Chapter 46 #4
I wanted every one of them dead. Every Shadowkin. Every operative. Every person who opened the wards, every person who brought them here, every person responsible for Vareena lying on the floor with Raiden folded over her.
My power answered the thought, and the hall shook again.
“Lyra!” Kieran was closer now. I turned toward him, and he stopped. Blood ran down one side of his face. His formal jacket hung open where claws had torn it, dark runes visible beneath. Shadow surrounded him, but his hands stayed low. He wasn’t trying to restrain me. Not yet.
“Come here,” he said.
“She’s dead.” His face tightened. “She’s dead.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” Another pulse of magic tore out of me.
Kieran absorbed part of the Shadow and ducked beneath the Starlight.
“You knew this could happen.” I didn’t even know exactly what I meant anymore.
The attack. The Shadowkin. His father. Every secret he had kept behind his teeth while I trusted him.
“Lyra, we have to move.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not.”
“You always are!” My Shadow struck the floor between us and split the stone, but Kieran didn’t retreat. Behind him, Neseryn’s head snapped toward the northern arch. He turned with her.
A cold band cinched around my ankle. Black glass. A blood cuff.
The instant it closed, the Codex screamed. There were no words. Only a violent sound through my skull that made my vision fracture and sent both hands flying toward my head.
Star—
I looked down and found an operative beneath an overturned table beside me, half his face burned away. I had thought he was dead. He wasn’t.
A hooked chain ran from his hand to the cuff locked around my ankle. I sent Light toward him, but nothing happened. My Starlight faltered. Shadow remained for half a heartbeat longer, then shuddered.
The Codex’s voice thinned with it.
They are severing—
Kieran’s face went white.
“LYRA!” The operative pulled, and I hit the floor hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs.
Broken glass tore into my palms. The ribbon slipped from my fingers.
I grabbed for it. My fingertips brushed pale gold silk before the chain jerked again, dragging me through Vareena’s blood. The ribbon stayed beside her.
Hands caught me from behind. I screamed and drove my elbow backward, connecting with bone hard enough to make someone curse. Shadow burst from my shoulder and hurled one man away, but the cuff around my ankle flashed black and pain shot up my leg so violently my vision went white.
A second cuff closed around my wrist. Magic vanished from that arm. “No!”
Somewhere beneath the pain, the Codex remained.
Do not let them take you beyond the ward.
“I’m trying!” The words tore out of me aloud.
I kicked backward and felt my heel strike a knee. The man behind me grunted and tightened his arm around my throat just as Kieran crossed the distance between us.
A Shadowkin dropped between us. He tore it apart without slowing. Another replaced it. Then another. They weren’t trying to kill him. They were buying seconds. “Eiryx!”
Eiryx appeared beside the operative holding my chain, his blade already coming down.
The man caught it on black glass, and Neseryn hit him from the other side.
Shadow filled the space around us, thick enough that I lost sight of the floor.
Someone screamed as I clawed at the cuff.
It bit deeper, blood running over my hand.
“Lyra!” Damon shouted. Gold struck the man holding me and threw him sideways. His grip loosened enough for me to twist free.
For one heartbeat, I was standing.
Kieran reached for me.
Our fingers touched.
A band of freezing magic snapped around my throat and dragged me backward. The broken northern arch vanished. The hall vanished. For a fraction of a second there was only darkness, crushing pressure, and the sensation of my body being forced through a space far too narrow to contain it.
The Codex surged inside my mind.
LYRA.
Kieran caught my wrist. Pain ripped through my shoulder. His face appeared through the dark. “Hold on!”
I tried. Gods, I tried. My bloody fingers slid through his.
“No!” Shadow lashed from him and wrapped around my forearm. The darkness around my throat tightened in answer while the cuff burned against my wrist, swallowing whatever magic I reached for before I could use it.
Do not cross the—
The voice vanished. My mind went terrifyingly empty. “Codex?” No answer.
Kieran pulled. The force dragging me into the breach wrenched back with brutal strength.
“Codex?” My shoulder screamed, and then the blood on my hand betrayed me.
His fingers slipped. “Kieran!” His face changed.
I had never seen fear look like that on him.
The darkness swallowed my arm, then my shoulder, then him.
The last thing I saw of the Solstice Hall was not the Council staring at the place where I had stood, or Halos, or Damon, or Neseryn.
Not even Kieran fighting through the breach after me. It was Vareena.
Cream and gold against the blood-soaked floor, Raiden folded over her. Beside her hand, where my fingers had lost it, lay a pale gold ribbon. The Codex was gone. Vareena was gone. Then the dark took me.