33. Chapter 33 #2
I step around Augustine to get a better glimpse of her, only to regret my decision immediately.
The queen uses that opportunity to tear a gouge through the floor, forming a deep rift that nearly pulls me under.
Augustine grabs my waist and pulls me to safety before I lose my footing and slip.
But that doesn’t stop me from peering down into it, only to find a never-ending chasm of darkness lurking below.
“Imagine my shock once I got word of your little secret,” the queen continues as she takes a calculated step toward us.
“Imagine my outrage once I learned that you were plotting behind my back.” Her eyes pool with unbridled venom.
“Imagine my fury upon realizing that you’d stolen my precious statue, and that you’d given it to the dragons.
” As she takes another step forward, each word she delivers is like a lethal blow to my heart.
“But not before you blew up my fucking castle. Isn’t that right… Brother?”
All the breath swirling around in my lungs expels at once.
He did what?
She pauses with an eerie tilt of her head. “What you have done cannot ever be forgiven. As such, I will allow you to die an honorable death.”
Augustine's entire body tenses.
She charges at us like a jagged stroke of lightning, her teeth bared, her magic zinging from her fingertips.
A thick, thorny vine breaks through the fissure in the floor and enwraps itself around Augustine’s throat.
In response, I begin choking on air, as if I’m suffering the ill effects of its magic vicariously through him.
She must be using dark magic against us.
“Raven!” Augustine calls out, cutting the vine loose with his dagger and gathering me into his arms. “Are you hurt?” The way he says those words, so soft and urgent… it sends a tingling sensation soaring straight to my toes.
“Never better.” I fight back a sob. Perhaps he was right and I am fragile after all. Stunned, I watch as he unleashes an inferno of black magic from his fingertips, which he uses to coax the shadows out of the walls. He motions with his arms, and the phantoms charge.
“By fighting me, you lose everything!” the queen wails, her eyes rimming with red-streaked madness.
“I’ve already lost everything!” Augustine roars back, wrapping his arms around me protectively.
Through a crook in his arm, I watch the shadows swarm the queen.
She lets out a blood-curdling shriek and tumbles to the floor.
For a split second, I really believe that she’s been impaled by the darkness.
Swallowed whole. Dragged to the depths of Hell itself through her own carved-out hole, never to return.
A girl can only hope.
But then a beam of light breaks through the smog, incinerating the ghosts in one fell swoop. “You can’t overpower me, Brother!” she bellows as a golden sword appears in her hand, which looks like it was seared from the fires of a supernova’s explosion. “Now give me the raven!”
Augustine drapes his magic over me like a cape as the queen flings her fiery sword in my direction. Her weapon ricochets off the protective dome of Augustine’s heart, then slips into the abysmal hole that she created.
“Fight me like a man, you coward!” Her lips curl back in a sneer as her dress catches fire to everything around her…
the pews, the banners, the portraits, the tomes.
Everything goes up in smoke as she adds, “Give me the raven so that our mother doesn’t destroy the entire damn world.
We must end this now before it’s too late! I will spare your life if you obey!”
Augustine studies me carefully, his protective dome of magic turning into a set of black angel wings. “On the count of three, I want you to make a break for the door,” he says into my ear. “Do you understand me?”
I nod.
“Get to the river, find the Harvest Queens. They’ll hide you in Valenoria where my sister can’t find you. I need you to listen to me, Raven. Being underground is the safest place for you right now.”
Raven.
“Actually… no,” I croak out, my nose wrinkling in defiance.
“I’m sick of us being apart. You can defeat your sister.
I know you can. I’ll just wait here and watch.
” I pat his chest, then push away from him, putting some space between us.
Augustine exhales slowly. He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes, looking as though he’d love to give me a mouthful, but he’s resisting. Likely because he doesn’t have time.
Without another word, he spins on his sister and raises his voice above the ricocheting booms coming from outside the window, where I imagine the dragons are fighting against the other gods.
“And what a shame it would be if the world ended, my dear sister!” he shouts, finding a little rift in the floor that resembles a makeshift bridge and following it toward her, likely to keep her attention away from me.
“Considering how you built this world from the ground up with your very hands,” he adds, his voice rising louder over the roaring flames.
“A world that’s sitting on a foundation of dragonblood and wraithbane, its essence hewn from mortal bloodmagic that you so often dip your dirty fingers into.
Did you know that its floors reek of death?
That its walls quake with despair?” He tosses his dagger into the air and catches it.
“Maybe it’s time for a bit of redecorating.
” He glances up at the ceiling and whispers something inaudible underneath his breath.
Moments later, chunks of structure begin disparaging over her head.
“I built this world for us, you blundering idiot!” she screeches as she shoots a blast of lightning at the rocks, turning them into little pebbles that rain down over us.
“But you’ve been so blinded by love that you did not see!
” She swats at the storm of pebbles and then bares her teeth.
“Love was right in front of you all along.”
“You have always been a terrible liar, Sister,” Augustine chuckles as he flings his ruddy dagger in her direction, which sails straight through its mark—her heart.
I catch my breath, praying that she drops dead, only to realize that the lethal act has rendered her entirely unharmed.
Almost as though her body is a ghostly specter made out of stars.
Just like Solara.
What the fuck is going on?
“In fact, I dream of nothing other than to be rid of you,” Augustine continues, seemingly unshocked by his sister’s inability to be maimed by sharp objects. Which causes me to wonder whether they toss knives at each other frequently.
“I know exactly of what you dream, Dreamwalker,” Armona hisses, “for your dreams are my nightmares.” She points a finger straight at me.
The tips of my ears burn red hot. If only she knew what he’s really been dreaming of lately… she’d probably cut off my damn head. Although in my defense, it was she who ordered that we fall in love.
“Get your own dreams,” Augustine argues, unleashing another army of shadows in her direction.
This time, the shadows seem to grow venomous teeth that chatter around her like loose bones and swipe at her throat haphazardly.
She cuts them away with her sharp fingernails like they’re made of smoke and not magic, looking more irate than ever before.
That’s when I realize this fight will never end unless I do something to stop it.
I think of my friends and the Harvest Queens.
I think of the wolves, and even of Sir Valiant.
But most of all, I think of Augustine… and the potential consequences of him losing.
What if she holds up her end of the bargain and really kills him?
Everyone could die because of me.
“Fine,” I say, holding up my arms. “Fine! You can have me. But only if you swear to let my friends go, and to remove everyone’s rings off their fingers.”
Augustine falls still. “What are you doing?” he mouths silently.
“Fixing this,” I say with a chin jerk toward the statue. “Just like it says in the prophecy!”
“Fuck the prophecy!” he shouts at me.
“Well, well, well…” The queen’s eyes flicker with a flash of preemptive lightning as she gives me a wry smile, her magic whittling down to that of an extinguished star.
She takes a step toward the rift, toward me, lowering her defenses in order to speak with me calmly.
“At least one of you has some common sense.”
“Do we have a deal?” I ask her with my hand outstretched over the rift in the floor.
“You cannot make a deal with my sister,” Augustine warns me. “She does not hold true to her word.”
The queen waves a finger at the chasm. The floor quakes beneath my feet, stitching together a bridge right before me.
She glides over the bridge and looks me over thoughtfully.
“We could make a deal with a blood pact,” she offers quietly.
“Then you could rest assured knowing that I am bound by my word in blood.”
“Fine,” I say, fighting back the urge to vomit all over the floor.
To be bound by blood…
To be hers…
The thought is incomprehensible.
And it’s my only choice.
She plucks Augustine’s dagger off the floor behind her and gives me an orchestrated smile.
“And what better way to sign a blood pact than with Dreamwalker’s prized possession?
” she coos. In one seamless motion, she uses his blade to cut open her own wrist, sending golden bloodmagic dribbling down the length of her arm and spilling onto the floor.
“Your turn, Shadow. Let’s see that silver blood of yours. ”
I grab the dagger by its heavy-handed hilt. Gods, why does it feel like I’m holding the fate of the entire universe in my grasp? “You swear on your life that you’ll leave my friends alone if I do this?”
The queen solemnly nods. “On my life.”
Augustine groans and throws his head back.
“And you vow to remove everyone’s rings?” I assert.
“Couldn’t refuse if I tried.”