32 #3
A glass sphere spun itself between his fingers. With a gasping effort, he heaved against the box. A viridian burst flashed from his fingers to the glass. Felix started forward in alarm, but Myria flung out an arm to stop him.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t let him touch you.”
“But I think that’s—”
“Your arcana, Myria,” Vixius panted, green flooding from his fingertips into the sphere. “Kept safe all these years. Stop, and it’s yours.”
An anchor dropped in her gut.
Yours.
She took a breath, and suddenly, there it was—that pull, drawing her in like the tide.
Yet now, that prickling unease was gone.
The call rang pure and clear. It no longer beckoned her to him, but to itself.
Herself. There, bound in glass, lay a piece of her, at long last split from the man who’d stolen it so many years ago.
Your power.
Gray magic streamed on down into the box. Vixius collapsed to one knee, barely keeping his hold on the sphere.
“Your faculties won’t work without it,” he rasped. “You’ll stay powerless forever. The deal . . . the deal still stands.”
Just think what you could have. What you could be.
It tugged at her heart—the glow of what should’ve been hers, within her grasp, and one false move away from shattering for good.
“Myria?” Felix said softly. His hand closed around hers.
It’s a trick. A curse, she thought, eyes settling on that emerald-bright glimmer. It’ll kill you the moment you touch it.
But it might be real.
She looked at the fifth lord of the grayside on his knees. She looked at her three friends—no, four—real beyond a doubt, and right there by her side.
Powerless, he’d called her. It was enough to make her smile. She was still smiling as she strolled toward Vixius, dropped to a crouch in front of him and cocked her head. He ran the sphere right to his fingertips.
“There was never any deal, Vixius,” she said. “Only the reckoning.”
With that, Myria slammed her hand to the box, and Vixius let go. The sphere fell.
Too fast for anyone to cry a warning, Cassia dived to catch it. She lunged forward, hand outstretched, just in time for Vixius to seize her wrist. The sphere shattered, and black power slammed through the box.
The world turned on its head. For a moment, Myria was tumbling through oblivion. Her stomach lurched with panic.
Then the fog-stone of the fifth lord’s watchtower slammed against her back. She opened her eyes. The box was gone, and her enemy’s eyes blazed right before her.
Adrenaline bolted through her. Vixius’s hand moved, and so did hers. She seized his dagger hilt and whipped it back, then scrambled up and put six feet between them. He snatched a second blade from his boot, drawing out the sound of scraping steel.
“Don’t,” she panted, holding the dagger at arm’s length. Vixius stepped sideways like a fencer, circling nearer. He made a sudden feint toward her, and she flinched back. A thin smile crossed his face.
Damn. Damn. Cassia, you lovely, brave splitwit, why couldn’t you have let it be . . .
It was the position she’d hoped to the Pantheon she’d never end up in. Her, the fifth lord of the grayside, and six inches of steel.
He darted forward again, and she gave ground. Damn him. Three years of planning, and it rested on a knife fight with a criminal. Her heart pounded hot in her head, faster and faster.
Quick, clever and certain, he murmured in her memory. Certain enough to kill?
“I’m sorry, Myria,” Vixius said quietly. “For both our sakes, I’ll make it quick.”
He was certain. For all his words, there’d been no hesitation in the hand that had driven the dagger into her back. She knew who’d win. The grim assurance in his eyes said that he knew it, too.
No, something rattled in her head. Where there’s a wit, there’s a way . . . but Vixius had forced her to fight on his terms, and all the wit in the world wouldn’t help her wield a blade any better.
Then, a single ember fell from the dark behind him.
Oh, she thought; and at once, a smile threatened to betray her. She still had what he didn’t. An unfair advantage.
Them.
She scraped her heel across the stone as she stepped back. An amber line traced through the darkness, coming closer.
“Chivalrous to the last,” she said, letting him narrow the distance. “Still, old boy, you’re going to lose.”
She scraped her heel again, and felt the familiar magic casting out for her amid the crumbling arcanic world.
“Why? Because I’ll be fighting alone?” said Vixius, smiling sadly. He stepped within three feet of her, close enough that one good thrust from either of them would strike true. Moments later, something warm came tickling underfoot.
“No,” she said. “Because you’re fighting us.”
Myria stamped down. The amber blaze of Leo’s arcana shot beneath her feet. The ground below them vanished as the gateway opened, and they fell into the void. Unlike Vixius, though, she knew that magic. She kept her balance, kept her wits and made her move.
Quick, clever, and not alone.
She rammed her dagger through him to the hilt. The thud of steel on sinew echoed in her bones.
Then, her boots hit the stone of the real world. She found herself on one knee, her left hand on the box, her right hand locked around the blade that bloomed a reddened flower just above the fifth lord’s heart.
Vixius spasmed, snatching half a breath. Myria gave the blade a vicious twist.
The blood came spilling down his waistcoat, thick and glistening. His dagger slid from his nerveless hand. He gasped, skin paling by the second. His gaze fixed upon her, as though she were all he could see amid a world blackening around him.
She ripped out the blade. Vixius slumped back, like a rag doll watching her through glass eyes. The last mist of gray arcana rose from his skin and whispered into the box. His next breath came thin and ragged.
“The two of us against the world, Myria,” he said faintly. “It could’ve been . . . could’ve . . .”
“Perhaps it could’ve.” She gave a mirthless smile. “If you hadn’t betrayed us. Poisoned all the things you couldn’t live without.”
“The devil’s rules,” he said, words cracking with what might have been a chuckle or a gasp. “Had to survive. Couldn’t break them.”
“There’s the difference between the two of us, old boy,” she answered quietly. “I could.”
But he had gone beyond where words could reach him, now.
She watched, still and silent, as the last lord of the grayside bled to death before her.
Her heart was pounding in her head, so loud that she could hear nothing else.
All his color flooded out into that crimson torrent, drenching the immaculate black and white of his clothes.
He was dying, years spilling out of him in seconds.
The tang of blood caught in her throat, and for a moment, she stood swaying in the depths of Elysius Tower, gripping Hadria’s hand as her dying friend fought for breath.
It flickered across her mind in a dark reel—the slow horror of the trial, the despair of her teacher’s death, the long years waiting in her cell.
Then, Vixius’s head slumped. The silver eyes left hers.
He collapsed, and the box released him with a soft hiss.
The images fleeted away, like a train disappearing around a corner, until the air was quiet in its wake.
She breathed out, so suddenly relieved of a weight she’d scarcely known she carried.
All at once, she was so light that she could’ve taken flight.
You did it, she thought dizzily. You’re free of him forever. We did it, Hadria. We won.