Chapter 77
The stone wall seals off behind me, and a fleet of Zo soldiers pile out of three other arriving vehicles.
“Has your ghost king returned to you yet?” Jasper reads the look on my face well and motions for me to climb in. “I didn’t think so. Come on now. We have places to be, and time is pressing, I’m afraid,” he says with too much glee.
Dae. My insides twist. Where is he?
When I don’t jump into the rumbling car, he says, “My guards did mention the bondslave, didn’t they?”
I scowl.
“Ah, they did. Good, so I don’t have to. Get. In.”
I slide in on white leather next to Helina.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I release the full force of my father’s glare, and she shrinks in her seat. A moment later, she whispers, “You don’t understand the love for a child from a parent.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
She flinches away from me again when the deep-red markings on my arms begin to swirl, but the void gem on my neck is still running currents of agony down my spine, disconnecting myself from any sort of power.
Jasper slides in with a smile.
I hide the shake in my hands by clenching my fists, and despite the fatigue in my body and the collar chipping away at my sanity, I keep my eyes on the road as it leads us toward Zo.
“The Zo heir is Hollam,” I say, my mind working.
Jasper rolls his eyes. “Decoy.”
“Why?”
He flicks a speck of dust from his white suit. “If you’re half as smart as you think you are, you’ll figure it out.”
I narrow my eyes. “You know about the prophecy regarding the blood of the Zo heir.”
His grin becomes lethal. “I know all there is to know. About prophecies, about Dagen, and about you, through his cold, tortured mind. You cruel little beast.”
He brushes a finger along my cheek. I’d bite that finger off if not for Yisabell. I slam my mental walls down.
He leans forward, glaring at Helina who lifts her chin.
“I will admit,” he says, “waging your life on that schedule arrangement certainly paid off.” He tugs a box out from his suit jacket and opens it to reveal a white, gleaming First-Made Vessel. “The Zem’s really are prideful to a fault, aren’t they? Kazem gave me the location of an abandoned mine his father visits in exchange for my father’s vote of a duel change and a window of time where Dagen wouldn’t be with you.”
Helina stiffens at my other side.
“But look, here you are alive and primed for my next arrangement.”
“What arrangement?” I grind out.
“The First-Mades can only be worn together if they are placed at the same time,” he scoffs. “The ancient ones did like to complicate things, but no matter. I’ve made a deal with a god. I will hand you over, and she’ll kill your possessed father when he inevitably comes to save you.”
“My father won’t come,” I snarl. “Ooh. Touchy subject.” He grins.
I close my eyes and try to think past the never-ending pain surging through my body. “Which god?”
He grins. “Oh, you’ll find out, Nizzara.”
When we pull under the white arches of the Zo palace, I’m yanked out of the car by a Zo guard. When he goes to clasp manacles around my wrists, a black, wavy sword sinks through his chest, red blood soaking his pristine uniform. He drops to the ground, revealing Halix behind him, my father standing next to her.
His eyes are his. When they land on the collar around my neck, they fill with rage. He raises his hands, but no black smoke falls when his power seizes every surrounding guard, his black gems on his gloves and shoulders shattering like glass.
“I only have minutes before she returns,” he grunts to Halix as, one by one, Zo guards lift their own guns and end themselves at my father’s hand.
Even Jasper is frozen halfway out of the car.
My father’s neck vein pops in the shape of a snake as he holds the fifty grown men and women surrounding us. Halix speeds the process along with her sword, ending them with swift, deep stabs through their chests.
“How did they take you?” Father growls at me as another gun fire rings out. “I trained you better than—”
An oily spirit falls in from above.
“So clever you are,” she hisses before disappearing into his shield where my mind’s eye can no longer sense her.
His eyes flicker to the stones I’ve become so used to, and his body jerks into her control.
With a jerk of his hand, all the gun barrels point to Halix, and at least six bullets fire through her center. She collapses. Her sword loses its gray glow. So do her eyes, as she bleeds out.
When my father opens his mouth again, his voice barely sounds different. “Ah,” she says through his mouth. “Now I see what you’ve been hiding beneath my nose. Her soul is quite pretty when it’s not covered in pink, frilly nonsense. What a prize indeed.”
Jasper’s body unfreezes and he points at my father. “You won’t touch her until she’s here. It must be timed perfectly!”
“I do not bow to the orders of men, or my sister,” she hisses, Father’s power seizing Jasper once more. “Scientia can take a back seat to me, for once. She doesn’t know everything, like you mortals believe she does. Yet, you worship her as if she brings you air!”
“Nizzara!” Liha’s voice screams through the air. “Gravera’s taking what’s left of him. You have to kill him now or else—”
Father’s arm surges toward me and my body bows to his command. It’s the first time he’s ever used it on me, but—
His eyes.
He’s dying inside them, the hardness snuffing him out.
My gaze is the only thing that can move. It lands on Halix’s bloody sword near my feet.
“I”ll buy you time,” Liha says. “But only seconds. You must end him.”
I’m unable to argue, my mouth frozen. She’s not inside my shield to hear, but I’m screaming at her mentally not to do—
She disappears inside his shield, and a pink wave of smoke blows out in every direction, the sound of shattering glass ringing throughout the air.
I’m released. When I grab the wavy sword and snap it to my father’s chest, he is there. His eyes are warm like they were when I was little, full of love for me. I sense it raining down and drowning me in its intensity.
“Do it, my Nizzara,” he whispers. “You don’t have time to hesitate. Do not let your heart blind you.”
My arm shakes.
“You can fight her!” I yell at him, tears streaming.
I should be ramming this blade through my father’s chest, but I am frozen. Liha is gone.
My father is about to be.
He shakes his head. “I cannot. I’ve already been fighting too long. To have more time with you.” The hard, stoney presence creeps back into his eyes. “You must do it now.”
“I can’t—”
He grabs my sword and shoves it toward his own chest, but not fast enough. His arms jolt to a stop at the same time his eyes turn to complete, solid stones. I shove the tip toward his heart, but it stops at the point of puncture, not breaking through his black uniform.
My father’s hand jerks up and releases a force so much greater than the possessed caster I fought in the ring. It takes hold of my neck, lifting my feet from the ground. All around me, the same is happening to Jasper, and Helina, and his fleet of guards.
That’s when the world turns to ice around me.
“Dae,” I whisper as he sinks in my shield. I instantly feel how drained he is. “What happened?”
My father calls a dark, black-and-red sword seemingly out of thin air. It burns with vast energy, vibrating the air as it nears my chest.
“Let’s separate that soul from that body,” she hisses through my father’s mouth, in his own voice.
“I’m fine. No time.” Dae says, pouring what power he has into my veins. It reacts like explosions set off throughout my veins.
Time stops.
My father’s blade, surging toward me, is frozen in midair.
“Focus, Nizzara. You’ve got to move her power off of you.”
I imagine her invisible hand of power like a fist around me as I move each finger into its own tucked away dimension.
When my feet hit the ground, I jerk Halix’s wavy sword up to my father’s frozen chest.
Black, thick ice cracks up my blade, and the world sinks into a cold I’ve never known, infinitely colder than Dae. Infinitely colder than scientific reason permits.
Dry ice climbs through my veins, freezing as it goes, until a dark figure is towering at my side. No shape, no eyes.
“Dagen,” it says in a voice that sounds like many. “Your time is at an end. Deliver her to me.”
I feel Dae draining through our bond, draining to the point of fading. “I will not deliver her,” Dae growls.
“Then you shall face your bargain.” He begins to suck Dae from me.
“Wait!” I shout. “I will bargain.”
I hear the smile in Nil”s voice, coming from inside his cloud of darkness. “I am listening, Pure One.”
“I will go with you—”
“You will not!”
Dae’s dark spirit encases me like a blanket trying to hide me.
I square my shoulders, raising my chin. “I will give my soul in exchange for Dagen, the King of Kings.”
“Nizzara!”
“It is you. You are the king. Find Yisabell when I am gone. Save her.”
I speak to Nil as the world remains frozen in time, “You will give him complete freedom. You will not call upon him.”
The frigid cold climbs around me, taking my breath away.
“Your father was right, Pure One. It is your heart that weakens you.”
I grit my teeth. “Do we have a bargain or not?”
“You do NOT!” Dae flickers in my shield, fading fast.
“I cannot return him to life. He will still have shadows in his soul. He will still be half-dead,” Nil says.
“Complete. Freedom,” I hiss.
“Very well. We have a bargain, Pure One.”
I waste no more time and do what I should’ve done minutes ago. I ram my sword through my father’s frozen chest. Tears slide down my cheeks, but I land true through his heart.
Dae slumps as time resumes.
My father stumbles back, hissing and thrashing before he disappears. Gone in a trail of dark mist.
Jasper is still frozen, but because of the giant, visible, dark god now looming in front of him, his eyes are the size of glo gems.
“It is time.” The god speaks like an earthquake through the air.
“Try not to miss me,” I say to Dae.
Such anguish leaks from him. I hear his tears when he chokes out, “You cruel beast.”
The god wraps himself around me. The scream that rips from me is involuntarily as my soul is torn from my flesh, but the worst part, is the bond shattering between Dae and me.
He disappears from my senses.
No more cool nudges at my shoulder.
No more velvet voice.
No more inside jokes.
The gold vessel ring drops from my finger, clinking to the ground with a metallic clarity.
It rolls until it hits Dae’s black boot.
He picks it up and squeezes it in his hand, tears in his eyes.
Clutching my vessel ring with one hand, he sinks his other through Jasper, dropping him where he stands with a tortured scream from Jasper’s soul as it tears and cracks.
Helina screams, but Dae’s gritting tears back as he finishes shredding Jasper’s soul from him with no reverence.
No remorse.
Just cold ruthlessness.
Dae fades from view as I’m sucked from my own lifeless body that lies at his feet. That’s when the darkness sinks in.
The soul-burning cold.
And the shadows.