Chapter 23
LAST RESORT
“Now, now. That’s enough you two.” With the confidence of a king, Ian smiled at me. “Bow, darling.”
My body betrayed me, my knees folding as if puppet strings had been cut. I hit the nest floor hard, catching myself on trembling hands as breath tore from my lungs.
Rage shattered my composure. I fought to stand, pushing up, muscles straining, my teeth bared in a silent scream. Waves beneath my skin hammered against the cuffs, searching for a crack, a weakness, anything.
Nothing. Even my outline of Elowen vanished as strength abandoned me in a rush.
I sagged, panting, shoulders shaking, fury, grief, and humiliation scalding my throat.
All this power inside me. Enough to open waterways.
To peer into the future or the past and terrify battle-savvy soldiers.
Yet still I ended here, on my knees, defeated.
Jasher swiped up the backpack and gave it to his leader.
“I hope you know this isn’t personal,” Ian said, a patient tutor with a new pupil.
“It’s very personal to me,” I snapped.
Jasher raised his chin, saying nothing else, his features blank.
Ian dumped out the bag. The stones. The journal. The hat. The note. The stones, now glowing again.
Whether they reacted to the danger, Ian, or my need, I didn’t know.
The two stones Jasher broke had reformed into perfect orbs. The ones I’d dropped and fed to a monster had reappeared, as well.
Grinning, Ian picked up the journal and kissed the cover.
Here was my nightmare, come to pass. How could I be so foolish to mark it?!
“Jay tells me you’ve been making notations,” he said, dripping with eagerness. “I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.”
Jay? Jasher hadn’t admitted his full name?
Hope flared bright again, even as he continued to work, arranging the stones in a circle, then blowing a stream of fire over them.
The flames absorbed into the stones, as if sucked inside lungs.
Then the stones exhaled, and the flames snapped high, bright and hot.
“You didn’t finish your story.” I pushed the words between gritted teeth, and not just to buy time. I longed to know more. Everything. “You found monstra eggshells, and Sin told you how to use them to create your clones. Why not explain it to me, if you’re certain I’m soon to die?”
Ian grinned his coldest grin yet. “You don’t have to cajole me, girl.
I want you to know.” He tossed the hat and note into the circle of flames, and both disintegrated into nothing.
“All it took to create the clones was a little of my blood. The smallest of shell fragments can grow hundreds of my beasts.” His gaze honed to a razor’s edge.
“Now, it’s your turn to talk. Tell me where Andrea is hiding. ”
“I don’t know.”
His eyelids narrowed to slits. “I gave you honesty, and you dare repay me with lies?”
“I’m not lying.” I looked between him and Jasher, who still displayed zero emotion.
“You are. So this conversation is over.” Ian flattened a palm over the emerald tattooed on his chest. A golden light speared from his fingers, and when he drew his hand away, he held an actual emerald. Not the glowing one I’d seen in my vision, but an ordinary gemstone.
“I. Don’t. Know,” I insisted. “You beasts caught me while I was searching for her. Ask your oh, so loyal Jay.”
“Come here,” Ian said, crooking his finger. “Stand within the stones.”
Compulsion hit. My breathing fractured. I dug my heels in, every instinct screaming no. Muscles locked as I fought the pull of his voice, but in less than a blink, my body snapped upright. My feet moved, each step toward the circle stolen.
Heat licked my cheeks as I approached the blaze. “A vision,” I bellowed, willing one to come. The air thickened before me, shimmering and alive. Flames coiled higher, their light stroking my skin like curious fingers.
“I don’t need your visions,” Ian asserted, unaffected.
I tried to slow, to stumble, to fall—anything—but my legs kept carrying me forward, inch by merciless inch, toward the heart of the inferno.
There was no stopping this.
All right. If these were my last moments, they wouldn’t be spent in a panic, delighting my enemies. I smoothed my expression into blank defiance, stopped fighting—and stepped inside the stones.
I expected pain. Melting. But seconds passed, and nothing happened.
I blinked, unsure. The fire whispered around me, scorching but also somehow…
gentle. Almost reverent. And as the flames rose, licking at me, the prettiest shade of blue bloomed over my flesh, as if an invisible veneer was being burned away.
My eyes widened. This was what everyone else had seen when they looked at me?
A prickling sensation sparked in my feet, as if my skin was waking up after a too-long sleep. The prickles raced upward, needles and silk and electricity all at once. I gasped as it spread from my calves, to my thighs, to my spine.
Golden smoke rose and clung to me, fusing to my skin. Where it touched, light bloomed. That light pulsed the faintest green at first, but quickly darkened to a shade matching the emerald.
Amazing. The stones hummed in approval.
Ian’s grin reformed, slow and triumphant. “Behold,” he said, voice thick with satisfaction. “The Ember of Everlight. The only power great enough to defeat a monstra army.”
Shock almost buckled my knees. I caught myself on instinct alone, fingers curling to grab hold of something solid. Anything that said I was still just a girl standing in a ring of stones, rather than a deadly weapon newly unsheathed.
My pulse roared in my ears. Every breath felt too loud and too thin at the same time. Me. I was just me. A royal farm girl made of doubts and stubborn hope, of water and love and all the fragile things that broke too easily.
I stared at my hands, at the emerald glow tracing every vein, and a thousand moments collided inside me, bringing brutal clarity. Every warning. Every vision. Every prompting from Elowen. All had pointed to this.
I was the Ember of Everlight. Not Andrea. Not anymore. Me.
I dragged a hand over my face, wishing denial could erase everything else. How could I be the spark of annihilation to end the monstra armies?
Sharp and possessive, Ian locked on me. “We just needed to re-ignite it—so I can take it.”
Elowen believed this was our final loop. That the Ember—me—had been depleted with each new life. Ian must not share her suspicion.
“You are a container,” he explained, “just as Andrea was. Just as I will be, through the emerald. I should have guessed your identity the moment I spotted you.” Stroking the gemstone, he laughed, then lifted his prize into a beam of sunlight.
A wind erupted around me, lifting the brightness from my skin and funneling it into the emerald he held, causing it to glow.
Cold seeped into my bones. Here was my vision, come to life.
“Sin explained the Ember would resurface in a different water maiden. The very reason I wed one, certain she was the one.” He stroked his precious. “She didn’t last long in the stones, however.”
Killed by a madman, he’d once said, knowing he was referencing himself. More monster than any of his clones. I wrapped my arms around my middle, desperate to understand. “I drank a serum. I’m not truly a water maiden.”
“Now you lie to yourself. You are Sandrine’s daughter, are you not?” Ian tsked before placing the glowing gemstone over his heart and closing his eyes, clearly relishing the sensation as it faded into his skin, becoming a tattoo again. Only now, it glowed.
Finally, Jasher spoke up. “She doesn’t know.”
Ian grinned slowly, gleefully. “Allow me to enlighten you then. Sandrine is Hakeldama’s original water maiden, Andrea.”
That… no. Not possible. Not even worth contemplating. “You’re wrong. Sandrine is human.”
He scoffed. “I assure you, Sin is never wrong about Andrea. We think she awoke in the cave-in, though we aren’t sure where she hid for nearly twenty years until washing up on that shore, without her memory, and met Ahav. But we’re certain she started the time loops. Sin has begun to remember…”
I withered into myself. My mother. A water maiden. Andrea. The first of our kind. Me, a water maiden by birth, not serum.
Cords stood out in Jasher’s neck. “Elowen is Sandrine’s—Andrea’s—daughter as well. And your half-sister.”
Another shock jolted me. Elowen…sister? “No.” But the visions I’d had…
“Oh, yes.” Ian smirked brighter than before, only to hiss and peer down at his chest.
My eyes widened. The emerald. The glow was lifting from Ian’s skin in glittering flecks, swirling, collecting.
Like a lightning bolt, it arrowed back to me and shattered, hitting my skin like needle pricks.
I sucked in a mouthful of oxygen. The stinging points vibrated, humming with power.
“No,” Ian bellowed. “Reject it. Expel it. Now!”
Compulsion hit, and I attempted to obey, but the Ember remained on me, in me, as if it had a mind of its own. The stinging heat and hum only intensified.
Did I have the power to crystallize him?
“Very well,” he snapped. “We’ll do this another way. Once you’re dead, the Ember should abandon you. And if it doesn’t, well, we’ll start over. Sin said I cannot stab you, so I won’t.” He waved to the side of the nest. “Jump, Moriah.”
Jasher double-blinked.
This compulsion gripped me with greater force. I fought it. Fought so hard.
“We might not have another life,” I spewed at him, digging in my heels as my body attempted to force me to the threshold of the nest.
“You’re wrong. Jump,” he repeated, but a tinge of fear leaked into his expression.
Still I fought, but within seconds, I was walking forward. Dread unraveled knots in my throat.
One last chance to win Jasher. Desperate words spewed from me. “What if this is our last life?”
A vein throbbed at the side of his neck.
Almost at the edge… “Jagged ash seeks heart’s enduring rest!” Understand, understand, understand. “Please,” I cried. “Don’t let me die.”
His hands fisted, but he didn’t budge from his spot. Didn’t look at me.
Numerous monstra had returned, flying new circles overhead, blowing fire and smoke to obscure the sky and the world below until everything turned orange and black. Frigid wind whipped my hair against my cheeks.
A mere two steps from certain death.
Every cell in my body joined the battle. One step. “Please,” I repeated, reaching for him.
His gaze shot to me, irises haunted and fierce. Wild. But he didn’t reach back.
Hope waned. I’d reached the edge.
I jumped.