because that ruinous little witch took every wall I ever constructed around me, and she fucking shattered them. She reduced me to a man that could not breathe if the air was not sweetened with her breath, and now she has rendered me a man unable to breathe at all.
Anger bleeds into my chest, quickly eclipsing my pain with a wrath that will either take Aeverie’s life or my own, but I will not allow my Mate’s sacrifice to be in vain. Even with Adelphia’s magic bound to mine once more, we are still gravely outnumbered.
But I must try. Must protect her family at least, and when all else is lost, I will find Aeverie, and I will use my final breath to kill that fucking elf.
I leap back onto the horse, and we bound back the way we came. The beast howls in my veins, but my control doesn’t slip, Adelphia’s magic suppressing that primal side of me once more. For the best, because if it wasn’t, there’s no way I’d be able to fight without four feet on the ground.
Time is a blur. Every thunderous beat of the horse’s hooves beneath me an inch I drove the knife further into her chest. Every bite of wind against my face a nagging theory. Was her final thought, as she plummeted through the caliginous night, that I had failed her? Was she hoping I’d catch her? Did she lean back, expecting my hands to vice around her waist and pull her gaping chest against my own?
I push her out of my mind as we speed back towards the heart of the war, the sounds of clashing metal scraping across my bones. With a nudge of my boots, I urge us into the battle, unsheathing one of the swords on my back.
I try to force her out, but she’s there—her voice echoing my own as I call orders, her magic joining mine as I rain a storm of ice and fire across the battlefield. Her hand covers mine with every thrust of my sword, and her authority rings clear with my own as I make the calls to retreat. We need distance between us and those ballistae, and we need it quickly.
I don’t know how much time passes. It could be minutes, it could be hours. Hell, it could be fucking years. All I know is she never leaves me for a minute of it.
Probably for the best, because it is thoughts of her that guides every sweep of destruction from my palm as I work to create a barrier between us and them, affording my army critical moments to retreat.
It works, for a while.
But they keep fucking coming. For every hundred we kill, a thousand more are charging forward to replace them, while our own disadvantaged numbers reduce further. If exhaustion seeps into my muscles, I don’t feel it. Don’t feel anything other than resistance as my blade cleaves through muscle, the warmth in my hands and forearms where my magic crackles and spits.
But it’s not going to be enough.
There’s too many. Just too fucking many.
I slice through one more on my left before turning to head back the other way, to where they’ve started breaking through the barrier and?—
A high-pitched scream rends the night. A fiendish, eldritch shriek that turns my blood to frost.
I jerk towards the sound, half expecting that our ritual on the cliff somehow summoned a hound from the depths of Hell, but it isn’t a mongrel that skulks through the inferno.
It’s a demon herself.
She wears a gown of liquid red. Every single inch of her is smeared with blood, her white hair now unbound and threaded with the regret of anyone that dared to stand in her path.
And now it is my heart that stutters, each pump surely its last as it pounds to an arrhythmic beat.
Her Black Grace, I once called her, but that is never who she was destined to become.
It’s not what I was created to do , she had said, and my Mate had never been more right.
Because gliding through the flames in a gown of murder, my songbird is exactly who she was always born to be.
A dark shrike.
The Red Queen.