Chapter Seven. Fallon #2
Caldris reached up, his arm moving faster than a lightning strike arcing through the sky.
He caught the daemon’s blade in his bare hand, stopping it with an explosion of golden light that tore through the cavern and made the tree branches rattle in the woods beside the beach.
Sand blew into my face, stinging my eyes as Etan turned me in his grip, shoving my face into his tunic and shielding me as he rounded his body over mine.
The sound of something striking the ground was the first to permeate the buzzing haze, like the explosion of light had damaged my ear drums.
I pulled my face out of Etan’s chest, blinking up at him with wide, shocked eyes that I suspected mirrored his.
His russet-brown gaze roamed over my face, inspecting me for injury in a way I couldn’t reconcile.
His lips moved, but no sound came as I shook my head at him and reached up a hand to touch my ear.
My fingers came away wet, and I brought them forward to stare down at the blood that trickled down the sides of my neck from whatever damage I’d sustained.
The feeling of my body healing itself was one I would never grow used to, the flesh moving within my ears as my body fought to repair the damage caused by Caldris’s outburst.
I spun as hearing returned slowly, trickling in through the silence.
Caldris had covered Estrella with his body, shielding her from any further harm as he laid her out on top of the sand.
She stared up at him in shock, unable to figure out what she’d done to her mate.
What she’d made him into by giving him her blood.
He did not smile as he inspected her for injury, his face strangely unfeeling as he got to his feet over her.
The daemon was nowhere to be found, as if he’d simply vanished into thin air while Etan surrounded me.
Estrella scrambled to her feet as the guards charged Caldris, attempting to contain the threat to the Queen they were all forced to serve.
Caldris reached out a hand, his shadows no longer dark.
Instead of black tendrils, they glowed with Estrella’s golden light as he sent them sweeping toward those who advanced upon them.
They wrapped themselves around the guards’ throats, squeezing as the other royals stepped back away from the fray.
Etan tightened his grip, lifting me off my feet as he too backed away from the spectacle.
“No!” I screamed, thrashing my legs to fight against his grip.
I wouldn’t leave them to fight this alone, would at the very least bear witness to what my mother did to two of the people I loved more than anything.
Estrella was part of me, a part I would never be able to tear from my soul.
The crescent moon on my hand that marked us as one and the same seemed to pulse as she glanced up, meeting my stare with a soft smile that spoke of exactly what she knew would happen here.
She already knew that she would never walk away from this cove, that there was no possibility in this world that Mab allowed both of them to remain free.
Her face was resigned as she mouthed to me, and I would have sworn I heard her sad voice break through the chaos.
“Go,” she said, ignoring my head shake to look at Etan and study the way he held me.
She pursed her lips, nodding to him with a slight motion that he seemed to recognize as her expectation to protect me.
She would haunt him in the afterlife if he didn’t.
Estrella’s attention shifted to Mab as she raised a single hand.
Her face tipped to the side as Mab held Estrella’s stare, watching as the Queen’s gaze fell to the already healed wound on Estrella’s wrist. The blood that stained her skin shimmered with gold, with the distinct sign of the Primordials that Estrella had fought to keep secret in the face of Mab’s suspicion.
What she proposed was impossible, and yet …
There was no denying what Estrella was capable of.
Caldris finished with the guards, turning his attention to the Queen who had enslaved him as a weapon for all those years. Who had allowed her people to violate him in the greatest way, robbing him of autonomy over his own person.
Mab squeezed her hand as Etan backed me away slowly, attempting to avoid drawing attention to us and our retreat.
Caldris grimaced but continued on through the pain, pushing through her control on him even as his chest stilled and stopped heaving with breath.
Estrella struggled in turn, her face pinching with agony that I knew existed only in her heart.
Their bond was incomplete, his pain only a shadow of what it would be had they been able to accept it.
Caldris dropped to his knees, clutching his chest as his eyes flashed back and forth between blue and gold.
“Stop!” Estrella begged, squeezing her eyes closed. She was trapped, desperate to save her mate, and I knew what she would do to save him, knew the sacrifice she would make. I couldn’t fault her for it, knowing I would have done nothing less to save her. “Name your price.”
“My star,” Caldris wheezed, reaching toward her with his free hand. He would rather see both of them dead than see her enslaved to Mab as so many others had been, than see his one love turned into a brutal weapon and know the guilt she wouldn’t be able to escape for an eternity.
My mother grinned, clearly pleased with the turn of events.
This may not have been what she’d intended when she set forth with this task, but she was positively gleeful about it nonetheless.
Meanwhile, my heart felt like it was being torn in two, knowing that there was nothing I could do to help her without any magic or control over it.
My helplessness was a prison all its own, leaving me shaking with the feeling that I might come out of my skin.
That something within me wanted to burn.
Mab tossed her head back and laughed, the sound filling the cavern. “We both know there is only one thing I want from you, Little Mouse,” she said, stepping closer slowly. She only stopped when she stood before Estrella, pressing the tip of the blade into the skin above her heart.
“Estrella, NO!” Caldris screamed, the agony of that yell making the hair on my arms rise.
“Don’t do it,” a male voice pleaded, drawing my gaze away from Estrella and Mab and the spectacle they made.
Rheaghan raised his hands placatingly, as if he could convince his sister that he was no threat to her.
Etan winced at my back, stilling in his retreat as his King’s gaze collided with his.
Rheaghan gave him a look that said not to intervene, that no matter what happened, he was to stay out of it.
I felt Etan shake his head at my spine, his grip tightening on me as Rheaghan’s gaze dropped to me for the briefest of moments before he swung his attention back to Estrella.
“It cannot be undone. I don’t think you understand what an eternity of servitude will mean. ”
“I consent. As long as he lives,” Estrella said, the words torn from the depths of her soul.
Caldris’s horror was palpable in the air, striking me deep in the chest with an anguish I hoped I would never understand.
I didn’t want to love anyone that completely, not if it meant feeling pain like that.
Mab wasted no time gliding the edge of her blade along Estrella’s skin, cutting through the muscle and sinew to create a gash that leaked blood on her dress in a steady stream.
She carefully avoided Estrella’s heart itself, unwilling to lose the weapon she’d only just claimed for herself.
For any mortal, the wound would have been fatal within seconds.
But Estrella stayed standing, her silence ringing through the cove as she refused to give even a whimper of pain. I didn’t know how she did it, how she survived and endured endlessly without ever giving in.
I would have given up long ago.
Mab raised her other arm, the one with the torn hand—a small snake twined around her wrist. It hissed at Estrella as Mab guided it to the hole she’d created in Estrella’s chest, iron-teeth flashing as it slithered inside.
Her wound healed over, and Estrella’s entire body shuddered as those iron-teeth sank into the flesh of her heart and turned the key to the prison of her body, shackling her in chains that we couldn’t see.
“What have you done?” Rheaghan asked, running a hand through his hair.
Estrella turned to face him, her face distinctly devoid of life. There was no emotion in it during the moments that Mab made herself at home in Estrella’s skin, only a blank mask of mindless obedience.
Mab’s iron blade lashed out so quickly that I thought for a moment she would go back on her word and take Caldris from Estrella after everything. It would be a small mercy in the end, with the knowledge I possessed that Estrella would go with him.
But it was Rheaghan’s throat that parted beneath the blade, his blood trickling down the front of it as his mouth dropped open and he choked.
He pressed both hands to that line, that unnaturally straight line that marred his fair skin.
Blood poured over his hands in a thick, viscous ooze as he looked to Etan.
I didn’t dare to look at the man behind me, at the man who had just lost his King. I didn’t know the truth of Etan’s allegiance, of what he might feel for Rheaghan even as he betrayed him with Mab, but there was no mistaking the anguished gasp that rattled in his chest or the tightness in his body.
There was no denying the outright devastation on his face as Rheaghan bled.
Everything in me stilled and then rattled, vibrating with fury for the opportunity she’d taken. I’d thought we’d have time to get to know one another outside her watchful gaze. I’d been so sure we would have that opportunity.
I’d been so sure the man at my spine was Mab’s ally and my enemy, so determined to keep him at a distance because of it. But he’d been the first one my uncle looked to in his last moments.
He’d been the friendly face he sought out.
Rheaghan fell to his knees at Estrella’s side, and Estrella reached out to take his hand in his final moments as emotion flooded her once again. Her face was no longer a carefully controlled mask, but one of anguish.
I hadn’t realized she’d known Rheaghan that well, hadn’t seen them together but a handful of times, but there was no mistaking her grief as Mab drove her knife into his heart, silencing him permanently.
Estrella moved as if she might give him her blood, and I knew she intended to save the King of the Summer Court, even though she’d already greatly weakened herself. She had nothing left to give.
Mab abandoned her blade to squeeze her hand, forcing Estrella to halt and preventing her from interfering. Estrella fought against it, against that hold on her as her body refused to move. Rheaghan bled out before us, and none so much as dared to attempt to save him.
It wasn’t his sister he looked to in his final moments, nor was it Etan as his second-in-command. He looked to Estrella as he died, as if he saw her for the first time, and his eyes filled with sorrow.
He dropped onto the sand face-first, bleeding out upon the white silt. There was no movement in his chest, not a breath in his body.
Because the King of Summer was dead.