Chapter Forty-One
Kai
Something was wrong, but Kai hadn’t the space to stop and puzzle it out; couldn’t risk the glance around.
The call in his blood was unending, the waters flowing bountifully forth, but Avette’s blinding glow spoke to her own ease.
They were too evenly matched, one-to-one, where she should have been overpowered.
Where was Adeline?
Dread weighed on him, slowing his muscles just enough that each movement was a struggle, each surge of power and deflection just a breath shy of turning the tide. Every lash of his waters collapsed in a solid mass at Avette’s feet, every crashing wave whipped away by her winds.
Her face blazed above her pendant, blue light hollowing her features and leaking from her eyes as the wind whipped her hair into a dark halo. She lashed out again and again, fierce but not fierce enough—and that, he knew, more than his betrayal, was the true reason behind her unyielding rage.
She knew her power was not performing as it should; knew she could not have truly secured the pearl.
Knew Kai did not have it either, considering he hadn’t yet ended their struggle.
She chanced the occasional glance around for the source of his power, but neither of them could spare their attention without succumbing to the other.
“What is it you hope to achieve?” Avette called over the shrieking storm around them. She gestured broadly at him, the sweep of her arm less graceful. Less ethereal. She really was just a girl, just a desperate human being as fragile as any one of them. “You could have ended my life by now.”
She knocked back his advance with a gale force gust, but Kai bore down and let the force of the waters carry him forward, the elements beating at him from all sides. It was a struggle to draw breath, but he called back to her all the same.
“And you could have ended mine.”
It was the truth. He could have flooded her airways; she could have shattered him where he stood. He saw that she knew it too, the firm set of her lips speaking words she would not allow past them. She needed him alive—and he needed to live with himself when all was said and done.
“I won’t if you yield now.”
“You won’t either way, Avette,” he said, and as if to disprove him, she shot a spear of pure ice in his direction.
He avoided it by a breath, the frigid shard tearing at his sleeve as it passed.
Kai twisted awkwardly in his deflection and lost his footing, but his magic shot forth instinctively as he fell, and Avette screamed as the forceful stream shot her feet out from under her.
He was the first to rise, darting for her before she could do more than freeze the flow of the water.
Kai’s heart leapt into his throat, the relief sweeping up his gills and snatching his breath as he reached down for the pendant, barely daring to believe—
“Your Majesty!” someone howled, and then Kai was landing sideways on a wet mess of slush.
He rolled to see Avette shoving Benan off of her with several irritated slaps, and then out of nowhere, the Queen’s Gard was wrenched down the dais steps. Kai lurched to his feet; eyes locked to the struggle. There were several more gards surrounding Benan, but they were—
Fighting him.
Defending Kai?
The thought was a wasted second too many, Avette already upright and alight in blue by the time he’d turned to engage her again. But she was not looking at him. She had seized the moment of confusion, too, whipping around to search for something, someone.
Imogen.
Kai saw the moment she put it together. Mareda and Gerard squared off as one fluid shield, Imogen behind them with her jaw set and lashes fluttering over blank white eyes.
The light of Avette’s pendant drew in for just a moment, a stutter of shock like a stolen breath.
Kai lunged for her at once, yanking at a fistful of her skirts just as she sent another vicious ice spear bursting forth.
His grasp caught her off balance, and the ice spear flew wide, shattering against the Priestess’s podium.
Avette slipped with the force of her own power, and though Kai stumbled at the tug of her weight, he was yanked forcefully backward before he could hit the ground.
Too much happened between one breath and the next, chaos ripping through time and compressing seconds into an incomprehensible flash.
Kai was thrown against the podium, a shape looming over him, and the burst of pain through his spine shook his grasp on his magic.
It barrelled through him unchecked, the mess of ice and water across the dais rising in a towering wave that thrust the figure backward.
Benan caught himself at the edge of the steps and teetered for a frozen moment—and just as he advanced, snarling, a thick, green rope lashed around his waist and whipped him backward.
There was an audible crack as Benan’s head ricocheted off the marble floor.
Kai had a brief impression of Adeline’s slack, bloodless face where she stood at the foot of the dais steps, staring at Benan’s unmoving body.
And Avette howled.