Chapter 105
Ivy
It was more than a rush of adrenaline.
It was like life was pouring through me. In an instant, I felt everything.
From the lives around me to the terror playing out in the streets of the city beyond the mountain. The attacks on innocents, the bloodshed and souls gasping for breath.
I felt the fires around the academy burning brighter and hotter with every second wasted. Every spell the students cast against the flames as they battled against oppressive heat born from the elemental mages attacking them.
Then there was the attack at the Titan’s Channel and the storms battling against their shores. I felt every attempt to enter the Underworld under the watchful gaze of the full moon, each strike of magic against the barriers that would not falter.
In Faery, there were rumbles beneath the earth, as if the realm itself wanted to fight against the bloodshed.
Darkness crackled along the horizon, sinking the world in a tar-like substance as the Fae fought each other, two sides warring for power: those who wanted to see Dante reign, and those who still believed in what the Goddess promised.
Life and death all came together, snapping through me like a rubber band.
And I also felt it slipping away.
Beyond the haze of power, I heard a chuckle. “I feel it,” he whispered, awe filling his voice. “I feel all of it.”
My grip on his wrist tightened, fingers digging into his hot flesh. But I couldn’t make any words form on my lips, not as I tried to reel it in, to keep it as my own.
It was my power. The one I was born to hold, the one I was always meant to wield. It wasn’t his—and it couldn’t be.
Dante would never be strong enough to hold it.
The air around us crackled with electricity. The haze of the world came into sharp focus as I felt the tumultuous shift in power.
Dante was taking what was mine.
He was absorbing the magic.
And I wasn’t sure if I could stop him.
I needed to pull away, but I was trapped, Nyx’s skull the glue holding us together. In the distance, I heard the rumble of something else. Earth shifting, not thunder. Listened as shouts sounded around us.
When I breathed in, it wasn’t rain that filled my lungs, but smoke.
From the rush of adrenaline came pain. Scorching, unbearable pain. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. It struck me like lightning, running through my body without remorse.
It wasn’t my pain I felt, but the agony of all those around me.
The students at the academy boiling alive. The demons drowning trying to keep his forces away. The Fae swallowing earth as it engulfed them.
The magic wasn’t just being absorbed by him, it was being expelled.
For a moment, I saw a flash of the Old World. Long cut off from my power, I felt it open up. Tasted the rotten death on the wind, felt the moment my magic, which once tried to destroy them, leak into their realm.
Like a match being lit, magic exploded throughout their realm, trying to finish what it started over three thousand years ago.
“What’s going on?” Dante whispered, sounding almost pained. “What is that?”
I focused on him, on what he felt. Faery, ever the catalyst of struggle, burned.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. It wasn’t the first time the power had gone to those lands and unleashed its anger on it.
Deep in my bones, I could recall the other time my magic sought out release that was not through the body of a Daughter of Nyx.
It’d been during Pandora’s reign, when she first took the power and didn’t have her mates.
Back then, the power had released a storm upon the realms. Burned forests, flooded cities, froze lands.
It was doing it again.
Only this time, it would succeed.
There was no Goddess here to stop it from destroying us all.
There were no forces strong enough to tear Dante and me apart.
There was only me and him and the skull.
“You aren’t strong enough to control it, Dante,” I said, my voice sounding outside of my body somehow.
My eyes were closed, and yet I could see everything.
All four realms tied to me, connected to me.
I felt them deep in my body, and as they were punished for Dante’s treachery, so was I. “You were never meant to.”
The male growled, but I felt fire inch up my legs, curling around my shins while ice filled my lungs with every breath I took. The storm raging around us clouded my vision, turning it dark.
“Release it to me,” he said, pulling at the magic. “Give it to me!”
I can’t, I said to myself. It was mine, not because the Goddess commanded it, not because I wanted it. But because it was so ingrained within me.
If I let it go, it would cut me open and tear me apart.
Dante was a fool to think it would ever be his easily.
As I fought him for control, I tried to rein it in. The fire destroying the Oberon campus, the storms flooding Avalon and the Underworld. I even tried to take hold of the earthquakes rocking Faery, but with each pull of power, there was a push from Dante.
Push and pull. A tug of war I needed to win.
Through my bonds, I watched the battle around us; Aither Fae and Wrath demons falling through the air as howling winds tried to keep them down; shifters locked in their animal forms bowing to a new Alpha—to my mate; witches tearing apart their mage counterparts while vampires were locked in a never-ending battle against their own.
“This is how the worlds will end,” I whispered, eyeing him with tears blurring my vision. “You are not the king you think you are.”
Dante bared broken teeth, the first sign that he couldn’t handle it. Although pain threatened to crush me, I knew I could bear it. I could take it all if I had to.
That was the difference between Dante and me: he’d never had to carry the weight of others’ pain on his shoulders.
Never had to hold it together when they couldn’t, never had to understand their suffering while also choking on his own.
There was never a time where he had to be the strength for someone else so they could break and be the one to mend them once they were done.
Dante would never understand sacrifice, because he’d always had someone else to do it for him.
He could never give up everything—his life, his family, his world—for the betterment of others.
At least I could admit how terrifying and painful that was. At least I could admit it hurt knowing I had to be the one to do it.
It would be easy, letting him have it all. Give him the power to rule so I no longer had to. Admit to him—and myself—that I couldn’t be what the realms needed.
But there was no easy way to do it. Because it meant death.
And that wasn’t a sacrifice I was willing to make.
“Don’t you see it yet, Dante?” I asked quietly, watching as darkness closed in around us, as his tar-like magic tried to overwhelm my own. “Don’t you understand?”
The male looked at me, blood pooling in his eyes. “Understand what?” he spat, lips red, voice slurred.
Around us, the fight seemed to slow. I felt every one of my bonds move to circle us; each one a tether around my heart. Each one keeping me grounded to reality and not to the pain—or the horror—threatening to crush me.
“No one will win,” I finally said, voice low.
“Not you. Not me. Not the creatures around us. There will be death regardless. There will be loss and pain and darkness. There is nothing that will make up for that.” A lump formed in my throat as his gaze cut through me.
“There is nothing either of us can do to save them.”
Something shifted in his dark eyes. Not understanding, but maybe a realisation.
It was too late for that, though.
My eyes closed as waves of power rushed through me. The game of tug of war continued, spilling out around us.
My power trying to rein it all in.
His power trying to consume it all.
And the skull between us acting like a conduit, neither protecting me nor helping him.
The bone grew hot in our hands. I hissed as it became too much to handle.
Dante’s body bucked, forcing my eyes open. Through the haze, I saw blood spilling from his shoulder, the tip of a knife cutting through the fabric of his shirt.
It was a moment of distraction that I took full advantage of. I pulled my hand from his wrist and grabbed the skull, spreading my fingers atop the bone and beneath the jaw, ignoring the pain it caused.
“Let go,” I whispered, watching Dante’s eyes widen. “Or it will destroy you.”
When I looked down, his hands were black, rotting away, fingers now bone and sinew. The sight of him literally falling apart from the power should have made me sad. Maybe even pity him.
But I felt nothing. Not as it inched up his forearms and burned away his clothes. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would drive him mad.
Another dagger cut through his body, this time through his chest. When he screamed, the sound was guttural, painful even to my ears.
But it was another shift of magic. Not towards him, but into me.
My eyes closed as I focused on my breaths, evening them calmly and pulling the magic back into my body.
With each breath in, I took the flames burning the forests.
The smell of smoke lightened in the air until it was nothing but a whisper on the wind.
The fires surrounding the academy disappeared, doused by the magic swelling within me.
The wild, magic-stoked fires coursing through Faery fizzled out one by one, leaving behind the remnants of Dante’s actions.
I pulled in the storms next, feeling the rain stop, and listened as the thunder turned to a distant echo of what it once was. The electricity in the air dampened before fleeing, and with another breath, I dissipated the storms raging across the Titan’s Channel and calmed the oceans.
On another breath, I calmed the rumbling earth. Fissures in Faery closed as the realm settled, like a giant returning to sleep. In Avalon, I closed the gaping wounds in the land so that it might heal.
In the Old World, I summoned the magic back into myself to stop the assault on what was once my realm.
When I opened my eyes, snow stopped falling in the Underworld and across the northern islands of Avalon. Ice cracked in the southern lands of the Old World and in the Summer Court.
When I sighed, Winter settled in once more.
Dante stared at me for a long moment before falling to his knees. Blood spilled from his lips, but not once did he take his hands from the skull.
“It was supposed to be mine,” he whimpered. “My power. My magic.”
Again, I expected to feel pity. Remorse. Sadness. But instead, there was a fire burning in my chest that needed to escape, and he wasn’t worth its wrath. Not anymore.
“This was never your power,” I said, stepping back. His hands, broken from the rot, fell from the skull. “And it was never going to be yours, no matter how hard you tried.”
Dante watched me for a long moment, the two blades still sticking out of his shoulder and chest. “He said it would work.”
The chill that rolled down my spine was the only reaction I could muster. “Who?”
“Emris,” he whispered, tears rolling down his face. “Emris said it would work. He said the power would be mine. He said—”
Those final words were cut off by a collar snapping around his throat. Dante’s dark eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he fell, slumping into the wet stone.
I finally looked at the figure behind him, drawing in a sharp breath as Hawk came into focus. “I remember everything,” he said, not meeting my stare.
“And?” I asked, mouth suddenly dry as I took in my mate’s bloodied, soaked form.
Hawk looked at me with pursed lips. “I remembered how much I hate this fucker.”