Chapter 58
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
What have we done?
The question was the first thought to return. I fought for awareness with broken fingernails. There was fire everywhere, red and white, blue and orange. I gasped a great breath, but I felt as if I was getting no air at all. Like I was drowning on solid ground.
I reached out blindly. {Kyrene,} a distant voice called. {Kyrene!}
I followed Zefiah’s voice. My hand touched her blade, one solid thing in soupy nothingness. And then, it kept reaching.
Fingers intertwined with mine. Someone murmured my name. The voice was both familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar, because I had learned how it sounded in every shade of pleasure or pain and all in between. Unfamiliar, because it was now so stretched, so hollow, a faint shadow of what it once had been.
I drew in another gurgling breath, but all that did was flood more liquid into my lungs. Panic ratcheted higher.
But then I saw Septimus’s face. It was covered in blood, all that pristine beauty shattered. His eyes were bright red. I could see, in every line of his perfect features, how hard he fought to cling to control. Between us, cradled in our intertwined arms, were two pieces of metal:
Zefiah, and a silver bolt.
Our twin mercies.
A streak of red slid down his cheek.
Nyaxia was gone. Somewhere in the distance, stone groaned and crumbled, as if this entire prison was collapsing in on itself.
Through the flames, a silhouette emerged. Glowing white eyes. Burning threads of fate. Six outstretched wings, and now, within them, an empire.
Her gaze fell to us, impassive. As if she was looking at nothing more than a broken object.
“My people,” Septimus rasped out. “The curse.”
He could barely speak. The four words were slurred and coarse, barely even coherent at all. But Acaeja was a goddess. She would understand what he meant.
We had come so far. Sacrificed so much. And here, in the ashes of our success, death breathing down our throats, that desperate shared hope still hung by one fraying thread. That perhaps it had all been for something after all.
Acaeja stared at us, face still, as if rifling through our pasts and futures, evaluating based on some mathematical equation that only she understood. And with every second of silence, my rage rose and rose.
Because I already knew, before she spoke.
Septimus watched, his hope palpable—that his people might be saved.
But I knew.
Everyone always looks at their heroes like that, in the end.
Acaeja, at last, spoke. “I told your lover, when we met, that fate is not an impassive creation,” she said. “Fate is forged. But one must be wary of where they place the hammer’s strokes. For fate can be forged into a sword. It can be forged into a cage. And it can be forged into a crown.”
Her wings spread. And that crown was there, too—upon her head, as she ruled over the empire she had created.
Her eyes burned into us. And she said simply, “You would betray me one day.”
And then she was gone. Fate shattered just like that.
Septimus clutched me, letting out a ragged sound, something between a sob and a roar. His curse dragged him out to sea. Blood fell over my cheeks like rain. I barely felt any of it.
In another world, Valentina called my name.
In another world, I could rest.
{You must act now, Kyrene,} Zefiah begged. {You must kill him, and let him end you, or both of you will suffer forever.}
Our last chance for mercy.
My lashes fluttered. I fought to look into Septimus’s face one last time.
He was now holding Zefiah. Her glow reflected from the streaks of blood on his cheeks, thinned by tears.
He was nearly unrecognizable from the pristine vampire prince I had first met.
The man who used his beauty and dignity as a shield against the future he knew would one day come for him.
That future was here, and it had taken so much from him.
And yet, looking at him now, the words unfurled so clearly in my head:
You are perfect.
Because he had fought so hard. Given so much.
All those sacrifices now shredded his defenses, leaving behind only the suffering they had hidden.
And I knew that suffering. I felt it, too.
And in this moment, I loved him for it, for all those failures in lockstep with mine.
All those shattered hopes, so precious for having existed at all.
He had seconds left. And he would need to use them to end my life, or else I would rot here, forever conscious.
He buried his face between my neck and my shoulder. I held him as tightly as I could. I tried to memorize the shape of his body against mine. I knew I would never feel it again.
In my final moments, I was furious. I was so furious that I would burn up the world with it.
I will not turn against you as long as my pathetic mortal heart beats, I had told Acaeja.
And my heart was weak now, as I drowned on my blood, as my body gave out.
Septimius whispered in my ear, each word hard-fought, “I wish I could give you more than an end, lyri. I wanted to. I wanted to.”
No, I decided. This would not be an end. I still had to take one last shot for spite. For mine, and for his.
There was so much I wanted to tell Septimus, in this moment. Thank you’s and I’m sorry’s. I wanted to cut open my soul to let out everything he deserved to hear, so many words that I knew they would gush free like blood, and they still would not be enough.
But death reached for me. My body, fragile and mortal and weak, failed me. I did not have endless words to offer him.
I only had two. Two precious words.
I fought to make my lips part, and I said those words over and over, because I didn’t know if my tongue was moving at all.
Consciousness slipped away.
My heart stopped beating.
An oath shattered.
And the part of me that still existed, the part of me that would live on because of my pact with Zefiah, prayed that he had heard me. That he had used his last dregs of lucidity to obey my request.
Two words. A plea.
No, a command.
Not, Kill me.
Turn me.