Chapter 22 Lightning Strikes #2
“There is no pain!” he yelled. “There is only the promise of transcendence. If I am but a shell of a man, it is because I have poured every potion in London down my throat looking for a cure.”
“A cure?”
“For this.” Apollo gestured to his body. “Something that will make my body a proper vessel for the talent that leaped so eagerly into you.” Something like a wail clawed its way out of his throat. “Why am I unworthy? And why are you—” He spit on the ground. “God, Diana, I don’t want to kill you.”
“I believe you.”
“There is no other way. I’ve looked.”
Temple’s hand tightened, a fist ready to strike in any way, every way.
“There are many other ways,” Diana said. She looked to the sky.
The stars were winking out under the rolling storm clouds. Closer. Thunder louder now.
“Not for me to get what’s mine. My soul.”
“You have a soul, Apollo.” God, her voice—cracking and desperate. It ripped Temple’s heart in two, tore away whatever made him human. It left him a beast, cold and eager to be deadly.
“It does not feel like it.” Fordham clawed at his chest, ripped at the collar of his shirt.
Diana rushed forward. “Apollo, no.”
Fordham’s arm flashed out toward her, at the end of it the golden blade.
Temple had a blade, too, and—almost—he was close enough to use it.
* * *
Diana needed light, but the darkness of the garden denied her. Though what glamour she’d cast with it, she had no clue. Besides, what good would a glamour do against a knife?
She’d stopped as soon as Apollo had pulled it, thrown her hands up between them.
“I want to help you,” she said.
Toward the house, a dim light lifted above the garden greenery. She tugged at it with her consciousness, begged it to come closer. It barely budged.
“Stay there.” Apollo waved the knife at her.
Her alchemist ring burned. Temple was nearby. And angry. She tried to send him comfort through the iron, but she could not think of that.
She needed the light.
And it flashed in the sky.
Could she? Could she steal from the lightning? It was so far away. She’d thought the same thing earlier, looked to the storm grumbling on the horizon and wished she could pull it closer, cloak the garden in drenching, obfuscating rain, call on the storm’s wicked white, sky-splitting light.
Apollo took a step forward, arm outstretched, weapon held in a white-knuckled grip.
She’d been holding back her fear since he’d appeared, caging it so she could act with calm efficiency. She’d not been able to the last time they’d faced one another.
This time different than the last. No shivering, helpless desperate woman now. She could control her power. She could wield it.
But the fear in the cage was shaking, breaking free. For every step Apollo took toward her, she stepped back, thrusting her chin high, grinding her teeth to keep her chin from trembling.
The light from the house.
The storm.
Her back hit a tree. She reached for the sparse light, the light miles away but rumbling closer. Traveling faster. Clutching her hands in her skirts, she imagined grasping the nearest lightning bolt…
Apollo put the knife to her throat.
She gathered the light reflected off each raindrop…
“I don’t want to kill you,” Apollo said. The knife’s point nicked her skin, ripped away whatever speck of composure had remained. “But I am nothing without taking what you have. I have always been nothing. An empty vessel, damned and purposeless.”
“That’s not true.” Her voice shook.
The rain came quickly, beating down on her cousin’s shoulders and streaking down his face.
Lightning flashed across the sky, making a noon moment of the midnight garden.
As thunder rumbled around her, she grasped the light, held it within her.
The sparking power of it gave her strength, made her brave.
“You are whole without the talent, Apollo. I know because I was whole before it. Worthy of respect and friendship and honor and love!” Her fear and sorrow were burning away in a white-hot rage.
“Have you always thought me less than human? Less than you? Incomplete because I could not change my appearance or hide my faults behind a beautiful mask?” She wanted to spit.
She wanted to claw his eyes out. “You’re wrong!
About me, about yourself! I am complete without this cursed talent, and without your approval or that of any man who thinks himself better.
Put. The knife. Away.” Her voice was thunder now, loud and powerful, demanding.
Not idle demands, either. If he kept that damned knife to her throat, she’d show him how angry she was.
More lightning. She possessed that, too. She was calling the storm to her, bringing the rain, grasping the light. In the brief flash, a sight to make her heart sing—Temple stepping from the trees, clutching something, raising it high.
When darkness reigned once more, she lost sight of him. Fear returned, shaking the cage.
“What are you looking at?” Apollo glanced over his shoulder.
No. No, no, no. Run, she wanted to yell. Hide! But that would give Temple away, and he would not listen. He would stay and fight. One of countless reasons she loved him.
Another flash of lightning.
Apollo jerked, spun around, and brandished his knife at Temple. He’d seen.
“Do as the lady says and put down the blade.” Temple’s voice was deep, dangerous.
“I’ve nothing to live for.” Apollo’s words were so small, so quiet, the rain almost swallowed them entirely. He raised the knife.
Temple raised his fist, and whatever he held in it.
And like gods fighting on Mount Olympus, the two men threw themselves at one another.
Fear broke free. For her, for Temple… for Apollo. The light she’d gathered seemed to explode from her all at once, and she reached for even more. She’d transform their knives to snakes in their hands. Or feathers. She’d produce so many copies of each man neither would know who to swing for.
She’d scorch the earth between them with her lightning—
She grasped it—the very light crackling in the clouds above. It sizzled in her grip, and she threw it down into the earth.
The blinding flash of light threw her backward, blinded her. Screams rose all around her, voices like raindrops pattering against cobblestones.
Then silence. Absolute quiet. No rain, no wind, no thunder. Only a still, dark night.
And Diana’s frantic, beating heart.
“Temple!” she cried, jumping to her feet. “Temple!”
Coughing. “Here.”
She threw herself at a dark shadow on the ground.
She couldn’t see him, couldn’t see if he was hurt.
But there was power still inside her, and thinking of the fairy lights, she produced one in her hand.
A glamour, but with the loveliest soft glow.
A Nickleby House glow that, somehow, changed her tears to laughter, her fear to strength.
So did the sight of Temple. He was stretched across the ground, propped on an elbow. “Are you well?”
She knelt by him. “Yes. You?”
“Yes. Fordham?”
She lifted her fairy light high, casting its light across the garden.
And on the shocked faces of the transcendent ton. The entire ballroom seemed to have followed them outside. The entire ballroom had watched her pull a fairy light out of thin air.
And so had the king. He stood at the very front of the crowd, mouth open, his wife the queen on his arm. She covered her mouth with one hand and clutched her skirts with the other.
The end. Of… everything.
She couldn’t think about that right now. Coughing behind her. She whipped around. Apollo lay on the ground, stretched out on his back like he was stargazing. He rolled to his side, pushed slowly to sitting, mumbled a curse.
“What was that?” Temple asked. He stood, pulling her into his arms. “Did you create that lightning or… reroute it?”
“A glamour.” It had to be, but it had felt so very—
“It seemed real.” The light in her palm flickered into darkness. Better that than all the eyes on her.
“Someone provide a damn light.” Nico’s voice.
A dozen fairy lights appeared on palms, and the crowd rippled, parted. Nico appeared, and he picked up Apollo’s knife, then jerked Apollo to his feet.
“You are coming with me,” Nico said.
Apollo didn’t fight it. But before Nico pulled him into the crowd, he looked to Diana. What she saw there… it could not be… worry. For her? How could he, after…
“Take Fordham to my guards, Sir Nicholas,” the king said.
Apollo would lose his title.
She could lose her life.
She clung to Temple.
And the king stepped forward. “Seize them. Bring them inside.”
“No.” Diana clung to Temple, but a thousand arms, it seemed, separated them.
“Touch her,” Temple growled, “and I will delight in separating the iron from your blood.”
“Can he do that?” a man somewhere to Diana’s left asked.
No one but Temple had an answer. “The next man to touch my wife will find out how well the iron obeys me.”
Despite their numbers, the men—their features shadowed by the darkness, their glamours still in perfect place despite the rain—reared back, scared and unsure.
Temple pulled Diana into his body and set their steps toward the house.
The crowd followed behind them, whispering, sneering, but not touching.
She barely felt the muscle movements that put one leg in front of the other, barely heard the soothing words Temple whispered. Drums beat between her ears, and her limbs had buzzed into numbness.
The house rose larger in front of them, then they were striding across the ballroom where so short a time ago they had been dancing.
A man dressed all in silver addressed them, bade them to follow, and led them up a large staircase to a room near the back of the house.
The curtains had been closed, and a few real candles flickered on wall sconces.
In the doorway, Diana’s feet rooted to the ground. Her knees gave out. “I-I-I cannot.”
Temple caught her before she crumbled, tucked her tight against his side. So much strength, all of it given to her, time and time again.
Did she even deserve it?