Chapter 40
CHAPTER
Veragi screeched, a bloodcurdling, angry cry. It was not Ozik who stood on the opposite side of the bridge, just like it was not Amalie who stood at Vaasa’s side. The sheer enormity of power emanating from both deities bounced around the bridge, making even the air feel heavier.
Run, Ozik’s voice curled into her mind.
Remember our bargain, Vaasa hissed across their bond, her hand still clutching her abdomen.
One breath. Two. She lifted her chin. Zetyr stood across the bridge in front of all the guards. Crimson glowed in his eyes, entirely consuming the pupils and whites, just like Amalie’s were coated in white. Dark webs protruded upon the skin of his neck and cheeks.
And on his knees in front of the deity…
Roman.
Vaasa’s heart dropped into her stomach. The guards behind them fled, emptying from the bridge with terrified shrieks. Zetyr raised his hand and twisted, pulling his fingers into a fist.
The roar of the Miro’dag sounded behind Vaasa.
The terrible screech of the creature caused her body to lock.
The cracking of bones echoed, and Reid cursed, still holding tightly to Vaasa.
She didn’t look. She didn’t need to see them to know the Miro’dag had killed the guards.
Zetyr had eliminated the people who knew of his magic.
“The demon is blocking our path,” Reid growled in her ear.
There was no way off this bridge. Either they faced Zetyr or they faced the Miro’dag.
Vaasa put one leg beneath her, then another, standing to her full height at Veragi’s side.
“Vaasa—” Roman choked, then went silent as Zetyr grabbed his shoulder.
Those glowing red eyes landed on Veragi, who stood next to Vaasa and Reid with a dark scowl painted across her lips. The bridge stretched between them, but the distance started to close as Vaasa held Roman’s pleading eyes.
“Finally, we meet again, sister,” Zetyr purred at Veragi. “Tell me, will your witches save you now?”
He threw his arms forward, and Vaasa lurched as the cords between her and Zetyr tugged.
The magic he wielded was incredible, far more than Ozik had ever taken from her.
Power pulsed down the bridge, a stream of red flying toward them.
Veragi stepped forward, and a glittering black wall rose into the air, blocking the assault.
It dropped, and he struck again, and again, and again.
She blocked each attack with a raise of her arms.
Zetyr cackled into the sky and screamed, “No tomb can hold me forever!”
Vaasa forced her shaking hand into her pocket and took hold of the necklace. Her magic extinguished, and she gasped at the relief, even as it hummed against her fingers. Her head snapped up to see Zetyr shake his head like a dog.
He couldn’t access her magic when it was dulled. It might not be enough to stop him, but it was enough to cause him to falter.
The crimson in Zetyr’s eyes sputtered, gold leaking through, and his face contorted in rage. Ozik was fighting. Even right now, he was fighting. The anchor upon his hand was the only lifeline he had left.
Strike! Ozik screamed in her mind.
Vaasa burst forward, her fingers clutching the necklace, and Reid let loose a strangled holler as she broke from his arms. Reid’s steps pounded behind her.
Roman screamed for Vaasa to stop. But she had already faced this.
She thrust the necklace forward and Zetyr roared, stumbling back and away from Roman.
That glowing red sputtered, gold breaking through entirely, and Zetyr’s body—Ozik’s body—convulsed with his fight.
A flash of bright white lit the bridge and shadows whirled around them, growing, shifting, flares of magic so dark they swallowed any light.
Veragi’s power shot at Zetyr. Glittering black mist curled around him and gripped like a vise.
His body slammed into the bridge and dragged toward them as if a rope had been tied to his leg and pulled.
His screams pierced the air. The shadows writhed over him, snuffing out each of his senses, burying him in magic like a tomb, his limbs going rigid in the senseless void.
Except for his hand, his ringed hand, where the licks of magic could not penetrate. They kept trying, but each time the tendrils dipped to the black stone ring, they recoiled. Something about that ring scared them off, as if they were fingers touching a flame.
“Holy shit,” Reid cursed from behind her.
Vaasa whipped her head to Veragi.
The goddess lifted from the bridge, rising into the air over the ocean. The whites in her eyes pulsed, and a wicked cry broke from her lips. A scream that sounded so much like Amalie’s. The goddess held Zetyr down, but only for so long. It had to have been using everything Veragi had.
“Jump!” Vaasa screamed to Sachia, whose crew was dragging her to the edge of the bridge, eyes wide at the goddess. Sachia took one look, waited one second, and then flung herself over the ledge.
Vaasa met Reid’s eyes. “Go!”
Reid stood there, gaze on her, and shook his head. “Not without you. Not this time.”
Zetyr lay beneath the swaths of Veragi magic, unmoving within his binds. If she released the necklace in her hand, it was possible Zetyr would harness her power again, that he could use it through Ozik’s connection to her.
She couldn’t wield.
But if she took Ozik’s ring, it would remove the last semblance of a defense he had against Zetyr.
Magic sharpened around her. Veragi’s power. A tendril lifted and then dropped like a blade, severing Ozik’s hand at the wrist. Veragi snarled at the body on the bridge as it began to convulse. To fight.
Veragi’s message was clear—take the ring, no matter what it cost.
“I need the ring,” Vaasa panted. She sprinted forward, eyes on the ring, the necklace in her hands—
Someone moved into her path. She skidded to a stop, meeting Roman’s pleading eyes. “How could you do this?” he screamed, and then his voice dropped to a strangled plea as he looked past her to where Reid stood. “Was any of it real?”
She saw the desperation in his maddened brown eyes, remembered every fracture of kindness and love that had once lit up his face as he looked at her.
Fear had made a home in him, too—fear of loss, fear of powerlessness, fear of his entire existence being stolen from him just because he had loved the wrong woman.
It was the sort of despair that would cause a man like Roman to do something he could never take back.
To lock her in a prison, if that was what it took to save his own life.
In a way, he had already died for her once.
After what she’d done today, she didn’t think he would do it again.
“No,” she said. “I guess that makes us both liars.”
Veragi faltered in the air, her arms shaking, and Ozik’s body convulsed. Zetyr would not stay down much longer. A terrible peal sounded on the other edge of the bridge, and Vaasa’s heart jumped into her throat.
It was the Miro’dag. It was behind her. Near Reid.
Again.
And she had a choice. She had a choice to win this fight, to get the ring, or to turn around and change the outcome this time. To save him.
“Don’t,” Roman begged.
With one last look at Roman, Vaasa spun on her heel.
Love or power; she knew precisely who and what she would choose.
The Miro’dag took form, Zetyr finding his grip on his power again, and Vaasa sprinted. “Reid!” she screamed as she threw the necklace, the links of it disconnecting from her fingertips, sending him the very thing that could save his life should Zetyr rise.
Agony, wicked and dark, filled Vaasa’s lungs and broke from her in an ear-piercing scream.
Not just pain.
Magic.
It flooded into Vaasa’s stomach, into her veins, drowning her, smothering her. Her muscles tightened as they sewed back together, weaving with the force in her bones, a well inside her filling to the brim like a hole had been dug into the ocean. It was gruesome and all-consuming.
It exploded.
Magic burst from her in tendrils of darkness, the familiar black mist flooding the entire bridge as if someone had blown out the moon. It stole the air, the sound, the light. It stole everything.
And in her mind, Ozik’s voice whispered, You are more powerful than I could ever have imagined.
The stones beneath Vaasa’s feet shook, and magic—her magic, his magic—morphed at her command, following the call of her heart.
The commands of her soul. Four legs. White eyes.
A howl that crashed into every corner of the continent.
Vaasa’s feet dug into the ground. She lifted her arms. The mist enveloped her hands and her wrists.
She was untouchable. She was pure power.
She was a wildfire, a monsoon, a life-altering natural disaster.
Her wolf ran at the Miro’dag, snarling, and Vaasa followed with her steps in tandem and her heart beating wildly in her chest. It chased away the cold, the fear, the longing.
The magic filled every empty, miserable piece of her that had chipped away into a chasm these long weeks.
Everything she had withstood. Those who had tried to control her. Lord Vlacik, Lord Karev, Roman.
Her wolf grew with each step, reaching the height of the Miro’dag and the size of Melisina’s horse, and just as Ozik had taught her, it struck.
The Miro’dag screamed as the wolf sank its teeth into its throat.
Metal coated her tongue as if she could taste the blood, taste the rip of flesh and the accompanying tearing of Zetyr’s magic.
Vaasa kept going. She lifted her hands and urged her manifestation onward.
It tore into the Miro’dag with an unforgiving rage.
It remembered, just as Vaasa did, what had been taken from her.
The weight of Reid’s body in her lap.
When he ceased to pull breath.
The wrenching away of her magic.
She wanted it all back.
The Miro’dag extended its webbed wings, and as it had done in the colosseum of Dihrah, it winked out of existence.
Her wolf stood snarling. Oil dripped from its mouth, the manifestation clearer than it had ever been.
Vaasa heaved air into her lungs. Her knees wobbled.
When she stumbled, arms wrapped around her waist, and she fell into Reid’s weight. “I’ve got you,” he promised.
He hauled her to the edge of the bridge, and she took one last look at the opposite end to see Veragi’s eyes dim and her body plummet downward, directly into the water. The same ocean Reid now hauled her toward.
“Jump!” he screamed.
She glanced across the bridge one final time, her gaze meeting Roman’s.
And then Vaasa flung herself off the side.
For a moment, all she heard was the roar of wind in her ears. Her stomach flew up and into her throat. Then the sound of Roman’s scream broke through the air, and the glacial ocean swallowed her whole.