Chapter Fourteen
AVA-MARIE
I knew what had happened before anyone told me otherwise.
I shot upright in bed, breathing hard. It was just after daybreak on the first day of February.
I’d only been sleeping for a few hours, gone to bed after I’d threatened Cameron, but I hadn’t been able to sleep.
My back had been aching all night, signaling some harsh arrival of a new reality.
The sun still shone, and I heard birds chirping, but I knew this beautiful day was for nothing.
There was a decaying rot in my gut that made me feel so sick I could barely stand to sit up straight.
My intuition told me the truth before a single person had to say a word.
The Elven Gate was gone. My friends had lost. I sensed it somewhere deep within my soul that everything we’d worked for had been destroyed.
Did that mean they were all dead?
I pulled myself into my chair and got dressed in a hurry, throwing on a loose sundress before racing out of my suite.
The Ladies’ Court was deserted. I entered the main halls of the palace, and everything appeared calm.
Guards did their morning patrols and Elvish nobles greeted me, which I ignored.
No one had gotten any bad news yet, but I knew it was coming.
“Ava.” I heard Ez’s voice and stiffened. He had the same stark, dreadful look that I bore.
“What do you know?” I demanded.
“Nothing, but something’s not right. I woke up about ten minutes ago, and I never get up this early. It was like I was shocked out of bed,” Ez replied. “The world just… doesn’t feel right today. Something’s way off.”
“I feel it, too.” Whatever had happened was big. He joined me as we searched the palace together, looking for someone, anybody—
We found them in the gardens. Marcus, Danny and Charlie— thank the ancestors, Charlie— were near the giant fountain, covered in a variety of mud and bile.
The swollen bruises and blood coating Charlie’s face confirmed that something terrible had happened.
Marcus was tearing at his hair, and Danny was on his hands and knees, vomiting up the remnants of his last meal of blood.
Oberi had his tail tucked between his legs, ears flattened in defeat.
Charlie shook. He barely looked able to stand as he wrapped his arms around his torso, lip trembling. Everyone was sobbing. That’s how I knew it was bad. Charlie never cried unless things were as terrible as they could get, and he was bawling now.
My eyes searched everywhere for my best friend, but she wasn’t around.
“Fuck you, Charlie!” I’d never heard Marcus sound so broken. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, his hands balled tightly into shaking fists. “I need to find her!”
“There’s nothing we can do for her, Marcus,” Charlie whispered, his tone signaling we were at an end. “She took off on her own. Locating her now would be impossible.”
“How dare you drag me back here. You had no right!” Marcus fell to his knees, covering up his face.
“This is the first place she’ll come back to. There’s nothing else we can do,” Charlie pleaded.
Panic strangled my heart to the point it couldn’t beat. “Where the fuck is Kallie?”
“She portaled off,” Marcus whimpered. “She’s in Malovia right now, looking for Kaz, and Charlie wouldn’t let me go after her! He just had to portal us back here.”
“You’re damn lucky I could,” Charlie shouted back. “Do you know how hard it is for my Elf powers to work against the ocean’s surface? Be grateful I could get us off that damn island at all!”
“We never should’ve left!” Marcus growled. “We should’ve stayed and waited for Kallie to return!”
“We don’t know where she went, Marcus! Malovia is an entire country, and she could be anywhere!” Charlie insisted. “We need to stick together right now!”
If Kallie was in Malovia, that was better than her being hurt. She could take care of herself, but I was terrified that she wasn’t with us now. Something awful must’ve happened to make her run off to look for her brother. “What’s going on?”
“We lost, Ava,” Charlie moaned. “The Warden opened the Elven Gate.”
A cold chill knotted inside of me, wrapping around my waist and dragging me down to a place where I couldn’t fight back and there was no escape.
I knew deep down it had happened. But I didn’t want to believe it. “No. You… you’re lying. You’re still here— he didn’t kill you.”
“I’m certain he let us live so we could tell you what happened…
how we lost. The Warden hates you more than any of us, and he wouldn’t be satisfied with merely wiping us out.
He’s got to play his mind games with you, because that’s the kind of sick fuck he is.
” Charlie gasped between his tears. “We’re basically insects to him now.
Too weak and insignificant to bother dealing with. ”
The Warden wouldn’t have left my friends behind if I was there. He cared if I lived— the queen cockroach, in his eyes. He’d have blown us all up if I had been there, but since I was absent, he’d rushed off to the afterlife without bothering to care about what happened to my friends.
Maybe it was a good thing I hadn’t gone after all. It was probably the only reason my friends were still here.
“He took the keys from us and went through the Gate to the afterlife. It was destroyed once he crossed through, so the Gate is useless to us now,” Charlie moaned.
“There’s no way for us to mend the broken boundary.
Souls can’t get into the afterlife now, ever.
He ascended to godhood. He’s unstoppable. ”
“We got the keys from the wreckage, but they’re worthless.
There’s no magic in them anymore. They might as well be artifacts,” Danny croaked out, tossing the Divinity Keys onto the grass.
He sounded completely heartbroken— he wiped his mouth to shakily stand, drying away tears with the heel of his palm.
I stared at the keys, all seven of them together, and lost all hope.
I wasn’t magical anymore, but even I saw that the keys had lost their powerful sheen.
They were nothing more than hunks of metal now.
Dread consumed me until I was colder than a corpse.
I wasn’t sure how much time we had left now that the Warden had achieved his goal.
There was nothing standing in his way from coming to Ilamanthe and turning the city to ashes.
We were all fated for death. It was only a matter of minutes until we met it.
Shadows elongated against the sunrise. I felt relieved as I saw Kallie rush into the gardens, followed by her twin brother, Kazim, and his mate, Sigrid.
Kazim and Sigrid were supposed to be stationed in Malovia, leading the fae against The Mission, but it looked like Kallie had left through a portal to bring them to Ilamanthe as soon as she could.
The moment he saw her, Marcus grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Kallie, what the hell were you thinking? You can’t just run off like that and not tell me where you’re going! Do you have any idea how terrified I was for you?!”
“I had to get my brother,” Kallie snapped, pushing him off. “I wasn’t going to leave him to wait for the Warden!”
“You just yanked us through a portal with no explanation!” Kazim burst. “What’s going on, sis?”
“The Warden beat us, that’s what.” Kallie broke, her voice snapping as her eyes watered.
“We couldn’t stop him. He opened the Elven Gate and took all its power, which means he’s going to wipe out everything.
I had to get to you before he reached Dolinska, because he’s going to crush it to pieces, if he hasn’t already. ”
“So you save us and leave everyone else behind?” Kazim demanded. “Our friends are back there!”
“There was no time, Kaz! I had to make a choice!” Kallie cried. “I didn’t have time to find all of you, so I took who I could!”
Tears shone behind Kazim’s glasses, and he bitterly turned away. “I’m no king worthy of the name if I flee my country and my people are left behind to suffer. I should be going down with them.”
“You’ll get your turn,” Danny said, sounding sick. My heart collapsed into my abdomen.
“I only bought us a few minutes.” Kallie put her face in her hands. “But I had to take the risk so I could see you again, one last time. I… I didn’t want to die without you.”
Kazim’s face fell, and he reached out to pull Kallie into a hug. “I’m sorry. If the world has to end, at least we’ll be going out of it the same way we came in. Together.”
Kallie nodded. Marcus was crying harder than before.
“Kallie,” Marcus said weakly. “I thought I wasn’t going to be there with you.”
Marcus knew better than to hope Kallie would survive what was coming. He just didn’t want her to perish without him being there to hold her.
Kallie’s face crumpled, and she reached out to Marcus. He took her into his embrace, while Kazim enclosed his arms around Sigrid.
None of us wanted to face the end alone. At least if we were all together, maybe it wouldn’t be so scary when the Warden finally came for us.
All of us jumped as we heard an earth-shattering boom echo through the air. It sounded like someone was dropping nuclear explosions overhead, and the bombs were going off over the city. Boom. Boom. Boom.
I looked up. My guts twisted as I saw the shimmer of a ripple ricochet across the surface of my shield, which held as fire rained upon it from above.
The palace awoke with wailing cries. Screams could be heard from the city as the explosions continued, growing in volume and intensity.
“What’s happening?” Marcus’ voice shook as he looked up at the shield, watching the ripples swarm across the magical surface like crashing waves.
“It’s the Warden. He’s trying to get in.” Charlie clenched his fists as he said the words. “He’s destroying the shield as we speak.”