Chapter 60
F or a heartbeat, Alora allowed the darkness to cradle her. The ragged breaths sinking daggers into her side with every inhale anchored her to reality as her mind pleaded to slip away. That fall—as brutal as the one when Garrik had taught her how to fly.
Only this time, he didn’t catch her.
Someone was screaming. Waving their arms high above. Out the window, silhouetted by the morning sky over the glass dome.
Alora had mere seconds before the females would storm the winding staircase.
She had to move. Now.
Behind her, the wooden door shattered.
Ahead… The forest …
It was pushed back. Far back from where it had been the night before. She didn’t have to guess it. By Ladomyr’s manipulations, the landscape had shifted. The ground cleaved open to a steaming, scorching pit carved around the tower.
With no other way across but to leap.
Even with her wounds, Alora managed to clamber to her feet. Cursing every star as she limped to the edge and surveyed the molten core of Elysian raging like a swift river. The voices behind the tower grew louder, and Alora knew—starsdamnit—she knew what she had to do.
Alora eyed the other side, eyed the almost too-far distance?—
Footsteps rounded the tower.
She didn’t give herself a second to reconsider. Alora paced six steps backward and hurled herself over the edge. Steam and heat and Firekeeper tried to lay their claim, but she refused them. Falling would not be her end. No. She would land on the other side and then?—
It knocked the breath from her.
Jagged edge of rock and dirt slammed into her torso and cracked her already shattered rib. Alora grappled for a stronghold, ignoring the searing pain, hearing laughter and shouting as she pulled herself up the ledge.
Then. Pain.
So much pain. Alora gripped her ribs, wheezing. The flat of her back on grass.
The others—they were only seconds from leaping. Only seconds from having her again.
Against the pain, Alora screamed as she pushed herself up and ran. Into the trees. Every step, sheer agony as she clung to the bark of pines and sprucewood, not entirely certain if they were holding her upright or if the burning pain from her collar was.
She didn’t dare look behind and ran. Ran through her body screaming that it couldn’t. Ran until a streak of ebony and shale slipped from behind a tree.
Aiden.
Alora blinked, shook her head. The sight of him standing there … in his white tunic, which was fluttering open in the breeze. She went to shout for him, but his head snapped behind her, flashing his half-human teeth.
Alora dared to glimpse over her shoulder, catching the silhouettes flanking each other, weaving in the distance, with spears aimed in front of them. Their cold, predatory eyes …
As soon as she whirled to Aiden, nothing but endless forest waited. She didn’t understand. He would have waited for her—ran to her. He wouldn’t have left her there?—
A hollow thump sunk into the tree to her left.
White braids tickled her cheek as her pupils flared, scanning the spear that had narrowly missed her ear.
Alora vaulted forward, catching chortled sighs and grunts of disappointment from the crowd when another swoosh passed by. It was pointless to dwell on it, to think that some of those watching actually cared she survived while others rooted for her death.
Hurtling through the forest, Alora marked every movement, every snap of a branch, anything dark that could be her sea captain. A rumbling river announced its presence long before she saw it.
Weaving through the outskirts of the trees, Alora almost collapsed the moment she saw the water. And if by any luck, the females prowling the forest weren’t as skilled as she was trained to be and would take some time to catch up.
And once across …
Alora could only hope the water would carry her enough away that they wouldn’t find her downstream, and without a second thought, she jumped in.
The water burned . Worse than the collar. It felt like she was being roasted on a spit.
Her skin feathered to angry crimson, pebbling blood from her pores as the water washed what was left of the runes from Jade away.
Alora pumped her arms. Kicked her feet. Desperate to reach the other side but her boots … her starsdamned boots got in the way. She steadied her breathing, reached through the scorching sting of the river, and pulled off her boots, throwing them as far as she could onto the bank.
Behind, voices broke the treeline.
“ You can’t run from us !”
Watch me.
Something whirred past her head. Stones—sharp ones like arrowheads . Then another. Three more, all nearly missing her flesh.
Alora kept her eyes on the bank, on her boots. Kicking through the sizzling agony and pain.
Water splashed behind her. Females screamed, and a faint smirk contorted Alora’s face as those females experienced the same torment.
“Faster,” Alora coaxed herself. “You must swim faster.”
She did. Until she reached the bank and crawled her way out, refusing to surrender to the pain. But she couldn’t remain there. Couldn’t rest. Once her boots were on, Alora sprinted, undecided of the direction. She only knew she had to run because those females, prime and uninjured, ravenous with a taste for her blood, were swimming faster than she had.
Alora hurled past trees and branches, which whipped her leathers and slashed at any exposed skin. But she didn’t stop running.
Not until Garrik screamed.
Alora froze.
She couldn’t shake the sound of it. The guttural, raging scream. A thing of nightmares—what she had only ever heard from his nightmares.
Between one step and the next, Garrik released another. Bouncing off trees, not the walls below the balcony. A painful roar, past a breaking point, one only heard through unfathomable torture.
“ Garrik !” she screamed, forgetting the anguish of her body as she whirled around. Twisting, turning, searching the trees. “ Garrik !”
His answering wail almost dropped her to her knees.
Where? Where is he? She couldn’t remember the direction she came. Alora lunged forward when five figures moved. That was backward, toward the tower. Two more to her left. Another to her right.
So, she whirled. Rotating toward the high-rise balcony peeking through the canopy.
Over and over, he screamed. Each time, breaking her more.
She began crying in earnest. That courageous part of herself shattered into a thousand pieces. The only thing that could break her was crying out, being whipped, his body broken for all she could imagine by the sounds of his screams.
It took her a heartbeat to register what she was seeing.
Garrik’s eyes were wide, staring forward.
Shackled to a tree atop a hill, basking in sunlight as the crowd’s rapturous excitement roared.
But she barely heard it. Her very bones cringed. The air in her lungs turned to ash. Something cold—something like death—sliced through her.
Because Garrik … he … he …
She broke into a run. And she thought she might have screamed. Not from the pain of her ankle or shoulder or rib. But for him—for his pain. The blood gushing from his wounds and the skin flayed beneath the shackles.
Through the tall grass, Alora raced straight for a monster Made of black shiny armor. The scales that should’ve been fur. Toward claws and teeth and spikes on its back made of iron with a tail resembling a great cat in a bear’s monumental form.
Over its shoulder, it narrowed its glowing ruby eyes at her.
Alora had nothing but the sharpened stones in her pocket. What could that do to the beast?
But she had to try. For Garrik. For the blood gushing from his wounds. From the bite marks that split his skin open and the claws that shredded from his shoulder to thigh.
Silvery metal and a glimmer of crimson drew her attention.
The dagger. The one in his shoulder.
She held that predator’s gaze, mouth crackling dry the closer she moved. And when that horrid thing lifted another claw, aimed for Garrik’s neck, she shoved every bit of panic and love and pain into her arm and launched a stone at its skull.
At best, she could anger it. Turn it away. Outrun it in the forest and return to her mate.
The stone did nothing more than bounce off the bear’s armor.
Hopeless. The stones were hopeless.
Alora was twenty feet away when it reared on its hind legs, swished its feline tail, and released a roar that rattled the glass dome, waving over every stone and metal seat in the stadium, which knocked faeries on their asses.
Garrik suffered a strangled sound, but she couldn’t let it draw the beast’s attention.
Sliding to her knees, Alora slung three stones at its face, angering it more as one of them stabbed its eye.
She had to move. Because it was moving—right for her down that hill.
The ground rattled with every stomp. Dirt and grass and creeping things inside the ground sprayed the air around its paws.
Alora steadied her breath. Counted every one as it closed the distance. Waiting for her movement. Unmoving. Silent. And she may have felt blood draining from her hand. Gripping a sharpened stone too tightly.
But the moment the beast neared enough that she smelled the rotten flesh stuck between its teeth, she threw it …
And dove as it did, too.
She kept her attention on Garrik—on that dagger—and rolled to her hands and knees.
Making her escape up the hillside while the bear rolled to the bottom. Lungs and muscles burning, Alora slammed into her mate, covering Garrik’s body with hers, soaking his blood into her leathers and skin.
“I’ve got you, mighty prince. I’ll get you out of this. Hold on ,” she sobbed and pulled away to remove the knife, but she stopped when she scanned his face. Those … vacant eyes staring into the sunlight, piercing the Stars Eternal beyond. “G-Garrik?” It came out broken, unsteady as her voice cracked. “Garrik?”
It was then her heart felt it. The lack of it.
His unusual heartbeat… Silent. Empty.
Lifeless against her own.
She tried beating his chest. His mate mark.
Beating and beating and beating as the collar on her neck began burning and burning and?—
That wasn’t her screaming. It didn’t sound like her. Some desperate, helpless, powerless thing that cracked a hole in the realm. In her soul.
Only it was her. Her screams. Over and over, wailing his name as if it would call to wherever his soul roamed—the Middleworld or the Stars Eternal—and draw him back.
Because he couldn’t be dead. Garrik couldn’t be dead.
They had only just vowed to spend their life together. He deserved more than this. More than to die like this. He was supposed to live.
Alora pounded his chest so violently bones cracked, feeling her life flicker away.
My soul cannot exist without yours. It couldn’t. Her hands grasped Garrik’s face, his cold cheeks. “ I cannot exist in any world without you ,” Alora warned through the relentless tears staining her cheeks, as if her death would return him.
Something was pulling her back, from that starsdamned collar, from the call within it. Tearing her away by a single inch.
The ground shook as terribly as her knees. She didn’t care to know why.
Then, Silas, above the roar in her head, above the screaming of her heart and the pounding on the ground, commanded with a venom-coated tongue, “ Move !”
She couldn’t— couldn’t leave Garrik there. Nothing mattered. Not her life. Not anymore. Not without him?—
That collar burned molten red. The pain of his unbeating heart burned worse.
Silas screamed from somewhere on the walkways, “Turn around!” But she didn’t, and he screamed again, twisting that sapphire ring. “Gather your fucking wits. Fight it and turn around!”
Fight it? To what end? She would die anyway. What was the point?
A spear sliced her thigh. Then her death mark. Another nearly missed her neck. And she wanted it. Wanted to meet Garrik in death as she sobbed through the excruciating pain. At that loss of having not felt him since the day before, not knowing it was their last time holding each other. To look into the perfection of his eyes. To hear his unusual, perfect heartbeat.
“Curse the fucking blood, snap out of it and move ,” Silas demanded.
Her collar was almost unbearable now. She hoped it would sear through her, boil her insides, sear?—
Blood splattered her back, her leathers. She didn’t turn, didn’t care enough to see if it was her blood and guts being feasted upon as the howl of a vicious predator dying scraped every inch of her flesh. Then the screams of females. Their bones crunching, being gnawed upon until the shrills eventually died away.
Then it was silent.
Not even the stadium breathed.
A low rumbling coursed across the grass.
Silas ran a hand through his half-shaved hair, over the scar and rune marks down his neck, and cursed.
Alora’s hearing narrowed. Her touch, too. It didn’t feel like she clung to Garrik’s blood-soaked tunic and ripped apart flesh. It felt like … like bark.
So so slowly, Alora pulled away from Garrik’s neck.
But that wasn’t pale, cold skin. And the grain of the wood wasn’t blood trailing down his body.
“Wh-what?” Alora sobbed, scratching her hands down jagged bark. Shaking her head in disbelief, she stumbled backward, cushioned by something warm and soft and breathing.
Garrik wasn’t there? He wasn’t there?
Ladomyr’s dark laugh billowed over the crowd—and they laughed too. His eyes locked onto the wooden stake Erissa’s shoulder leaned against. The wooden stake where her mate was chained.
Alive. Breathing. Unconscious.
It wasn’t real? Alora snapped her gaze to Silas, who ground his teeth, and as if in answer to a question she hadn’t asked, nodded.
“How?” Alora breathed to no one. But it didn’t take long for her to realize …
Aiden. Garrik. Both hallucinations.
Ladomyr’s sick, twisted game conjured by poison the moment the females released it in her veins.
Silas had known. Had helped her again—or tried to when the thing behind her?—
A sound of strangled relief choked from her throat but was short-lived. She almost plummeted to the meadow when whatever she’d backed into moved.
Trembling as the hairs on her neck stood, Alora turned to meet the russet eyes of the golden wolf from the Cullings.
The urge to run should’ve been there, but something true and honest cloaked those eyes. Time seemed to sputter as she searched them and raised a quivering hand to brush that golden neck. Looking into the flaxen flecks, wondering who this male was before he was Made into Ladomyr’s beast. So, she asked, wondering why he had saved her life, “Who are?—”
“Alora?” A female voice. Gravelly and stern. Breezing around the wolf and over the bear mauled near their feet.
She knew that voice. Hated it once. Wanted nothing more than to sink Soulstryker into her neck as she slept.
The wolf whipped its head over its shoulder, releasing a half-hearted snarl of warning before it fractured to silence. The beast lowered its head, sniffing the air between them as it backed away. And in its wake, with the comforting smell of celosia flowers and a taste of iron on the mountain breeze …
Stood Jade.
In the center of bloodshed. Holding the severed head of the half-feline female.
“Jade,” Alora breathed. Nothing could stop her. She limped forward as Jade did until fiery red hair was buried in her neck and their arms clung around one another. “You’re alive,” Alora sob-laughed, repeating it as the hallucinated ordeal and misery of being separated was barely contained.
“Like there was any doubt.” Jade laughed, and Alora seared that sound to memory, how the sound felt against her neck.
They pulled away, wincing. Alora scanned her sister, who appeared as terrible as Alora felt, cradling a shoulder popped from its socket. Alora cringed at Jade’s busted lip, the bruises, and badly wrapped fingers, imagining them at odd angles, and the numerous talon-hewn slashes in her armor revealing deep, dripping wounds.
Jade registered her exploration and winced. “A griffin. Three females,” was all she offered, then nodded her chin to Alora’s bruising neck and face.
Alora clasped a palm over her bleeding death mark and gestured toward the bloody wasteland. The mounds of bodies, some dismembered by what Alora guessed was from the wolf, and others cut down by weapons sheathed on Jade’s back; a Saxon-like structure, only instead of steel, it was griffin claws, talons, and a broken beak.
Green eyes darkened as Jade frowned, but Alora gripped her good hand, squeezed, and offered, “Thank you for killing them for me.”
“Couldn’t let you have all the fun.”
Alora scoffed; her fingers scraped over the thick blood on Jade’s knuckles?—
“Two remain,” Ladomyr’s voice boomed. “By our traditions, only one shall live.” He swept his gaze over the crowd, the side of his mouth curling with malice as faeries exchanged currency, others edged their seats while most screamed for their wagered victor.
Ladomyr raked an expectant eye over them, arching a brow half as menacing as Garrik’s and tenfold less terrifying.
Alora bit her cheek to keep from laughing. Perhaps the king knew, because when they didn’t move, Ladomyr snapped his fingers twice and the sound of countless armed High Guardsmen stormed the crystal walkways.
Silas stiffened as he was surrounded. Their bows drawn and taut.
Aiming the blunt edges of their arrows at Alora and Jade, the guards awaited their king’s next order.
“It makes little difference which of you lives. Though if I had my choice”—Ladomyr gestured and an arrow flew, embedding into Alora’s shoulder and eliciting a scream—“it would be the red-haired. Either make your choice or I will.”
Sweat gleamed down the column of Alora’s filthy neck, melding with blood spurting around the wooden shaft as she sank to her knees.
Jade lurched forward but cried out, grabbed her collar, and sank to the dirt when a blond male broke through the guardsmen, twisting an emerald ring before settling beside Silas.
Growling rumbled from the wolf. Footsteps vibrated the earth. Calculated. Lethal. Then fur eclipsed the sun, standing between them, their masters, and the guards.
Ladomyr’s sigh was devastating. “I’ve had enough of your defiance,” he decided loudly and with as much poison as that in Alora’s veins.
The wolf bared its teeth?—
Roots burst from the ground.
Alora didn’t have time to act as vine-like blades pierced its belly and thighs. A soul-shattering wail ripped from its throat as those roots began coiling around it, tightening and tightening with each spiral they made.
Alora started shaking. But there was nothing she could do as the wolf was hurled into the tree and stilled inside its wooden cage.
She’d forgotten … forgotten that incredible magic of Kadamar. Forgotten it was the king who commanded it.
Terror-filled sapphires spurted to Jade, who wore an expression much like hers. Both with silent questions about who would be next.
“ Do it ,” Jade snarled, her canines glistening in the sunlight. “Do it, Alora.” And unsheathed the griffin-made Saxon-like axe from her back. Jade gritted her teeth as her collar glowed. Through the pain, she managed to toss the weapon at Alora’s knees.
No, Alora’s mind protested so loudly it burst from her lips. “ No .”
Jade’s lips quivered. “I will kill you.”
Alora didn’t have to argue—she knew it was true. Jade was a pit-trained warrior born of blood-drenched battlefields. Spent decades fighting. Decades as Magnelis’s Raven and Garrik’s Dragon. A general of her own legion who had slaughtered eight faeries with her bare hands. “You’re High Pr?—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” Something sharpened in her voice, edging on that lethal fury she’d need to send Ladomyr to the fiery depths. “You’re my sister. Your life is as important as mine.”
“But Garrik?—”
“Loves us both . We’re both returning to him.” To them all. To Aiden and Thalon and Eldacar.
Above, darkness flickered in the cold eyes of Jade’s master. He glowered—a male of little patience. His fingers lightly brushed along his emerald ring.
Silas narrowed his attention at Jade. On the slow movement of her hand, on the starfire ring that glinted as Jade unwillingly curled her nails in the dirt.
“Alora, I can’t stop it.” The movement. The push of her bleeding legs, straightening her upright. The way her bloody fists balled at her sides as she took a fighting stance and the bloodthirsty roar of the stadium as she advanced. “ Please .”
This was all wrong—it’s all wrong. Alora’s throat constricted. She stood of her own will as Silas paced, face carrying perfect calm as those crimson sunset eyes watched Jade’s hand.
There was no way out of this. No way to?—
Jade released a desperate cry. Her fist barreled into the arrow lodged in Alora’s shoulder.
Emotion clawed Alora’s throat, and instead of swallowing it, she channeled it into a sharp gasp. Stumbling backward, Alora clasped where that rod had been, willing her voice to soften as Jade advanced, and cried, “I love you, Jade. No matter what happens. I love you.”
Her sister’s throat bobbed. Jade was quivering, desperately trying to hold herself back as that emerald ring twisted. “I love you,” Jade cried, too.
Another swing.
Alora arched her spine, dropping her head back before Jade could land the blow. One. Two. Five more. Alora jabbed half-heartedly. Jade countered with a kick to her gut, sending her flying nearly to the unmoving wolf caged under the tree.
Within a heartbeat, Jade’s gouged knee was at Alora’s throat.
Silas— where the hell was Silas?
As if by command, Alora’s collar burned as red as Jade’s. Her hand clamped Jade’s raised fist, ignoring the pain in her wrist. Stabbing Jade’s starfire ring into her palm while Jade pushed and pushed and pushed.
“ Alora .” That was panic. Pure, unadulterated panic.
Jade’s other hand dug into Alora’s cheek like dragon claws .
It took Alora another heartbeat to hear Silas’s words.
‘Consider reclaiming your claw , Dragon… Might prove useful.’
Jade’s ring caught the sunlight between her fingers. Her dragon ring of starfire … shaped like …
‘Release your claw yet, Dragon?’
Release your claw. Release your claw.
Release … your …
Claw. Not more than one. Only one.
Alora wrapped her arms around Jade’s waist and flipped her with expert skill. She didn’t hesitate and murmured, “I’m sorry.” Before her fist collided with Jade’s jaw.
Jade’s hands dropped to the grass; her head lulled. Blinking as if warring to regain her mind as Alora pulled that starfire ring from her finger.
Crystal shattered beneath her boot.
“Come on. Work !” Alora wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince herself or the magic within the broken stone.But star-kissed flames screamed around her in a fit of chaos. Like an untrained child, a raging hurricane, refusing to be controlled.
Silas leaned his rune-covered forearms on the railing, steepling his fingers hanging over the edge. Jade’s master screamed at her to get up , but no matter how much he twisted that ring, she couldn’t. Jade’s eyes opened to slits as Alora reached into the flames. But she couldn’t control it. The poison still surged inside her veins.
No— no. It should’ve worked. It was her fire. Her magic.
Alora clamped down on the flames until droplets of blood dripped from the crescents indenting her palms.
This magic was hers. She was fire. She was made from stars.
And this magic wasn’t inside her. Not bound by poison. It was there. Outside.
It. Was. Hers.
Alora screamed to the raging white inferno. Like a dragon. Like a starsdamned lioness. “You are MINE !”
Fire starbursted from the swirling chaos. Rampaging, furious, and crazed until it connected with her skin.
Alora inhaled as if it were oxygen. Entering not her lungs, but scorching through her being.
Arms wide, she released a scream so colossal it shook the arena, the glass dome, and commanded the skies as starfire turned her into living flames.
Ladomyr’s face was a furious shade of crimson. Erissa fled behind her guards. The entire crowd cowered, screaming in fear as the arena exploded into a sea of starflames. Only dying down to rage at Alora’s back.
Then.
Wings.
The size of a great dawnwood tree flexed from Alora’s back as High Guardsmen jumped from the walkways and royals could do nothing but flee.
But not Silas. The spymaster simply smirked as starfire ripped through every one of her veins.
Leathers steaming, Alora stepped forward and melted the collar around Jade’s neck, then hers.
Jade’s wide eyes met the embers of hers.
“ Take my hand ,” Alora demanded with ethereal authority, outstretching her flaming hand.
Terror—unspeakable, desolate terror—at the flames, at the star before her, froze Jade in place.
Alora lunged, scooping Jade into her embrace and scorching the grass beneath her as she took to the skies.