Текст книги "The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

68

RAIHN

Simon was looking right at those ruins.

It was like he knew. How? Maybe melding pieces of a god’s corpse into your flesh gave you some inexplicable awareness of other terrible magic. Maybe what Simon had made a part of himself now called wordlessly to its mate.

I couldn’t explain it, and I wouldn’t try. But when I got close enough to see that—the little turn of his head, the greedy glint of interest in his eyes—everything else fell away.

It was just like the wedding, when I’d seen Simon talking to Oraya and suddenly not a single other thing in the world mattered. My singular purpose became getting between him and that door.

I dove for him, and didn’t slow as we careened into each other like stars colliding in the night sky.

My sword was out, my hold on my magic loose, ready to unleash everything I had. And when Simon turned to me in that final moment, his blade lifting to meet mine, his own magic swelling, we were nearly evenly matched.

The burst of power—light and darkness, red and black, stars and night—obliterated us.

My ears popped. Every sound grew muffled and distant, as if underwater. My eyes, wide open through the whole thing, railed against the intensity of it, leaving the world in spotted outlines as the magic faded.

The two of us hurtled through the air, our courses thrown by the staggering force we’d just unleashed. In the background, several warriors plummeted to the ground, limp and broken-winged, unlucky enough to be caught in the indirect impact of our blows.

I didn’t have time to count how many were mine, and how many were his.

Didn’t have time to think about anything but Simon.

When he smiled at me through the onslaught of steel and magic, he looked just like Neculai. Just like the version of him that I’d seen in the Halfmoon trial, in the darkness before the battle began. The same version I saw in my nightmares, still, all these Goddess-damned years later.

Never again.

I moved on instinct now, meeting every blow, every dodge, relishing every time my blade struck flesh. I’d learned to communicate with my fighting strategies over the years, make each match a performance. Not tonight.

Tonight, I just fought to kill.

I twisted my body as Simon evaded one of my lunges, using his follow-through against him, spearing one of his wings.

It wasn’t the first time I’d hit him. But it was the first time I’d surprised him.

He lurched, and I smiled at the way he blinked in shock, like he didn’t fully believe I’d gotten him until he was dipping sideways in the air.

I didn’t waste the moment.

My next strike went to his side, exposed as he fought to right himself, arm lifted to reveal the weakest point of his armor—right beneath his armpit.

The sensation of the blade piercing his flesh was the most satisfying thing I’d experienced all night—second, maybe, only to the snarl of pain he let out next.

It was totally worth what came after.

He grabbed me as I yanked my sword free, spraying black blood over my face, holding me by the neck of my armor with an iron grip. The world rushed around us, the sky behind him a smear of bloody bodies and distant blurred stars.

He wrenched me close, so close spittle sprayed my face when he spoke.

“This kingdom was never made for people like you,” he growled. “Who do you think you are? You think you can become him? You?”

Fucking incredible, how it all just snapped together in such perfect clarity.

My worst fear for so damned long. Neculai looking into my eyes and telling me that my crown cursed me to become just like him, or that I would lose it because I couldn’t be.

Simon was right. He was everything Neculai’s successor should have been.

And that would be exactly what would destroy him.

I smiled at him. I leaned closer, gripping his shoulder, forcing my head to his ear. The man even smelled like Neculai, that sickening mix of blood and withered roses that followed me on my darkest nights.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m just a Turned slave. All I’ll ever be.”

And just as Simon turned his face to me, confused, I slipped my free hand through the opening in his armor, grabbed the twisted, ragged edge of the metal forged into his skin, and pulled.

He unleashed a roar of agony.

The world went white.

Everything disappeared for a few horrible seconds. I lost my grip on my senses.

When I regained them again, Simon and I were rushing toward the ground.

69

ORAYA

The moment my blood touched the stone, I wasn’t here anymore. I wasn’t Oraya anymore. I was somewhere long in the past, pulled into the soul of another.

I recognized him immediately, just as I had the night I yanked the pendant from his father’s wings. I would recognize him anywhere, even from within his own memories.

Vincent.

I watch her as she observes this place. She looks at it with such amazement, even though it’s little more than a cave. She has always been good at seeing the potential in things. Perhaps this is what drew me to her a year ago. Perhaps she reminds me that I used to be a dreamer once, too.

Yet, I can’t deny I feel some of it, too. It has taken us so long, so many sleepless nights and days, to get here. She has taken the unrefined artifacts I uncovered long ago and turned them into something incredible. And now, here, this place, serves as a physical monument to all that we have accomplished together.

The first layer of our lock has been constructed, the stone smooth and polished beneath my palms. Her cheeks are dusted with black soot from the hours she has spent carving into it, perfect interlocking circles of spell-work.

“You need to give it something of yourself,” she tells me. Her hands caress the stone like a lover. I watch her delicate fingers move back and forth, back and forth, across the smooth onyx.

“Blood,” I say, blandly.

“It will take more than blood. Just like that took more than your blood.” She nodded to my hip—to the sword hanging there. “You gave that thing a piece of your soul, and this will guard a much more powerful weapon.”

“Soul, then.” I deliberately sound bored, partly because I know it will make her scowl. Sure enough, it does, the wrinkle on her upturned nose scrunching the black marks.

“Belittle it all you want, my king. Just think of something powerful when you spill your blood over this. The stronger the emotion, the better. You can’t choose what this magic will take from you. But you can offer it strong options to choose from.” Her big, dark eyes flick back to me, and she smirks. “Think about, I don’t know, your ravenous desire for power and whatnot. Maybe the last enemy you killed. That kind of thing.”

I scoffed. “Is that who you think I am?”

Her smirk becomes a smile. I watch it bloom across her lips, and the distraction frustrates me.

“Isn’t that who you want to be? Isn’t that why we’re doing this?”

She’s right. Yet, the conclusion is even more aggravating than that nuisance of a smile. I take her dagger and draw it across my hand, then press my palm to the stone, letting my blood pool in the carvings she spent so long on.

I try to think about power and greatness. I try to think about the way my blade felt piercing the heart of Neculai Vasarus. I try to think about the weight of this crown upon my head for the first time. I try to think about the dead body of the father I hated, and my satisfaction when I spat on his grave. Something powerful, she said. These are my most powerful moments.

But I cannot tear my gaze away from her mouth, or the speckles of dust across her nose, or the little scar on one of her eyebrows.

“Come here,” I say, before I can stop myself.

No one disobeys me when I make a command. Not even her. The smile fades. Brief uncertainty glints in her eyes.

She steps closer.

She smells so wonderfully human. Sweet and savory and complex. Flowers and the earth and cinnamon. She tilts her head back slightly.

“Yes?” she murmurs.

Her heartbeat has quickened.

Strange, that mine has, too.

It is exhausting to desire. I can no longer remember when this set in, how many days passed with her in my presence before it became maddening. I despise it. I cannot think when she’s near me.

It makes me feel powerless.

My right hand is still pressed to the stone, my blood now dripping over the edge of the wall. But my left comes to her face, wiping away that smudge of black with my thumb, leaving a smear in its wake.

Her skin is so unbelievably warm.

Her mouth is warmer.

I staggered back, clutching my hand, which was now covered in blood. Vincent’s memories and my own tangled. The image of my mother’s face—Goddess, my mother—was seared so clearly into my mind, I could still see its outline when I closed my eyes.

I was so disoriented that I didn’t even feel the ground trembling until I heard the grinding of stone. I blinked away the remnants of Vincent’s memory to see the wall before me lowering, inch by inch, until it was flat against the ground. The carvings on the stone beneath my feet and that of the wall’s lip matched up seamlessly, all pulsing with faint red light, still stained with the remnants of my blood.

The realization of the vision settled into me.

This was a lock.

Each wall was a layer, a phase, like the pins within a padlock. And the column in the center was the final piece—the turn of the key.

I drew in a shaky breath and let it out. I took several careful steps to the second ring of stone. The magic in this room seemed to grow thicker, more noxious, than it was minutes ago. My head pounded. My stomach threatened to empty. My limbs shook.

But far more pressing than any of that was the thought of Raihn, fighting for his life above.

I didn’t have time for this shit.

I pushed myself through it, half-stumbling to the next wall.

This time, I didn’t hesitate. I opened the wound in my hand again, urging forth a streak of fresh blood, and pressed it to the stone.

My hand is already bleeding.

Rage. Utter rage. It’s raining outside, one of those rare, powerful monsoons that occasionally roars over the deserts. My hair drips rainwater onto the carvings. She had finished these not long ago, the dust still settled into the rivulets, collecting with my blood into a black sludge as it pours into the divots.

I hate them.

I hate her.

I shouldn’t have come here in this state. This is not the mark I want to leave on something so important. This was supposed to be a thing to make me powerful—instead, it is becoming a monument to my weaknesses. But I needed to come here tonight. Needed to know that she had not betrayed me with her final slight—needed to know that I had enough power to finish what we had started together.

Did she really think that it could end here?

Did she really think that it would stop me if she left?

She called me power-hungry. I called her weak. What right did she have to speak to me that way? She came from nothing. I gave her everything.

I was ready to give her eternity.

I was ready to give her all of it, and she looked into my eyes and spat in my face.

Did she know how many women would have died for such an opportunity? How many humans would kill to be made into vampire royalty?

Did she think I wouldn’t smell my own child on her?

With that thought, fear spears my chest. It is difficult to breathe.

My child.

A threat. Not just a threat, but the greatest threat. How many kings die at the hands of their children?

If she had stayed—if she had listened—

We could have dealt with that.

But now, she is gone, and I will have a child out there in the world, and I am—I am—

I sink to my knees, my forehead pressing to the sharp edge of the wall. My chest hurts fiercely. I stand on a blade’s edge between two emotions, neither of them pleasant, and I hate her for making me feel this way.

I’m ashamed of myself.

I think of every word I said to her. Every flinch of pain across her face.

I never asked for any of this. She was the one who came to my door. She was the one who kept finding ways to stay.

The thought of an empty bedchamber in an empty castle hits me, and it’s more painful than any battle wound I’ve ever endured.

I should go after her. I should hunt her down. I should snip the loose thread in my tapestry, mend this chink in my armor. It’s what my father would have done. It’s what all the prior Nightborn kings would have done.

But she had looked into my eyes and asked me if she would be safe if she left. If years of love and companionship had earned her that right.

I said, “You’re welcome to leave whenever you want. Arrogant of you to assume I’d care enough to go after you.”

Much of that conversation has become a blur, cruelties blending into cruelties. But I remember every word of that answer.

Here, in the face of the magic she created for me, I cannot lie anymore. And it was, indeed, a lie. A childish one.

Here, I cannot lie to myself.

She’s gone. She is not coming back.

And even if I found her, I wouldn’t be able to kill her.

The weakness in this confession to myself astounds me. Embarrasses me. I hate myself for it.

And yet, I know I would hate myself more, standing over her dead body. I think of another dark-eyed woman, a former queen who had been kind to me when I hadn’t deserved it, who I had not spared, and feel a little pang of regret.

What I felt for Alana was—is—so much greater than what I once felt for a kind enemy I barely knew. My body physically recoils at the thought of what the wound of her death might feel like.

I force myself back to my feet. My hands are so badly cut that the blood overflows the carvings. I got some of it on my face, stinging my eye.

I raise my gaze to the thing of beauty before me. This fortress, designed to hold a greater power than any king, Nightborn or otherwise, had ever wielded before me.

And yet I concern myself with some human woman?

I force my shame and my hurt away to a dark place in the corner of my mind, never to be acknowledged again.

Let her go, I tell myself.

She isn’t worth anything, I tell myself.

I pull my hand away.

I felt sick. I didn’t even come back to awareness this time until the wall was already down, and I had fallen to the floor with it. I was on my hands and knees on the stone, retching. I’d eaten very little today. Nothing had come up but a few spatters of putrid liquid.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and raised my head.

Now the only thing that stood before me was the column. Column—no, that wasn’t a strong enough word for it. An obelisk. The carvings on this one were, I could see now, a little different than those in the rest of the cave, even if I couldn’t fully articulate how—the strokes a little messier, the circles a little more crooked. The Nightfire had dimmed—or did I imagine that the room was darker now? The angry red glow of the carvings seemed more aggressive with each of my heartbeats, matching them in cadence.

My father’s memories—hurt, anger, fear—burned in my veins. The terrifying dual-blade of his love and his disgust for my mother. I hated feeling it.

I hated him for feeling it.

I stared at that obelisk. I blinked and a tear rolled down my cheek.

I didn’t want to.

The memories, the emotions, had only grown more intense as I moved to the center of the room. I was losing my grip on myself. This, I feared, might break me. Worse, it might break whatever fragile image I still had of the father that I’d loved—the father that had loved me.

What a fucking coward it made me, to still treasure that, after everything.

But I came here for a reason. There was only one place to go next. One remaining piece of the lock.

I stood, swaying on my feet. Stepped into the final circle.

I didn’t need to open the gash again. My hand was already covered in blood.

I laid it against the stone.

70

RAIHN

My wings wouldn’t work. I couldn’t slow myself, stop myself, before the ground rose up to hit me.

Pain. I tried to move. Something cracked.

I couldn’t make my eyes open. When I tried, a face I hadn’t seen in a very, very long time leaned over me.

My brow furrowed.

Nessanyn?

She looked just as she had two hundred years ago, curly dark hair falling around her face as she leaned down next to me. Her eyes, chestnut-dark and a million miles deep, stared hard into me, wet with tears.

Who wins? she asked, voice cracking. Who wins, if you fight him?

She’d said it to me so many times, back then. Countless times, dragging me back from the line every time I thought I would cross it.

I’d always thought that Nessanyn was so much stronger than I was.

But now, in this version of her, it seemed so obvious that she was just terrified. She was a lonely and abused woman who was a prisoner in her own marriage.

She didn’t fight because she was too afraid. Because it took a stupid kind of courage to keep fighting even when you knew every odd was stacked against you.

I reached out and touched her chin. She grabbed my hand and held it there, a tear rolling down her cheek.

Who wins? she said again.

Maybe not me, I replied. But worth a try, right?

She tried to hold onto my hand, but I pulled it away.

I opened my eyes.

Above me, carnage unfolded in the skies. Spatters of blood from warriors locked in battle hundreds of feet above dripped onto the rocks like black rain. A drop of it struck my cheek.

It was a nightmare. The kind of sight that, I knew in this moment, would wake me in a cold sweat ten years from now. If I was lucky enough to make it that far.

I tried to push myself up. A spasm of agony took my breath away.

Ix’s fucking tits. My body was broken. Absolutely broken. I’d pushed it too far these last few weeks. Whatever Simon had just done to me had nudged it over the edge.

I’d died before. I knew what it felt like to stand on the precipice of the end.

Not yet.

I lifted my head. Another drop of blood from above struck my forehead, rolling down into my right eye, tinting the world black-red. Through it, I took in the ruins around me. I’d landed on a rock, smashing up my right side. My wings were still out, though I could tell right away that the right one was now useless. That arm, too, refused to cooperate when I reached for my sword. I grabbed the hilt with the left one instead, every muscle protesting the weight.

I lifted my head.

There, through the ruins, Simon staggered to his feet. The front of his leathers was smeared with blood. One of his wings was askew in all the wrong places, sticky black blood matting the feathers. The—thing on his chest pulsed brighter now, bright enough that it surged through the night and illuminated the harsh panes of his face from below.

He swayed back and forth, clutching his head, letting out a chilling roar that sounded like it belonged to an animal.

Then he straightened, and his eyes fell on me.

I dug my sword into the ground and used it to force myself upright.

Sun fucking take me.

My knees almost buckled. Almost.

I didn’t show it. I just smiled. Didn’t realize how much blood was in my mouth until the expression made it dribble down my chin.

I was eternally conscious of the door behind me—the door that Simon’s gaze fixed on, before returning to me.

No, he wasn’t getting past me.

I’d spent long enough letting him into my thoughts, my fears. I’d given him too damned much already.

This was where it ended. Whatever it cost.

I lifted my sword, forced my violently trembling right arm to join my left.

Come on, I told my body, when it nearly wept in protest. One last fight. You’ve got it in you, old man.

Amazing what a mindset could do.

Because when Simon lunged at me, lips twisted into a snarl, unnatural magic flaring around him like fire around a match, I was ready.

71

ORAYA

My father stood before me.

The room had grown dim and hazy, as if coated in a thick fog. Nothing felt real except for the foggy, gray nothingness.

Foggy, gray nothingness, and him.

I had dreamt of Vincent countless times. But this version of him felt so much more real than even the most vivid of them. The fine details of his face struck me like a knife to the chest—all the things I didn’t realize I’d forgotten, like the slight crookedness to his nose or the way his hair favored the left side over the right. The version of him in my mind was generic, sanded down by months of absence, even as my grief clung to him.

I said, mostly because I needed to remind myself, “You’re not real.”

None of this was real.

Vincent smiled sadly at me.

“Aren’t I?”

Mother. His voice.

“I’m real in every way that matters,” he said.

“You’re a dream. A hallucination. I’ve lost a lot of blood and—”

“I left so much of myself here, in this room.” Vincent’s eyes lifted, as if taking in this place beyond what was shrouded in darkness. “More than I ever had intended to give it. And all of that still remains, even if I do not. Isn’t that real, little serpent?”

It seemed so, so real.

“I’m inventing you,” I whispered. “Because you’re what I want to see.”

He lifted one shoulder in a delicate half-shrug. It was such a familiar movement, it made my breath stutter. “Perhaps,” he said. “Does it matter?”

In this moment, it felt like it didn’t.

He stepped closer, and I took a step back. He froze, momentary pain crossing his face.

“The things you’ve seen here have so tainted your image of me? I meant to give this place all my greatest achievements, my greatest ambitions. Instead, it became a monument to all my greatest mistakes.”

So many mistakes in the end. Never you.

Vincent’s final words flitted through my mind. He flinched, as if he heard them too.

“So many mistakes in the end,” he murmured. “I never wanted you to see this version of me.”

“I never wanted to see you this way.”

And Goddess, I meant it. Sometimes I envied myself from a year ago, who’d known, beyond any doubt, that her father loved her. Yes, it was the only thing she could believe in, but that, at least, was solid, immovable.

Losing my trust in Vincent was more than losing trust in a single person. It had broken something within me, destroyed my ability to put that trust into anyone else.

Pain flashed over his face, there and gone again so quickly, I thought it might be a trick of the light. The idea that this version of him could be a figment of my own mind slipped further away. If it was a hallucination, it was such a perfect one that it might as well be real.

And with him standing right in front of me, the anger that I’d been suppressing for months bubbled up to the surface.

“You lied to me,” I ground out. “My entire life, you told me the world was a cage. But it was you that put me there. You manipulated me from the time I was—”

“I saved you,” he snapped, lurching closer.

Then he winced, as if he had to clamp down on his anger, force it back.

“You kidnapped me,” I choked out. “You killed my mother and you—”

“I did not kill her.”

“Yes you did!” My voice boomed through the room, echoing off the stone ceilings. “You went to Salinae that night knowing she lived there. You destroyed it knowing—”

“I—”

No. I’d had enough of this. “No more lies. I’ve had almost twenty years worth of them. I’m done. Done.”

Vincent snapped his jaw shut. A muscle twitched in his cheek, as if flexing with the force of withheld words.

The room seemed to grow a little more solid, the fog thinning. He turned to the column, laying his hand against it. He drew in a breath and let it out slowly, his shoulders lowering.

“This magic,” he said, more calmly, “is a living thing. And this, the center, is the most demanding piece of all. I’ve had to come back over the years, feed it more of myself to keep the spells strong. It’s the most important one, and yet the weakest, because I had to get a different sorcerer to help me finish it. After—”

After she left. He didn’t say it. Didn’t need to.

His gaze slipped over his shoulder. The anger was gone. Only sadness remained. Suddenly, my father looked so breathtakingly old. Not the old of wrinkled skin or graying hair, but the old of sheer exhaustion, right from the soul.

“Do you want to see, little serpent,” he murmured, “what memory it took from me?”

No, I almost said.

I didn’t want to see it.

But I’d come too far to turn back now. Swallowed too many lies to turn away the truth.

Slowly, I joined him at the obelisk. I lifted my hand, and laid it over his.

The night is cold, the only heat from raging fires that burn the city of Salinae.

I do not feel either. As I fly over the city, a shell of what it once was, I feel nothing but satisfaction. It has been a hard year. I’ve worn this crown for close to two centuries. Few Nightborn kings—few Obitraen kings, in general—manage to cling to power for so long. I have known this for a long time. But lately, my enemies have been stirring in the shadows. I feel them surrounding me at every party, every meeting. I feel their eyes on me when I am alone in my bedchamber and when I stand before my people.

Power is a bloody, bloody business.

I have gotten soft these last few years.

But the time for softness is over. I need to carve away my weaknesses like rotting flesh. And there is one particular necrosis that I’ve allowed to plague me for too long, because I’ve been weak. Too weak to give up my little fantasies about a woman—a human woman—who scorned me, and the bizarre comfort I got from the idea that she was still alive somewhere, and my shameful commitment to a promise I once made to her.

Lately, I’ve been having dreams. Dreams of her. Dreams of myself, driving my sword through my father’s chest. Dreams of a silver-eyed little boy thrusting a blade through my heart.

I didn’t come to Salinae to kill her.

I tell myself this, though I don’t know why. No previous Nightborn king would hesitate to kill such an obvious liability.

You’re too soft, my own father whispers to me, and I know he’s right.

I don’t need to kill her, I tell myself. I only need to kill the child. The child is the danger. She is inconsequential.

But when I fly over the Salinae human districts, burning and burning with Nightfire, and I land before the pile of ruin that used to be a house, I’m not expecting the intensity of emotion that spears me.

I stare at the house—what once was a house—for a long moment.

I smell no life. I hear no heartbeat. Once, I could sense her from across the room—across the castle—like her body itself called to me, making its presence constantly known.

Her absence now is even more overpowering. A great hole that has opened up in my soul.

Regret, fierce and unrelenting, tears me up.

Three of my soldiers surround the remains of the house, but they haven’t yet seen me. I consider flying away. Every part of me wants to turn away from this wreckage and lock it somewhere I don’t have to think about it.

But the absence of the heartbeat I was looking for made me miss the one that remained. The three Hiaj below were circling something, their interest piqued with hunger.

I can, at least, finish what I came here for.

I land. One of the soldiers is cursing and rubbing his bloody hand.

“A lamb?” he mutters. “More like a viper.”

Then the warriors notice me and hurry to bow. I don’t pay attention to them.

Because by then, I have seen you.

You are a lone flicker of light in an expanse of death. The only living thing in this pile of rubble.

In my dreams, my child is a mirror of myself. It is my own face I see when I think of dying by my Heir’s hand.

But you, little serpent, look so much like your mother.

I kneel before you. You are so very small. Surely small for your age, though I’m not sure exactly how old that is. Time can be strange for vampires. Your mother has lingered with me for so long that sometimes, I can’t remember how long it has been since she left.

You have long, slick black hair that covers your face, and freckles over your nose that blend with the smears of blood and soot, wrinkling as you sneer at me. They make me think of another time, long ago.

But those eyes.

You have my eyes. Silver as the moon, round and full of steel rage. The rage is mine, too. The fearlessness.

I reach for you, and though I can hear in your heartbeat that you’re afraid, you don’t hesitate to snap at me, sinking your little teeth deep into my finger.

I will not lie to you, little serpent.

I was expecting to kill you that night.

But what I was not expecting was to love you so devastatingly much.

It hits me so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, that I don’t even have time to brace myself against it.

You glare at me, like you’re ready to go down fighting even against one of the most powerful men in the world, and I smile a little, despite myself.

It takes me a minute to recognize the sensation in my chest. Pride.

I think of my own father and the way he spent my entire life crippling me out of fear of what I would become. Think of the night he casually threw my newborn baby brother out the window to the demons.

It is incomprehensible to me that my father ever felt for me the way I feel in this moment.

Surely no one ever has.

I cannot describe the depth of that emotion, nor the intensity of the terror that comes with it, bound together so inextricably. I came here to excise my greatest weaknesses, and instead, I now offer up my heart to it.

From that moment, little serpent, I could not entertain the possibility of killing you.

I’ll do the next best thing, I tell myself. I will raise you. I will protect myself from you by protecting you from a world that would teach you how to kill me.

It can be different, I tell myself, than how it was with my father and me.

It can be different than how it was with her.

I pick you up. You’re so tiny and fragile in my arms. Even though you’re terrified of me, you cling to my neck, like some part of you knows exactly who I am.

I’m already more afraid than I ever have been.

Afraid of you and what you could do to me. Afraid of the world that could kill you so easily. Afraid of myself, gifted with another fragile heart that I know I cannot keep.

But, my little serpent, it is the most wonderful fear.

Every minute with you is, even if I already regret all the mistakes I know I will make.

I drew in a gasp. My chest hurt. The air burned.

I was on my knees now.

I forced my eyes open through the noxious smoke. No—not smoke. Magic of some kind, thick and red, shimmering in a million colors at once.