Chapter 47

47

kane

The bones of my kneecaps crunched against the hard, dry wood below.

I couldn’t move.

I simply knelt on the edge of the platform, roaring. Roaring until my throat bled.

She was just hanging there . . . Limp, broken, impaled on a single jagged claw—suspended in air, speared through the center like a bowed ribbon. Elegant somehow, as if dipped in a seductive waltz by Death himself.

Dead.

She was dead.

Like the snuffing of a candle that plunges an entire room into pitch-blackness. And with it, the extinguishing of my soul.

I retched onto the knotted wood beneath me.

Over and over and over.

No, please, no—

I shook, panting while my mind went hollow—save for the deafening blare of her final words: “Live, for me . . .” Her words and the thrumming of my heart. My wrecked, annihilated, decimated heart.

And the crushing emptiness—

When everything in my gut had been purged onto the ground beneath me and I was panting on my hands and knees like a rabid animal, my eyes blurred with tears, my teeth gnashing, I forced myself to stand.

But Lazarus was gone from the sky.

Claws landed behind me and I braced myself with steadying, brisk breaths for whatever mercenary of his had come to kill me, too.

Please,I thought. Kill me.

I want to be with her.

Please.

But it was Griffin’s hand on my shoulder as he turned me to face him, eyes harsh, expression grim, as he said, “We have to go.”

Ryder stepped out from behind the commander and took in my expression. I must have looked wrecked. Ravaged. Because he uttered a single, appalled “No.”

Griffin’s eyes shot from me to Ryder and back. “Now.”

“No, no, no—” Ryder pleaded. “This is all my fault. I did this. It’s my fault—”

“Ryder,” Griffin cautioned, his voice sharper than a knife’s edge.

But Ryder didn’t stop. “I told her. I knew the minute I did that I shouldn’t have. How could Amelia have done this? How could—”

“What did you do?” The words flew from me, the rage a brief and welcome respite from the pain. I hadn’t even realized I was moving. Hadn’t realized I had Ryder’s throat in my hand, hadn’t realized his face was turning a shade of ghastly, satisfying blue. I tightened my grip.

“Kane,” Griffin snapped, ripping at my arm. “Kane, control yourself. It was a mistake. He made a mistake—you’re going to kill him!”

Ryder choked and sputtered.

Good.I squeezed harder, feeling his airway close under my hand. “Why should you get to live?”

Ryder’s purple face strained back at me, sniveling and wide-eyed. Enduring the pain. Accepting it.

“Why?”I bellowed.

Griffin shook me. “This is not what Arwen would have wanted!”

I released Ryder. Bit my cheek until I tasted blood.

“No,” Ryder croaked, rubbing at his neck. “He should kill me. I told Amelia where you’d be. And she told Lazarus. Why would she do that?”

“She must have cut a deal.” Griffin’s voice was hollow.

“For what?” Ryder asked.

“Her people, I’m sure.”

Ryder shook his head. “When I couldn’t find her, I had a bad feeling, but I never thought . . .”

I couldn’t listen to him anymore. Couldn’t hear anything but my heart. Beating too slow. Barely beating at all. I knew I was moving toward the edge of the platform, but I couldn’t feel my legs. I would be with her. Had to—

“Kane, stop, they’re gone.”

I shoved around Griffin, his lumbering chest in my fucking way, but he put himself in front of me again. Firm. Stern. “Kane, she’s gone.”

Sobs racked from my chest. I didn’t sound like myself. I didn’t sound like anything. I knew my face had crumpled, that tears were blurring my sight, and no matter how they purged from me, they wouldn’t soothe the emptiness, ease the unendurable agony—

I moved again for the edge of the platform. For that bottomless, depthless, blackened forest. For the peace I’d find at its base. But Griffin pulled me into him.

Awkward at first. Stiff.

Not as much an embrace as a steel grip to prevent me from my own—

I wrenched from him, from his resolute warmth, his support—but he held vehemently firm.

“I’m sorry, brother,” he said.

Resonant silence whirred in my head. The sun had fallen behind the lip of the isle’s mouth. It was cold now. Not frigid, but crisp enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck and my forearms limp at my sides. The smell of burning—perhaps a lantern or torch knocked aside in the widow’s destruction—crested the air in my nostrils. Voices wailed and the stomping of heavy boots sounded below us.

“We need to leave,” Griffin said. “There are men coming for you . . .”

I jerked my chin in agreement as he released me. Guided us both away from the ledge.

“I have to ask,” Griffin said. “The blade?”

“He took it. With her . . .” I couldn’t say the word.

Her body.

She was just a body now. Just a shell.

When Griffin shifted, I climbed atop his feathered wingspan, Ryder after me, his face flushed and splotchy from a deluge of tears.

My mind was silent as we took to the skies.

Utterly silent, as we sailed over the depths of the fathomless forest below.

As we moved through the clouds.

Until later—

Hours later—

Lifetimes later—

In the suffocatingly dark, foreboding silence of my study. With no one else around, more than inebriated with drink.

My thoughts crawled to the surface, where I was forced at knifepoint to face them.

It was so obvious now. Painfully, punishingly obvious. It had always been his plan. To let me live. To let us both live. So we could find the blade for him before he killed her.

We had been played.

And now, there were only three things left to do:

I would locate the White Crow. Endure whatever necessary to become full-blooded.

Hunt down Amelia, and make her suffer in unimaginable ways for her betrayal.

And then, when I’d torn the world to shreds, when there wasn’t a man or woman still breathing who could be faulted for her death, I’d complete the prophecy in Arwen’s place. Vanquish my father, drive the Blade of the Sun into his heart, and join her wherever she was now.

With the Gods. In the ground. Nowhere. I didn’t care.

I had lived centuries without Arwen. I couldn’t do it again.

Until then, I knew only one cure for such grotesque, intolerable pain:

Revenge.