CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I pressed my lips against Beck’s as I slid on top of him again, my legs straddling his hips. I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’ll try to find her again.” Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t.
Alexei bolts the grates on two more ships.
My veins are a bone-dry desert that burns like hell by the time I summon enough sparks to set them burning.
I hover to the side of the billowing pillars of smoke and sweep my gaze over the city.
Gargoyles make runs on the ships surrounding Dwellings, Crafts, and Merchants, dumping torches on them by the dozens.
Hundreds of da’kai roam the streets, but the legion is untouchable.
A few dozen remain grounded in Council, guarding the wounded with support from the air.
Humans have poured out of the flats on the south side of Dwellings—the poor side—by the drove.
They help the legion take back their city with every makeshift weapon they could get their hands on.
The island’s northern tip is notably silent.
I swing toward the temple. “Live,” I beg. “Please live.”
I surge forward and pump my wings. The tendrils of smoke that swirl around them is an agonizing reminder of Griffon’s brushing over my skin.
I battle for each breath and lose at least half of them, my lungs seizing on every horrible possibility waiting atop that lonely peak.
I reach the mountain even faster than the first time.
Movement at the bottom of the steps snares my attention.
Bellan races for a waiting carriage, his blue robes twisting around his feet.
He goes down to a knee, and his cry just reaches me on the back of the wind.
Hatred intertwines with the dread that has my gut in a death grip.
A snarl rips past my teeth as I watch him, limping and still a hundred yards from his salvation.
It would be so easy, to catch him and extract my pound of flesh. I fly even faster.
My boots kick up a flurry of snow as I hit the edge of the plateau and sprint toward the steps of the temple. I burst through the doors and draw up short.
The da’kai lie scattered, their bodies burned, broken, and hacked to pieces. The carpet is an inky lake, the legs of the statues and edges of the quadrants splattered with gore. Soot floats to the ground and blankets the corpses like a layer of grimy snow.
Griffon is propped against one of Etain’s feet. All I can see of him is his left leg, his ankle twisted, and his hand laying limply at his side.
My heart stutters. “No,” I breathe. “Gods, no.”
A da’kai limps toward him from behind Arawn’s statue.
The stump of one arm leaks blood onto the floor, the steady drip, drip, drip of it popping through my skull.
It drags a leg shattered at the knee, its face a mangled mess, but the spurs on its remaining hand flex as it stalks toward Griffon.
I can’t breathe as I stare, that ever-present dread an asp that strikes deep into my belly.
Griffon’s fingers twitch. I run.
A thread of his smoke snakes around the da’kai’s neck.
The beast waves its arm through the thin wisp, and it dissipates into a cloud of mist. I catapult over the bodies, my boots spraying gore as I race for him.
My palms splay, but only a scant flame swirls around the da’kai’s feet.
Its attention whips toward me and I bellow my challenge.
Its answering roar rings through the temple, its shredded lips fluttering with the force of it.
I rip my last dagger from its sheath and swipe a broken-off spur from the carnage. My hands are steady as I leap over a heaping pile of bodies and land in front of it. Its arm swipes at my head.
Not like that. Griffon’s voice slices through my skull, the footwork he’d drilled into me overtaking my sloppy instincts.
I duck, just as he’d shown me, and sever its arm at the elbow.
My next thrust rams the spur through its beady eye.
I pivot toward Griffon as it collapses. Its body strikes the ground, the thud a thunderclap through my skull.
A flash of white-blond snags my attention as I turn.
My boots slip in the gore, and I hit my knees. A ragged breath shudders through my chest. “Gods, please no. Please,” I beg. But even if the gods exist, they can’t save Laney now.
Her body is lying behind Arawn’s booted foot, her fingers inches from the carpet that separates death from life. The loosened end of her braid lies draped across the floor. The black blood seeping up it is the only part of her that moves. My gaze snags on her neck and I can’t look away.
Broken necks. We can survive a lot, but not that. Her words from that day we’d laughed ourselves sick spear through my head. My eyes shift to hers. They are open and staring, the once vibrant blue now dull and glassy.
Footsteps splash through the blood and slide to a stop beside me. I lift my burning eyes to Alexei as he stares down at his twin. His helmet strikes the ground, and he crumples under the wave of sorrow that crashes over his bloodless face. “Laney,” he moans.
I tear my eyes off him. Stone has long since failed to contain the horrors of this day, and his grief is too raw, too personal, too consuming to behold.
I crawl through the gore to Griffon. He is shredded, his armor in tatters and his flesh hanging in strips with it. His helmet is lost, hair plastered to his skull with brutal strokes of red and black.
“Shift for me,” I plead. My hands flutter over his body. There are so many holes in him I don’t even know where to start trying to stanch the flow of his blood.
A wet laugh tumbles off his cracked lips. His head falls backward, the clap of his skull against the stone as brutal as the crack of a whip. “Why would I ever—” The labored words are cut off by the breath that rattles through his chest. “Ever do something for you again?”
Later. I would think about the meaning of those words later. “Then shift for you. Shift for Alexei. And La—”
“Don’t you dare say her name,” he snarls. His eyes flare with something that makes my stomach twist.
“She wouldn’t want you to die here, too,” I whisper. “Please, shift.”
He only stares at me, his eyes half-shuttered and drenched with so much agony I can’t breathe through it.
I reach for his hand but hesitate, mine fluttering a fraction from his skin.
I lay it in the gore instead, a hairsbreadth away from his pinkie.
It doesn’t move. “I will spend the rest of my long and miserable life regretting this day. More than Solstice. More than every single day since. And if this is the last thing you ever do for me I’ll fucking understand, okay?
I understand if you hate me again. But you have to shift for me, Griffon. Please.”
Tears cascade down my cheeks and land on his thigh, making a soup of the gore crusted there. A thick glob of blood oozes out of a wound just above his heart. I press my filthy palm against it, and a wild, unhinged sob claws out of my throat.
“It’s okay if you hate me. I am so sorry.
I am so godsdamned sorry.” I raise my eyes to his and find none of the love he has showered me with these past days.
Nothing of the male who has kissed me and loved me and made me feel like I was worth something.
I suppose I’m not. “Shift for me,” I beg, “and I will never ask anything of you again.”
A shudder wracks his already shaking body. An eternity passes. Two. His eyes dart beneath his lids, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. I’m seconds from dragging him away in Stone when he finally shifts. His head lulls to the side.
I suck in a wild breath as my fingers fly to his neck and press against the thick, sticky layer of sweat and blood that coats his skin. His pulse flutters weakly beneath my fingers.
“Hold on,” I beg his slumbering mind. “Just hold on a little bit longer.” I spread my wings wide and crouch between his splayed legs.
My wounds scream as I twist for his wrists and drag his arms over my shoulders.
“Get up,” I command my battered body. My muscles tremble violently, but I stand and pull him with me, his body draped down the middle of my back.
His boots drag through the gore and thump against corpses as I haul him toward the exit.
My gaze darts to Alexei once, now hunched and sobbing over his sister’s broken body.
Once. It is all my shredded heart can take, that one horrific image burned behind my lids.
But I still feel his trembling shoulders in my bones.
Still grit my teeth as his cries burrow into my mind and join the day’s horrid symphony that I will never be rid of.
I drag Griffon to the sheer cliff edge overlooking the Hasting, our boots smudging gore into the pristine snow.
I ease him to the ground and wrap my arms around his chest. My fingers lock a death grip around my wrists.
Wings tucked, I stand with my back to the sea.
“Fucking help me,” I plead at the sky and anything that will listen.
Alexei bursts through the door. There is nothing friendly in his face as he stalks toward us. “You’ve done enough,” he spits. Without another word he shifts Griffon’s cold, shaking body into his own arms and leaps off the cliff.
I watch them fall. Watch Alexei’s wings snap out with effortless grace and catch them a few hundred feet above the water. I blink and they’re gone, swallowed by the rolling waves and crushing darkness.
I turn back toward that tomb. A coldness leaches from it now; a thick shadow that mutes its sapphire moon and dulls the crisp white stones. My boots are heavy as I retrace my bloody steps back to the stairs, through the field of corpses, and to my friend’s side.
Exhaustion drags me down. Exhaustion, and pain, and so much grief it pushes and shoves at the fragile seams of my soul. I shudder with the knowledge that Stone has it muted. That it will shred me into thin, irreparable ribbons when Flesh comes for me.
My tears bead on top of the oily blood and shimmer a glittering black with the layer of onyx beneath. Fitting, given the dark and poisonous emotions that pump through my veins.
I reach shaking fingers toward Laney and brush her sodden hair off her pale, bloodless face. “This should have been me,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry this wasn’t me.” My tears are a fleet of fallen stars in a sea of black.
She had treated me like a friend from the moment Griffon hauled me through Falcos’ gate. She’d known the things I’d done. Saw the hatred I spewed at her just because of what she was. And still, she had seen me as something worth fighting for. Worth helping. Saving.
I weep, because the world is darker for having lost her. I am darker, and poorer, and emptier for having lost her. She had called me family and I—
I jerk upright and pluck my dagger from where I’d discarded it by Etain’s feet. My hand is steady as I dig the tip beneath my left pointer finger and gouge the blade the length of my palm. I embrace the pain. Drown in it.
“I will spend the rest of my life fighting to make this up to you,” I vow, my words fractured.
“To somehow make this sacrifice worth it.” I stare at the wound.
“I won’t let it heal. Not for one second.
Not until it scars. And every time I look at it, I will remember you.
” My eyes shift back to her. “And your goodness. And I will fight to be worthy of the life you bought me.” I gently prod her lids shut on the carnage.
“Send Griffon strength, from wherever you are. If he dies, too…”
I swallow the thought. He won’t. Can’t.
I lean over and kiss her brow. One of my tears falls on her colorless lid. It slips down her cold cheek, until it disappears between her slightly parted lips. “Goodbye, my friend.” I choke on another horrible way to combine two words. “My sister.”