70
The Turn of Fate
Melody
“I cannot let him get captured again, Aris!” I whisper.
Tears well in my eyes as witches and Nefarians dive after Caryan. Unknown fury washes over me in a deluge when I watch them going for him and his power like starved vultures.
No.
No matter what kind of monster he is, or how many names he carries—Kirachat, the Necromancer, the Dark Lord, Caryan—no matter what he’s done, he is also the man who gave himself back to slavery to save me.
And I cannot—will not—allow them to shackle him again. Torture him. Make him bleed and suffer.
Gods, I want to kill them all. Reduce them to blood and powder.
My hand snaps around the stone vibrating in my pocket, thrumming like a second heartbeat—as though it feels what’s happening to Caryan.
As though it’s waiting.
Fuck it.
I tear it free, raise it to the sky, and scream, “Noxus!”
The wind dies first.
Not fades—it outright dies.
As if the world drew in a sharp breath but forgets to exhale.
Then the sky splits open, clouds slamming together like warring gods. Lightning crawls through them, slow and white and hungry. The air crackles with power, laced with sudden winds of darkness like harbingers of the apocalypse—
Then everything goes unnaturally still.
Time itself screeches to a halt—a total, complete standstill.
I know that something life-altering has just happened. That fate has just changed its course.
Noxus appears so fast, he might as well have always been here, exploding out of a blackness deeper and deadlier than anything I’ve ever seen. His black, silver-rimmed irises dart to me for a split second before I point to the still-falling angel.
I make sure he can see my eyes burning with rage and wrath as two words leave my lips. “Save him!”
Noxus, as an angel, doesn’t physically go after Caryan. He slinks between the worlds, between time and space, and opens a portal right underneath Caryan.
He catches his brother in his arms, disappears, then reappears a moment later without him—Caryan’s long sword in hand.
The Nefarians stop, as do the witches, and for a second, every single creature hovers in the air, locked in their places, eyes on the twin I just conjured into existence.
Confusion and fear and undiluted terror are written all over their faces.
And ancient gods curse me, but I drink it all in. Because they wanted to hurt him. Chain him.
Noxus’s magic hums like an undercurrent, like a deep, dark tune, like a monster threading its tendrils through water.
Utterly dark and otherworldly and deadly.
It writhes up his white neck like black flames, the one in the middle reaching up over his chin, licking his bottom lip in a black triangle, rimming his eyes like thick charcoal.
Those eyes take in the witches. The Nefarians. Then they flick back to me—and I can’t help but shiver when he inclines his chin in a silent nod, because they hold nothing but cold, dark death, wrath, and the promise of vengeance.
Time still hasn’t returned to motion when he lifts his hand. Another vortex springs to life in his palm, conjured from nothing, unfurling into a swirling spiral of the blackest magic.
Then everything turns dark. Darker than before, when Caryan’s magic filled us, hid us.
This darkness doesn’t hide.
It feeds. And kills.
I hear the screams of Nefarians and witches, hear them flying for dear life and failing to escape. Hear no one escaping as the darkness crushes and grinds them into nothing but dust.
All the while I stay on Aris’s back, clinging to his warmth, wondering what the hells I’ve just done. What I’ve just wrought on this world.
But when I think of Caryan, I can’t make myself regret it.
Because he is my mate. And I would do everything to keep him safe. I would stop at nothing.
And when that dark finally disperses, the sky is empty save for the angel and us—and Blair and her wyvern, both beast and witch miraculously unharmed, watching Noxus with shock and terror.
I swallow as I stare at that angel, too, wondering again, what I have evoked in calling him here.
But I know with absolute certainty that every witch and every Nefarian is dead.