AGONY.
Not my lighte, drained through the lilium, taken from my body against my will like a relentless bloodletting for the last few hours on
end—
Nor my throat, raw and shredded from roaring for Arwen. For her life, for her to wake, for her to fight, to run. Powerless and unable to help her.
No, the agony racked through me as I watched Killoran stride toward us, debased and menacing, blade raised, ready to cleave Arwen in two.
A rage I didn’t know existed within me—hadn’t known of for two hundred years—sloshed and jerked in my heart like a torrential storm. Until I couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t bark through my gag anymore at Killoran to stop, to leave her be, to take me in her place.
When the warlord stepped around the corpses that littered his floor toward Arwen, who had sagged in the arms of his thugs, I saw nothing but the pulsing, throbbing vein of his jugular.
His life force.
The only thing standing between him and the woman who could save our world.
Every realm.
Every human.
Every Fae.
I didn’t think as I lunged for him.
It was uncanny, feeling my dragon fangs pierce through my gums, through the leather gag, while my lighte was still suppressed by the chains. A feeling that my entire existence would say should not have been possible to experience. No Fae had ever used lighte while bound by lilium.
The pain was excruciating. As it often was, for the brief moment in which my body recomposed itself when I shifted. Only now the lilium chains kept me in a suspended state of anguish, unable to fully shift, and that rage, caged like a beast inside of me, shot free in the only way it could.
Through my very mouth.
I heard Arwen’s gasp of horror before any of the others in the room.
But by then Killoran was already dead on the floor at my feet, his gurgling scream as I shredded through his throat the last sound he’d ever make. Below me, that throat torn clean out, tendons and flesh peeled back and ripped apart in a gory, wet mass where his neck once was. I would’ve smiled.
But in my mouth—
I spat the bastard’s remains onto the ground before sinking to my knees. The sharp enamel of my dragon fangs retracted back into my gums and at last offered some reprieve from the pain.
But then, the pain was elsewhere. Burning, rippling, in my side.
I knew the feeling of steel lodged between my ribs. I sucked in a lungful of air.
Fuck.
Killoran must have landed one final blow in my side as I ripped his throat out. I just needed to maneuver my hands free of the lilium so I could dislodge Killoran’s blade before any of his men could finish what their leader had started.
My eyes snapped up as the two men holding Arwen staggered back like they had been burned. As if her skin had singed them, curiosity freckling the ugliness in their eyes.
Arwen rushed me. “Hold still. I’m going to pull it out—” “Whatever you say, bird,” I grunted. “But hurry.”
Arwen wrapped her hands around the sword, and I squinted against the bright light.
Bright light?
I started at the sight before me—Arwen by my side, Killoran’s sword wrapped in both her hands, both her and the blade glowing brighter than any fire, any star ever could. Its hilt adorned with all nine stones, like a bejeweled kaleidoscope, iridescent and luminous, brilliant and blinding like the sun itself.
The blade. It had been Killoran’s weapon.
But the men were upon us, bludgeons and clubs drawn, faces wet with fury and lust for our deaths.
I couldn’t even stand—
With one move, Arwen yanked the sword from my torso.
I clenched my teeth against the discomfort, unable to tear my eyes away as Arwen swung a clean half circle. The force of wielding the weapon nearly shot her into the air, and explosive light blasted from the steel, bisecting every vicious thug in the room. Killoran’s wives screeched their terror, ducking, as their gags of disgust twined with the sound of crunching bone and burning flesh.
Arwen barely took in the gore and shed limbs around her. The six or seven men severed in half as if they were simple loaves of bread. The blade that shone like it contained every star in the sky.
I stood gradually, arms still locked behind my back, dull pain splintering through my abdomen as she placed one hand against my split flesh. “Stay still.”
“There’s no time. The rest of Killoran’s men—” “We’ll go when you’re healed.”
“I’m fine, I’ve been stabbed a few dozen times. Barely hurts.”
I gave her a relaxed grin as a bead of sweat slipped down my brow. She huffed and I felt the lighte seep from her fingers into my wound.
She only needed a minute before we headed for the curtain, but something stopped her cold. Arwen pivoted and ran back through the blood- drenched war room. Diving over body parts and pools of gore and viscera,
Arwen reached Killoran’s empty throne, where the three topless women were cowering in a huddle.
“Run,” she warned, slicing the Blade of the Sun through their chains— fluid arcs of Arwen’s light sending sparks and wisps of metal into the air. “And to the east, away from the widow.”
The women moved swiftly, muttering their thanks.
“The Blade of the Sun,” Arwen murmured. “Inside my heart. Stones, I hate prophecies.”
I raised a brow in question as we followed the women toward the exit. “You, Kane,” she said, turning back to me. “You are my heart. I found
the blade inside you. Literally.”
I might have rolled my eyes if I felt I could afford to exert a single extra ounce of energy. I sagged toward the nearest wall to avoid planting face- first into some crook’s entrails.
“How do we get the lilium off you?” She looked to the chains still pinning my arms behind my back.
I gestured toward the blade in her hand. “What’s your aim like?” Arwen’s face blanched and I almost found it in me to laugh.
“There has to be another way.”
“None that I can think of.” My voice was hoarse and I could still taste slick, human blood on my tongue. “Now, bird.” I knelt before her on the suspended wood and turned my wrists to face her blade.
“I have no idea how to control this. What if it slices through your arms like it did those men?”
Voices were beginning to echo through the pathways and winding rope bridges. Calls for our heads.
“Who needs arms? Just do it.”
“Stones help me,” she muttered, and brought the shining blade down swiftly on the lilium chains with a crack.
Thank the Gods.
I twisted my wrists around and rubbed at the singed flesh. Just a scratch.
No time for basking in the comfort of mobility or the lighte returning to my body. We had to get out of here. “Come on.”
Arwen and I barreled past the curtain and down the crooked stairs toward the heart of the suspended city. We hurtled through bridges and shops, the crowds that had cheered so callously for Arwen’s death long gone, hiding from the monster she’d freed. We raced until we reached the roof we had first arrived on, the one closest to the eastern edge of the island. Below us stretched the endless pit of rotting, sunless trees that grew from the bottom of the island. Above us, the open mouth of the volcano-like
island, and the sky.
I readied myself to shift, widening my stance, making sure I was far enough away from Arwen.
But nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” I hated the fear in her voice.
I tried again. Nothing. And the voices were getting louder. “Kane?”
“I can’t shift.” “Why not?”
I fought the urge to roar until the entire island shook. “I’m too drained.
From the lilium. I need— Fuck. I just need time.”
“Fine,” Arwen allowed, wrapping her hand around my shoulder. “We’ll climb down and hide until—” Her voice drifted off into a gasp.
“Until what?” I turned to face her. But my eyes landed on the same blood-chilling sight that stole the words from her lips.
A wretched gray wyvern, circling below us, and the blurry form of a soldier with hair as white as snow saddled on its back.
Lazarus, in his dragon form. And Halden. Alive. And kneeling at the base of my father’s neck, a speck in his mighty wingspan, head tilted to search the forest below.
For us.
Arwen’s words were barely audible. “How did they know we would be here?”
Dread ripped through me. “Griffin was the only one who knew. And he would never—”
“Of course not.”
A silent wind swept her chestnut hair around her face. More shouts and roars from the trees below. More bridges swaying and crunching with the stomping of boots. A few errant shrieks from the western edge. The widow, I was sure.
I dragged us under a swath of large pines, and we crouched beneath a gnarled tree root. The wind pounded us both, and before Arwen could tuck her wayward strands behind her ear as she so often did when deep in thought, her eyes shot to mine, guilt flooding them like the swell before a wave crashes onto the shore.
“What is it?” I bit out.
“Ryder,” she whispered. Barely audible. “I told him where we were going. I never thought he would—”
“I’m sure he didn’t.”
Arwen looked over at the gray-scaled wyvern circling around through the trees and soaring up over the edge of the cliffs. Searching. Then her eyes found the blade in her hand, the sun dripping off its steely face in glossy rays.
Horror blurred my vision. “Do not even think about it.” “Kane—”
“I said do not. We’ll stay here until they’re gone.”
Arwen’s face was hardening. Along with her resolve. “He knows we’re here. He won’t stop until he finds us. Until he finds me.”
My heart was pounding too loudly to think straight. This couldn’t happen. I would never let this happen. I had told her as much. “We’ll bide our time until I regain my strength and then weaken him just enough to make it back to Shadowhold. Rally the army.”
Arwen stood, now in plain sight of any prisoners who were hunting us down, and moved backward for the edge of the platform. “We’ll never beat him.”
I stood, too, reaching for her. “It’s the only—”
“Kane.” Arwen took my hand in hers, her thumb brushing my knuckle slowly. Soothingly.
I could hardly breathe. “Arwen, I will not let you—”
“I don’t want to run anymore. Buy time so that tens of thousands can lose their lives in a war? Citrine won’t fight alongside us. Peridot’s been pillaged. It’s not a war we can win. But I’m here now. With the blade. Lazarus is flying below us, and for once, somehow, we have the advantage. I can end this right now.” Arwen held my hand firmly and I already knew what her next words would be. “And I’m going to.”
Grief, incomprehensible grief ripped my heart in two. “What about the White Crow? I can still take your place.”
Arwen’s face nearly crumpled, the first ounce of emotion slipping through her mask of still, unwavering strength.
“Your sacrifice would be worse than death for me. Condemning me to live without you? Knowing you had died in my place? Don’t do that to me. Please, don’t do that to me.”
Beth’s words rang in my head. “It’s possible, but the cost will be greater to her than her own life.” I gripped her arm. “I cannot live without you.”
“You’ll survive. I know you will.” Arwen took my face in her hands. Her eyes held nothing but uncompromising will, though they brimmed with tears. “I wouldn’t have changed a single thing.”
“No,” I roared. I didn’t care if the entire island heard me. I wrapped my hands around her arms.
“Kane—”
My chest. I couldn’t breathe. “No.” I held her tighter. “You need to
listen to me.” It could not end like this. “Listen to me, please, Arwen—”
“I love you,” she said, hands soft against my jaw. “This is how it has to be. I could never outrun my fate. And I don’t want to anymore. But you have to live. Be brave. Forgive yourself. Do that for me. Live, for me.”
And before I could say another word, stronger than she had ever been— stronger than me—she jerked free from my grasp and leapt off the platform, graceful as a dove.
