Chapter 43

43

Kyros’s roar was rage and loss. His battle charge was murder.

And we’d all watched the demon king kill his father. The rest of us didn’t need Basilia’s scream of anguish to spur us into gear. All of us had to fight now.

There was a crack in the air, and a portal opened.

I’d barely made it up off my knees, and Kyros was only halfway to the demon king, when a magus in thick robes stepped through.

The magus lowered his hood, and Wild froze.

“Varden,” he said in confusion.

Varden. What was he—? My eyes widened at the sight of his threads curled tight around his body.

“Varden, no!” I opened a portal and sprinted through.

Erupting out the other side, I was just in time to witness Varden’s body erupting with white light. The purest of magic. That of sacrifice in the name of love. The kind of magic that could only be used once because the use was final.

“No,” I screamed, dropping to the ground to shield my eyes from the fierce glare.

Kyros was on his knees, not far from me.

The glare faded, and though the baffled demon king registered in my mind, most of me was focused on the spirit floating toward me.

“Varden,” I choked, tears pouring down my cheeks. “Why?”

He smiled. “I was dead already. I chose a fate that would protect my people.”

I sobbed and extended a hand to him, a silent plea for the old esteemed not to depart.

But he was too smart to stay.

His hand rested atop my palm, which began to glow white. The white spread across my skin to cover me.

“Now you kill that which seeks to harm us,” Varden told me.

His eyes twinkled with the peace he’d found and the path he’d chosen.

I sucked in a breath. “Return to the Mother, sir. It was an honor to have known you.”

He bowed, already fading from this world. “The honor was mine, granddaughter of my dearest friend.”

A cry left my lips as he disappeared from sight.

Varden died to give me another layer of protection, and whether by his intent or by the mysterious summation of ingredients that resulted in fate, I could see that a thick, inflexible thread now connected me to the demon king.

I didn’t wipe my eyes as I stood.

It’s time for me to fight, I thought at Wild.

Yes, my queen. I will give you all I have.

I love you, Wild.

And you will keep loving me for decades to come. No mercy, my love. No hesitation. He took your family. He’s taken too much from those we care about. It is time for the demon king to meet his end at your hand.

Varden had given me a fighting chance, and—I realized—so had King Julius.

The demon king was favoring his right side. Blood still poured from hundreds of wounds over his body. More than that, the expenditure of magic he’d used to kill the Vissimo ruler had dented his supply.

If there was a chance to beat him, it was now.

And even then, I knew this could well be my final fight too.

Kyros’s growls filled the air again, but I spoke without turning my head, “I understand this demon killed your father, King Kyros, but he killed my family long before yours. This fight is mine.”

“It can be both of ours,” he snarled.

His anger wasn’t at me. The Vissimo was containing his power as best he could. “You know it cannot.”

Power like ours didn’t leave space for a team. Wild was the only person I could possibly fight with in a battle of this intensity, and only with ample practice over years or decades. We hadn’t had nearly enough time to get there, and even Wild knew he’d hinder my efforts. We’d all known this when Julius fought. Perhaps we forgot as Kyros charged the demon king afterward, but I’d regained clarity.

We’d be as likely to hurt each other as the demon king if both of us fought.

“The battle is yours,” he grudgingly admitted.

I dipped my head.

I walked toward the demon king, who had watched me for some time now. There was something strange in the way he stared that I couldn’t peg. Was it my part-demon nature? Was it that he remembered me as a horrified teen? He may be reconciling that version of me with the relic-covered, black-scaled person he looked at now.

“Your fight is with me,” I told him in the demon tongue.

“My fight cannot be with you,” he answered.

“And yet it will be.”

“And yet it will be,” he echoed. “Another curse in a cursed life. So be it, Magus Queen. We fight.”

I sent up a four-affinity barrier around me, and the demon king regarded it before skimming a look across the knolls to Wild. A low hum left the supernatural, but I was too busy peering at a golden spear protruding from his back that reminded me greatly of the tiny one in my heart.

“You have a mate,” I murmured.

Like the bond I shared with Wild, a golden line connected into the spear. I followed the gold line across the knolls and meadow, and up in the alpine forest where I assumed the bond disappeared through a gate to the other realm.

A growl rippled from the demon. A warning.

He was mated, so he’d be stronger.

What was stranger still was that a bond extended from me alongside the golden thread and into the distance. I hadn’t looked for the bond since my demon returned to me. I’d believed so strongly that the bond was the connection between us in different realms.

But the bond still led off into the demon world.

A thought for another time.

I unsheathed my daggers and banished my cloak. I’d summon it if needed against an attack, but the cloak was cumbersome.

The demon king was gathering smoke, and I released smoke of my own to strengthen the barrier I’d erected.

He threw a funnel of red smoke at me so quickly, I barely had time to get out of the way.

Fuck, the demon could draw on his magic as quickly as Julius had moved.

The smoke hit my barrier, and I pushed an image of myself forward, stepping back into a portal to reappear behind the demon king.

I summoned the arrowheads filled with my blood and shot them into the supernatural’s back. He managed to dodge half of them, but his furious bellow told me some were doing the trick.

Hesitation would kill me.

I sprinted forward and ducked under a slicing shard of red smoke to drive my father’s dagger into one of the deeper wounds on his torso.

Darkness stirred in me, and I released the darkness through the blade for an instant before ripping it away to dance back.

I cried out as fire erupted in my calf.

Wild was on the job, and I let him heal me from afar as I pivoted. Summoning from our charm stores, I activated explosions of Rooke’s antidote around the demon king. The mist rose around him in a dome, and his pained grunts could be heard from out here.

A demon was fire.

I blew ice to freeze the ground he stood upon, and the air inside the misty dome of antidote.

The ground began to shake, then boil.

The threads from the midst of my trap disappeared down into the ground, and I watched the ground deep beneath my feet, moving back with it to ensure my position was always between the demon and my mate.

Wild was the obvious target.

“Gu en, bryve!” I shouted. Come out, coward.

The ground in front of me erupted, and I wasted no time slicing my father’s blade across the king’s chest. This time, the blade was caught between the demon’s two hands.

We remained locked there, and I got a sense the demon was drawing parallels between this moment and the moment he’d killed Julius too.

Red smoke built under the surface of the demon’s skin. His scales were out in full force, and they glowed with a hypnotic pulse.

“I suggest you let go,” he said in the demon tongue.

I smiled. “I appreciate the feedback.”

Carving a path with a vicious drilling of my magus magic first, I shoved the dagger—blade, hilt, and all—inside the demon king. My father’s blood was in that blade.

The ruler choked and staggered forward, and then I was hurtling through the air, pummeled bodily upward and away by a crushing blow.

I rolled across the ground, and my inner focus settled on a red spear of his blood shooting toward me. No barrier would help me with that, and my body was in shock from the blow.

Sascha hurtled into the path of the blood spear, and I cried out before seeing the spear had broken across the Luther’s back and splashed to the ground.

Of course.Luthers weren’t affected by demon blood.

Another spear was coming.

Andie intercepted this one, and I finally made it to my feet, forcing magic into my shocked body to spur it back to action.

The king’s eyes glowed red, as did his scales. Smoke poured from him now, and at least I had the relish of seeing the fucker lose control.

I switched Ryzika’s blade into my other hand, panting hard.

I opened a portal and sent an image of myself through. The demon king turned toward the image behind him, and I blurred forward from the front.

He’d half expected the trick, and a wall of red smoke rose between us. I couldn’t alter course in time, and I screamed as the smoke singed and picked at my skin.

I sliced across the backs of his legs, driving my black smoke into the wounds.

A red thread was coming for me. Too quick.

On instinct, I redirected it from me, and the demon king stumbled midturn. He frowned, and I kicked savagely at the wound in his side where I’d buried my father’s blade. Sending out a blast of my magic, I sealed the skin over the dagger.

Get that out, you bastard.

The demon king sprawled on the frozen ground, and I flicked away another of his intended attacks. A rage I’d locked away a long time ago in an act of self-preservation had steadily been freed as I fought.

The rage was one of loss.

This supernatural changed my life forever one summer’s day. He’d gone out of his way to kill people who had no designs to ever challenge his rule.

He’d killed my family.

I shrieked with fury and released a funnel of magic so powerful that it left my channels raw.

I fashioned the funnel into a blade and aimed it directly at a gap in the demon king’s scales.

His arm thudded to the ground. The guy just stared at his arm on the ground, not making a sound.

“Grandmother would have liked that,” I said.

The demon king was clawing at his side, trying to remove the poisonous blade I’d placed there.

Tsk, tsk.

I released another burst just as powerful.

This time, I connected my magic to the dagger buried inside his body. Hooking a rope of my power around the dagger, I then continued drilling to the iron cage around the ruler’s heart. Breaking the case would take more power than I possessed, but I hooked the other end of the rope around the iron casing, connecting it to my father’s blade.

Now, he couldn’t pull the poisonous dagger free without ripping his own heart out.

A gory trap. “And my mother would have loved that one,” I told him.

I walked toward the king, vaguely registering the slight limp in my gait. “But my twin, my Syera,” I whispered, nearly choked by the pain of losing her. “She would have enjoyed all of this, and nothing but your life will do to satisfy the daily agony I endure at losing her.”

“Syera,” he hushed.

I released a volume of magic I’d never dared to release. Its exit scraped at the already raw channels in my affinities, and my jaw locked against the instinct to stop.

I staked the demon to the frozen ground and stood on his remaining arm to pin it in place. He struggled, and his magic rose against me. I battered the threads of his violent intent aside yet again, delighting in his confusion as his attacks appeared to fizzle and die.

I set the tip of Ryzika’s blade under the scale in the dead center of his throat.

“I’ll think of Syera as I saw off your head,” I purred.

“You know not what you do—” His answer cut off as I pried off the red scale.

Not by what I’d done, I realized, but by the black cracks appearing across his skin. The dagger was killing him.

Good.

I was determined to be sure of the kill, however. Syera would get her slice of revenge too. I plunged the tip of Ryzika’s blade through the gap in his scales. Red blood—that was entirely demon in nature—bubbled from his lips and the wound. The crimson glow faded from his eyes, and I looked into chilling irises of almost translucent green. They were furious.

They were… sad.

They were uncompromising.

Thunder boomed around us, and too late, I noticed the hundreds of threads climbing to the surface from beneath us.

Demons erupted from under the knolls, and I felt the coldness of Wild’s panic as they closed in on me. I erected a hasty barrier as claws slashed at me. The force of their attack threw me to the ground.

Crimson demons were everywhere. That’s all I could fathom as I focused everything else on keeping my barrier up.

“Tempest!” Wild bellowed.

But the only way I’d been getting through the fight was by keeping my lens narrow and confined to the fight with the demon king. Now, hundreds of supernaturals were filling it once more. Magus, Vissimo, Luthers, and demons.

And I was crippled.

Blows rained on my barrier, and it took everything in me to keep the protection up amid the threads flying everywhere across the knolls.

I was dragged through a portal.

Hands shook my shoulders. “Draw them in, Tempest. Draw them in!”

My body was convulsing, though, and there was no drawing them in this time. I arched in Wild’s arms, and the screams leaving me didn’t sound like my own. They were too broken and pained.

The clamor of the threads had broken me.

I’d been broken, and the only choice left was to submit to their power. To the power of the Mother. To the power that had enabled me to save those I loved, seek revenge for my family, and to give magus a fighting chance.

I submitted, and my screams stopped. Peace floated inside to fill me, and my entire body relaxed. All I’d had to do was stop fighting.

All I’d had to do was remember that my power was her power. That I was merely the vessel.

And in that submission, I found an answer to the anarchy surrounding me and my mate. The answer wasn’t one I would have chosen or even thought of.

But despite that my soul screamed against the decision, it also nodded in agreement with the Mother. This was the only answer.

I opened my eyes and smiled at Wild, reaching a hand up to rest against his jaw.

“I love you, Wild. I’m sorry.”