Chapter 24 Nyte #2
The terror only grew in Lilith’s soft eyes when she looked at me.
“I think … I think it’s like poison. These vines will continue to grow, and when they reach her heart…”
No. I didn’t accept that.
“How do we make it stop?” I asked with deceptive calm. When no one answered I growled under my breath, cutting my wrist with my teeth.
Lilith’s small hand lashed out to stop me before I could give Astraea my blood.
“That might only make her worse now … considering it’s your blood that’s harming her. Drinking it now could trigger a counter effect to the healing properties it once had.”
I looked Astraea over with absolute desolation. Yet she smiled for me, running her touch up my arm.
“How long do I have?” she asked Lilith.
Her friend’s brow pulled together with a wash of devastation. Lilith examined the wound more closely for a few long, tense minutes.
“It’s not spreading too fast. Three weeks, maybe less.”
Astraea blew out a long breath, contemplating her thoughts with her distant sight on the dark, wooden roof.
“Then we need to get moving to stop the gods sooner rather than later.” She played the situation off so nonchalantly while I was silently losing my godsdamned mind.
“Never mind that. We going to find a fucking cure.”
“Nyte—”
“No. You don’t have three weeks, Astraea. You have eternity with me.”
Again, she smiled, but she couldn’t hide the weight of her doubt. She might accept her time was draining, but I would never.
I let Lilith tend to Astraea while I had to stand, to pace, to begin to figure out how in the hell to save her this time.
“I’m so glad you made it back to us. Even if you are a moody pain in my ass,” Davina said tenderly.
There was hardly a breath of warmth in my attempt to smile.
Then someone descended the narrow stairs, and just for a second my grief switched focus.
Elliot was here. The sole survivor of the Golden Guard.
He tried to smile but didn’t approach. “Welcome back.”
I was slashed with pain so sudden and immediate. The sorrow on his face matched what I felt within. We reflected on the same grim event of being ambushed in the mountains by an attack sent by my father. The vampires had managed to kill Sorleen, Zeik, and Kerrah: the rest of the Golden Guard.
Before I lost Nightsdeath, it would have been easy to use that power to smother any care or feeling.
I would have been able to live with the loss of the only people I’d just begun to consider friends.
Now, I didn’t have such darkness to hide in.
I couldn’t thrust the agony of loss and fear of losing again into the shadowy depths to numb my mind to keep. Fucking. Going.
This vulnerability that had opened in me was so raw and … frightening. I didn’t think I was afraid of anything unless it concerned Astraea’s life, but here I was, starting to fear myself and what my emotions could do to me.
The front door burst open before I could begin to process anything. It was only Drystan.
“That was close!” he announced obnoxiously.
Feeling my tangible ire from the fright he inspired, Drystan gave a grimace as an apology.
“What happened with Laviana and Tarran?” Astraea asked, pushing through her fatigue as Nadir propped more pillows behind her.
“There wasn’t much of either force left, celestials or vampires, to keep going. It was all a pointless waste of life.” Drystan shrugged out of his cloak, seeming at home here, which enlightened me more to the fact all of them had spent a lot of time here while I lay useless.
Astraea explained what had happened and how Auster Nova was dead. It killed me to feel her sorrow when the bastard deserved a far fucking worse death than what he got.
“He’s finally dead,” Drystan muttered, mostly to himself.
“The city needs a ruler before word spreads,” Davina said.
“We have to retrieve the key; I won’t sit pretty on a throne keeping it warm and waiting as idle bait for the gods to come for me,” Astraea said. Her silver-blue eyes cast to me and my spine locked. “You need to rule when I’m gone, so maybe—”
I didn’t feel the ornament in my possession, but the room turned sharp when it shattered against a wall, thrown with a flash of rage I couldn’t contain. I had to take a few calming breaths.
“Do you really think I could stand to rule this continent if you were no longer on it?” I said; a familiar, villainous darkness spread through me. “No, Astraea. I’d sooner rip it apart.”
She scolded me with a look I found adorable.
“When you’re gone?” Drystan echoed.
I could hardly stand to keep hearing the reiteration of Auster Nova’s parting curse.
I tuned out everyone’s conversation, sitting by Astraea’s side and soothing some of the sharp panic in me with her touch.
“You need to rest,” Astraea said gently as if she could feel my racing emotions.
Lilith was almost finished with her bandages.
“These will stay in place well enough for you to bathe,” she informed. Astraea would want to wash the blood and dirt from her skin after the ordeal.
“We’ll meet here in the morning hours to discuss how to get to all these temples to get the key back,” Drystan said, accepting a pipe from Nadir and taking a long inhale.
“We all need as good a rest as we can get. Something tells me we’re going to miss the month you were asleep and we all hung around in our boredom, considering what we face next. ”
Just as I helped Astraea stand, as she refused to be carried, I sensed the intrusion before the front door swung open.
Zath and Rose stumbled to a halt as the door locked out the winter chill behind them. They both gawked from Astraea to me.
“Thank fuck,” Zath muttered, marching across the room.
I intercepted him, knowing his natural response would be to all but throw himself at her in embrace.
“She’s gravely injured,” I warned. Then I stepped aside.
Zath approached more tentatively, his expression shifting between pain and relief as he scanned her over.
Astraea hugged him, though it hurt her, and I was on edge with an irrational want to rip Zath’s arms off for it.
“I’m so damn relieved you’re okay. Leaving you behind in Vesitire was the hardest thing I’ve had to do,” Zath said.
“Thank you,” she croaked. “For coming and helping to fight.”
“I’d have to be dead to sit it out.”
She gave a breathy chuckle. “I know.”
“I can feel the heat of your stare,” Zath mumbled to me.
Peeling away from Astraea, I didn’t bother to smooth out my expression when he glanced back at me.
Zath only smirked, which made him grimace.
I looked at his wound site, but he slipped a hand over it as if I wouldn’t notice he wasn’t fully healed yet.
That he was alive at all from the fatal sword through his gut was a miracle, even for a Nephilim. He was admirably strong willed.
“I won’t take the chance of being suffocated by shadow if I tried to hug you, but shit am I glad you’re awake. How did you break the curse?”
“I killed Nightsdeath,” Astraea admitted quietly, letting go of Rose who’d hugged her next. I hoped her sorrow wasn’t because she thought it somehow hurt me.
“What do you mean? He’s right there,” Rose said. Her familiar irritation around me was strangely missed.
Astraea explained everything that happened with Nightsdeath, and it tore me apart to hear it.
I didn’t think she admitted to all of what she suffered by my hand.
As much as Nightsdeath wandered without me, it was merely a source of power until I gave it life.
It was powerful enough to live without the rest of me.
The concept was difficult to digest. I wandered away from Astraea, not quite knowing how to process it all.
Should I grieve? I wasn’t sure. I harbored this ache that plunged soul deep, but I didn’t know what it was for.
Why this wretched self-pity started to fester inside me; I wanted to claw it out with my own hand.
“Nyte.” Astraea’s soft tone accompanied her warm hand sliding into mine from behind. Only then did I realize I was staring mindlessly right at a wall. “I’m sorry—”
“Don’t,” I said, it barely left me as a choked plea. “Please don’t apologize to me.”
“Come with me?” she offered gently, already tugging me, and I followed like a ghost.
Is that what I was now? A shell of weak parts left behind?
Did I want Nightsdeath back?
All my life I’d had that heinous power to blame. To use. Shit I used it without remorse and I enjoyed it.
I was Nightsdeath. In name and glory and all wicked reign.
Now it was gone … a part of me was truly dead.
I didn’t know how I would cope without the vicious darkness holding me together.
My fingers laced through Astraea’s, and I squeezed absentmindedly.
As if she were the only way I wouldn’t float into a lost oblivion when I didn’t know who I was anymore.
Or perhaps more frighteningly, who I could become.