Chapter 55 #2
I scoured the receding darkness in a panic. “Teller, where are you?” I gripped Luther’s arm at the answering silence, fearing the worst. “Teller? Teller!”
“Told you I had one more surprise.”
The last of the shadows wisped away, revealing Ophiucae sprawled on his back—and my brother kneeling over him, his blade buried in Ophiucae’s eye.
Taran whistled. “Damn, little brother. Nice.”
Ophiucae’s hand twitched, and Teller pulled the knife free and stabbed his chest. He did it again, then again—in his throat, his ribs, his skull. He didn’t stop until Ophiucae’s arm fell limp, and his one remaining eye stared unblinking at the clouds.
I ran to Teller’s side. “He’s immortal, Tel. Those wounds won’t kill him.”
“I know.” He stared at Ophiucae’s hand with a thoughtful frown. He lifted up the arm and began sawing at the wrist.
Taran shuddered. “My new family might be scarier than my old one.”
I grabbed Teller, trying to drag him away. “What are you doing?”
“Research.” He shoved me off, then pulled a small jar from his pocket and ripped out the cork. He dug a finger inside, pulling out a clump of a vibrant red paste.
Doriel crept closer and squinted at the jar, their injuries abruptly forgotten in the face of something new to study. “What is that?”
Teller jammed his finger into Ophiucae’s mangled wrist, smearing the substance over the freshly cut gash. “Flameroot-based poison. If it mixes with Descended blood, it temporarily stops their magic. I put it on the arrows I used, but I wasn’t sure whether it would work on a Kindred.”
Doriel frowned. “What do you mean a Kindred?”
My heart lurched as I watched my brother abuse my sire’s wounded body with emotionless, almost clinical focus. Seeing Ophiucae lay there, utterly helpless, entirely alone . . .
Even his own men refused to come to his aid. They watched from a distance, whispering as their eyes jumped between Ophiucae and me—two enemies that magic had stopped them from attacking. With that magic now gone, they seemed to be debating which of us to kill first.
“We have a problem,” Henri said. He pointed across the city, where the mind-wiped Meros Descended had risen from their forced slumber. They staggered toward us, hands lifted as the air picked up with a powerful gust. “He must have given one last order before the flameroot took effect.”
Luther stood and grabbed my hand. “If we hurry, we can beat them to the coast.”
“Wait,” Teller said. “Diem has to kill him first.”
I looked down at Sorrow’s Edge. The heartstone at its center pulsed with a pale grey light. I could almost hear the desperate cries of the woman who’d forged it, still haunted by its terrible purpose and its inescapable cost.
Taran picked up the sword and offered it to me. My fingers trembled toward the gilded handle. For weeks, I’d known this moment, this choice, would come.
Save your friends.
Fulfill your fate.
Say goodbye.
Luther’s hand beat me to the sword. “I’ll do it.”
“You can’t,” Henri said quietly. “It has to be her.”
I couldn’t look at either of them. Unlike Luther, Henri knew what this would mean. The night I’d told him the truth, he’d offered to take my place, too. If I’d known then about his role in my father’s death, I might not have felt so ashamed when I considered letting him do it.
But as we’d argued that night over which of us most deserved to live, the memory of Lumnos’s story nagged at me until I noticed a detail hidden in her carefully chosen words.
A future taken, and a future given. It was love that bound them all.
It wasn’t just anyone who could take his life, just as it couldn’t have been a stranger who put him in chains nor could an enemy have freed him. The spell their mother had used to forge the blade had one critical limitation: Ophiucae could only be killed by someone who loved him.
And there was only one person foolish enough to do something like that.
Gingerly, I slipped my hand beneath Luther’s and closed my fingers on the handle. His grip tightened—on the sword, and on me.
“He’s right,” I said gently. “I have to be the one.”
His piercing gaze scoured my face.
“I’ll hold them off as long as I can,” Henri offered.
Taran snorted. “Great. That half a second should be really useful.”
“Just get the kid out of here, Corbois. He shouldn’t see this.”
“It’s Bellator now,” Taran snapped.
“Shouldn’t see what?” Teller asked. He looked between Henri and me. “I shouldn’t see what?”
“Diem,” Luther said darkly.
I pulled the sword away from him without meeting his eyes. I cringed, unable to believe the words I was about to say. “Go with them, Henri. Lana needs you.”
Henri took one look at the nearing mob and decided not to argue. “Thank you,” he murmured, the words heavy with two decades of complicated weight.
He threw Luther a look so stark with pity, so blatantly a sign of what was to come that I almost took my offer back, but he jogged off westward, grabbing my brother’s arm and dodging more swung punches as he dragged Teller with him.
Taran lingered, his worried stare searing my heart. “See you at the boat . . . right, Queenie?”
I fought back the building tears and flashed him a weak smile. “I’ll be right behind you.”
A look of pain carved his golden-tan features. He looked at Luther. “You too?”
Luther gave a single, silent nod.
“You promise?” Taran asked.
This time, Luther didn’t respond.
On the ground, Ophiucae’s chest began to rise again in stilted, heaving gasps.
“Go get your mate, cousin,” Luther called out. “Leave me to mine.” He placed a fist on his chest, and Taran—his typically joyous, irreverent demeanor darkened with grief—returned the gesture. Slowly, soul-shatteringly slow, he turned and left.
Luther’s gaze returned to me and hardened. “Do what you have to do, Diem, but you’re not doing it without me.”
Ophiucae twitched as his skin stitched back together. The army inched closer, their air magic whipping through the sky. At the base of the steps, the mortal men had noticed our change in numbers. Only Luther stood between them and the final two Crowns of Emarion.
The time for arguing was up. For better or worse, Luther would play a part in whatever came next.
He took my hand and set it on his chest. “This is yours.” He moved his hand to my heart. “And this is mine.”
I nodded. “All of it,” I whispered.
He captured me in a kiss that was rough and messy and excruciatingly brief, then tore away, lifting the Sword of Corbois just in time for the first of the mortals to mount the stairs. With a furious roar, he launched into battle.
I looked at Ophiucae, pulse pounding in my ears. One side of his face was smeared with inklike blood from his wounded eye, while the other stared at the midnight sky. My blood went cold as I watched it slowly blink.
I gripped Sorrow’s Edge in both hands and clutched it against me. The ancient whispers grew louder, more frantic, though I was not sure if they were begging me to use it or pleading for me to stop.
Ophiucae blinked again, this time with both eyes. He was healing impossibly fast—a chilling reminder that he was no mere Descended. The wound on his wrist had already closed, and the fingers on his hand squeezed into a quivering fist.
Hair rose along my neck as his flinty gaze dragged to me, then down to the sword in my hands.
“I see,” he rasped. “Just like my family, after all.”
My cheeks went hot with shame.
His hand shot forward to raise a shield that didn’t come, his magic still victim to Teller’s flameroot paste. He kicked weakly at the grassy soil, writhing to put distance between us. “I’m not going back.”
He sounded panicked and desperate, two things I never imagined he could be.
I took a few steps, and he pushed further backward.
“I will not go back to that island!” he roared.
I froze. At his side, his hands were trembling.
This intimidating man, regarded by the Descended as a god to be worshipped and feared, bearer of the strongest magic Emarion had ever seen, who had brought entire realms to destruction and vowed to force the world to its knees at his feet . . . was scared.
Not of me, or of death.
Of the island.
Rain began to fall from the sky, but it was no gentle shower. The drops of water formed tiny, powerful hammers that pelted us at magic-fueled speed. The wind sped into a cyclone, forcing me to dig my feet into the soil to keep from being dragged away.