Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Never accept a kraken’s hospitality. Never refuse it, either.
–An Incomplete Guide to Kraken Survival
Jokull had just made one very big mistake “inviting” me to his manor.
After six days in the mineral-heavy damp air of the cave, bombarded by Sebastian’s chill, I exited the warmth.
In the seconds of my travel, Jokull had lit the space like a wedding.
Candles by the hundred filled the dining room with dancing shadow while roasted fruit, clove and citrus mingled with the candle smoke.
The table stretched the length of the hall, and at the far end, past the wine and the silver and the meal, stood a cage, only a little bigger than a dog crate. And folded into it with her knees drawn up and her spine straight, sat Lady Harpa.
She was filing her claws. “Oh, good,” she said, without looking up. “The second guest has arrived. Do try the figs, dear.”
Jokull rose from his chair, every inch the gentleman, and drew out the seat at his right. “Little lizard.” His ash-and-gold eyes crinkled. “Welcome to our home. You honor us with your presence.”
Our home? My gaze shot to Harpa. Still filing those claws.
I moved forward. “As if I could pass up an opportunity to help my husband kill you once and for all.”
The primordial smiled as I eased onto the cushioned seat. “He’s certainly trying his best.” He motioned to the walls. Around us, dulled to a red smear by the dome, the sea was being taken apart. “The rune hasn’t drained Sebastian even the slightest bit.”
That should have relieved me. Instead, unease crawled down my spine. If the rune wasn’t draining Sebastian, what was it doing to him?
Jokull returned to his chair and poured wine. “He has killed a truly extraordinary number of my mers and shifters, and he is currently attempting to persuade my dome to admit him.” He slid the glass toward me. “It will, of course. Eventually. After I’ve tired him out.”
My veins flash-froze. More unease swamped me. What did Jokull know that I didn’t? Why be so confident that he could exhaust Sebastian? I played along to placate him. “That’s a good strategy.” But I’d thought of it first.
The compliment puffed up his chest with pride. “Isn’t it? When he comes through that wall, he does not leave it. Not ever. I won’t be dying today. He will. And with his death, I’ll contain the rune. Afterward, if you are still alive, you may go or stay. Your choice.”
“No longer eager to be friends with him?” I asked, sipping the wine.
“One must sacrifice for dreams.” He turned to blow Harpa a kiss. “An eternity with her is the dream.”
“My future is already crammed,” she replied, brushing a piece of invisible lint from her shoulder. “No reason to pencil you in.”
I looked past them both, at the red roiling sea. And there he was. Sebastian. My heart slammed against my ribs.
Cloaked in seething shadow, white light bleeding out of the cracks of him, hammering the dome with blows that would’ve flattened a mountain.
His face remained perfectly calm. His shirt was gone and his chest a wreck of runes and the handprint I had burned into him in his office. His eyes were flat, gray and empty.
Agony tore at me. He was ten feet away, on the other side of a wall, and I was sitting at a table with the man who had killed his parents, but the one I loved didn’t look at me even once. His gaze remained past me. Over my shoulder, locked on Jokull.
I didn’t have to wonder what thoughts rolled through his mind. He was measuring the dome’s failure point, the angle of his strikes, and the distribution of his own weight.
“He doesn’t see you at all, does he?” Jokull asked, so polite.
“Nein,” I said, not letting myself wallow in hurt. This was only temporary. Soon, I would punch through that stone with my love. Remind him how good we were together. But first. Jokull must be handled. “You don’t see me either. Not really.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t have let me come.
“Oh, I know you are strong.” The primordial toasted me. “I know you and Harpa and Sebastian believe you will, eventually, end me. That’s why he’s out there, beating on my house.”
“We will end you,” I said. “The rune wants to. I felt it.”
“Já.” He set down his glass. “It does. I felt it, too, and I have since accepted that it’s the only thing in all the realms that could oversee the deed.”
“But you aren’t afraid.” Not a question.
“Nei.” He picked up his knife, watching the candlelight run along the blade. “I will kill the man carrying it, ending him and inactivating the rune.”
I smiled, cold. “You will try.”
“The stone is nothing if it does not live in something,” he said, conversational, reasonable, a man explaining the tides to a child. “It replaced his heart. It is his heart. He’s gone, never to return.”
Nein. Nein, nein, nein. I refused to believe that. My Sebastian was in there.
Jokull leaned toward me, and now, at last, the pleasant expression peeled back, and I saw the monster that had been sitting at this table the whole time.
“If you help me, rather than the husband who has spurned you and who is, for all intents and purposes, dead to you, I will reward you handsomely.”
I rolled my eyes to show him just how little weight I gave his promise.
He shrugged, reclined, and looked at the cage. “You were right, my dear.”
“I always am.” Harpa rolled back her shoulders, stretching. “She was never going to betray him. That is love, primmy. Pure, genuine love.”
Longing glazed his face, but I didn’t care. He’d forfeited his own happy ending a millennia ago.
The dome released a sudden shriek. A long, tearing, agonized note. A crack ran up the red wall from floor to ceiling and Jokull braced for battle. Freezing black water trickled into the dining room, and I surged to my feet.
A shadow slipped through the fissure, solidifying into Sebastian as it fell. He landed in the dining room, crouched as the sea streamed off him. White light spilled from his fists. As he straightened, he kept his sights locked on Jokull.
“Welcome,” the primordial said, rising slowly. “Finally, our last party guest has arrived.”
Sebastian said nothing. He just got to work, taking the room apart as he reached for his target, shadow-tentacles exploding from him, all glowing white like his hands. Those tentacles went through the table, the walls, the floor. Everywhere they touched, the manor broke.
A laughing Jokull produced whip-thin shadows with jagged edges; they ripped out of him in a hundred directions at once.
Where they landed on my husband, they opened him to the bone.
But Sebastian didn’t slow. Never made a sound.
He just recalculated exactly as I’d watched him do in other battles and struck again.
My dragon rose howling. I dropped low, slipped beneath Jokull’s guard and unleashed a torrent of fire hot enough to melt everything it touched.
Argh! Skin bubbling, bones melting, while the primordial simply rebuilt himself as fast as I destroyed him, continuing to fight Sebastian without a pause in his strikes.
Jokull’s shadow-whip caught me across the ribs and threw me the length of the hall into the sideboard.
“That looks like it hurt,” Harpa said from the cage. “I’d come out and help, but it’s not my time to shine yet.”
I ignored the pain. Ignored her and climbed back to my feet.
I went left when the shadow came again, my broken ribs grinding. The manor kept coming down around us. A slab from the ceiling crashed where I’d been only seconds ago.
Sebastian drove Jokull toward the east wall, away from me. But did he do it because of me, or because the east wall was better ground? Guess we’d find out. Ignoring every burst of pain, I hurled myself back into the fray.
Jokull fixed on me as if Sebastian wasn’t even in the room. Before I landed my second strike, a black arc of shadow came down on my chest with the whole weight of the primordial behind it. No time to slip free. A tentacle shot down my throat, snuffing out my fire, filling my lungs with water.
I fought, I fought so hard. But nothing helped. My lungs screamed for air. My dragon clawed at my mind. My vision dulled, and realization sparked. Dying?
At least Jokull would die with me. Despite my haze, I could see Sebastian had a clean strike.
With Jokull focused on me, another watery shadow already forming, preparing the blow that would end me, his flank remained open.
There was no better time for Sebastian to act.
Saving my life wasn’t the objective, after all. But…
“Save her!” Harpa shouted. Jokull glared at her, his grip loosening.
“Come back to me,” I called to him as blessed oxygen filled my lungs. But Jokull squeezed again. Harder this time.
Sebastian’s arm lifted, a deadly shadow tentacle aimed at Jokull. Then he stopped.
My husband’s head turned. Toward me. Something had disrupted that terrible nothingness. Broken through. His fingers flexed and muscle jumped beneath his eye.
Sebastian looked at Jokull’s exposed flank.
At me.
Back to Jokull. Then the kraken king crossed twelve feet of rising water and tore the tentacle from my throat, pulling me into his chest. Because he hadn’t just considered the east wall better ground. Or so I reassured myself, even as the flat gray of his eyes told me otherwise.
As I coughed up brine, he turned his back to the primordial and folded himself around me, taking the next blow with his spine.
He staggered, the shadow slicing through him, tearing a piece of the rune stone from his chest. I screamed, but he made a small sound. Then Sebastian Mórisi, King of Krakenstrond, crashed to his knees in the water, his arms still sheltering me, blue blood pouring from his mouth and his wound.
He looked at me. No recognition. No farewell. No final flicker of love. Just a man’s eyes, flat and gray and emptying, fixed on a face as if it belonged to a stranger.
“Stay with me.” I tried to patch his wound. Tried so hard. “Stay with me, stay, stay—”
His eyes closed. His chest went still. And the brand on my chest snuffed out.