Chapter 30
Chapter thirty
Aldric
Acold wind ripped past, tearing at his clothing, flinging sand into his gaze. Black sand. Inky swells of it stretched as far as the eye could see.
Dark clouds boiled across a midnight sky.
Crimson lightning sought to rend the heavens.
In the distance, he heard a scream.
Sera.
“Aldric!” his kirei cried out for him. In agony. Afraid.
“Sera!” He lunged toward the sound but was drawn up short. Heavy iron bit into his wrists and ankles, keeping him in place. Bound.
He was bound by chains.
“Where do you think you are going, Crow?” a voice whispered, each word piercing his mind like a blade—sharp, merciless. “You are no hero. You’re a monster.”
No. No, that wasn’t true.
“No? Just look at what you’ve done.”
What he had done? His chest tightened as the familiar scent of death—sickly sweet—greeted his nose. No.
He didn’t want to look. He couldn’t possibly look.
…He had to look.
There Sera lay sprawled before him, her chestnut hair spilling loosely across the sands, her body limp, her beautiful gray eyes empty.
“No,” he rasped, shaking his head. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t.
“But you did.”
The dark dagger embedded in his wife’s chest—in her heart—gleamed, the crystalline jewel nestled in its hilt now swirling with iridescent hues. Taunting him with its prettiness.
Just as the voice taunted him with its cruelty.
“No!” he screamed, lunging for the blade and wrenching it free. But even with the unholy dagger now removed from her heart, his kirei did not wake. She did not move.
She remained…dead.
All the strength he had left him, sending him collapsing to his hands and knees. He forgot how to think, how to breathe.
She was dead. Sera was dead.
He had killed her.
“Sera…” he whispered, clenching the witchblade tighter in his grasp.
Without warning, the corpse that had once been his wife jolted to a sitting position. Her head turned toward him. Her cold, dead eyes met his. Her bloodless lips parted.
She spoke.
“Yes…Master?”
Aldric jerked awake, a shout of horror catching in his throat—strangled before he could properly voice it.
The weak light of early morning streamed in through the chapel’s stained glass windows, dappling the rich wood of the altar and pews with kaleidoscopic light. His back smarted; his neck twinged.
Had he truly fallen asleep here?
Something warm and soft stirred at his side. “Aldric?” a sweet voice thick with sleep whispered, bringing with it the gentle caress of breath against his throat. “Are you all right?”
His eye fluttered closed as he breathed deeply of his wife’s familiar scent: warm, floral, with a hint of vanilla. She was alive. The witchblade was in Father Perero’s possession now. He hadn’t hurt her.
It had just been a dream.
“I’m fine,” he rasped, blinking his eye back open and turning his head to stare in disbelief at the sight of pretty Seraphina de la Croix using his leather-clad shoulder as a pillow.
Those storm-gray eyes of hers flew wide the moment they connected with his. Sucking in a sharp breath, his kirei pulled away from him and righted herself at once. He pretended not to notice as she wiped a bit of sleep from her eyes and fussed with her hair.
The back of his neck prickled with an awareness of eyes upon him. He furrowed his brow and glanced over his shoulder to find a good dozen Queensguard and the Lord Chancellor himself standing by the doors leading out of the chapel.
Watching him like a bespectacled hawk.
He shifted to the side, placing a bit more distance between himself and his kirei. “Do you have the answers you need, then?” he asked, if only to break the growing silence.
Sera paused in her attempts to right her appearance and looked toward the altar. Under her breath, she murmured, “I do.” Her gaze slid back his way, almost reluctantly, when she added, “But you’re not going to like it.”
He huffed out a humorless breath and eased himself to his feet with a groan, all the while desperately trying to dash that strange dream from his mind. And the seed of guilt it had left behind.
“I figured I wouldn’t.”