Chapter 74

Zorander's horrified gaze locked with mine, then he was moving, heading straight for me, a blur of feather and shadow.

He never got there.

Corvus knocked him from the sky, slamming him against the cave wall with a hideous crack of bones and wings. Zor crashed down, limbs askew, head lolling, neck broken.

Tristan shifted in a flash of gold and molten fire, turning the cave into a furnace.

Then the flames faded as fast as they'd come.

Tristan's magic gone, the attack had only been a diversion to get closer.

Out of fire, both of us out of magic, Tristan wrapped his mighty body around me. A wall of solid muscle and sinew, teeth snapping, deadly tail lashing as he flattened me down to my hands and knees. I shoved at his immovable mass, couldn't stand that he was putting himself between me and Corvus.

Couldn't stand what the outcome would be.

Stop, Tristan. Stop.

Beneath me, the silver tree still glowed brightly, illuminating the belly of the wyvern rumbling against my back, talons scraping across the floor as he maneuvered to keep me protected.

But the entire mountain shook beneath Corvus's approach.

His malevolence crept into my blood like poison, bile clogging my throat, tears flooding my eyes. I crawled like a fucking rat beneath Tristan, hands and knees skidding across the smooth floor.

Get off me. Fly out of here and get free of this, I keened, but the stubborn beast ignored me, his body jerking as Corvus's reeking scent wrapped around us. This was my fault. We could have run.

We should have run.

Please, Tristan. You are the last of your kind, I pleaded. You have to survive.

Tristan grunted in pain, his body shuddering beneath whatever Corvus was doing to him.

Oh gods. I tried to crawl out from underneath him, but he kept me pinned down, my hands sliding…right onto what was embedded into the ball of roots at the base of the tree.

My palm met the slightly domed mark I'd assumed was part of the design…until I realized that's not what the mark was at all.

I dug my broken nails in deeper and wrenched the keystone from the ancient silver binding it in place.

Power wracked my body, my teeth clacking together, bones splintering beneath the onslaught. For a moment, I wondered if I was dead.

Then pure power, cold and eternal, rocketed into me from the stone gripped in my hand.

This was…The air was knocked from my lungs as a new power unfurled, older somehow than everything that had come before.

Lightning ruptured through me, blazing around me so brightly I couldn't see, the very air warping with enough power to rupture the world to pieces. I burned from the inside out, embers of fire that ignited, joined, and grew into an explosion that consumed me.

Whatever I'd thought magic was paled in comparison to this yawning power. Everything felt far away, distant, everything except my rage.

Tristan shuddered then collapsed, one eye fixed on Corvus, still growling as I slid out from underneath him even though he couldn't lift his head.

I stepped in front of the fallen wyvern, my feet barely touching the ground.

Dragged my gaze over Corvus's ruined, twisted shell.

This entitled bastard wanted to glut himself on this world?

I'd give him something to glut himself on.

I hit him with a crushing wall of light, my arms freezing, thawing, then freezing again, hoarfrost crackling up my neck as I fed every sizzling drop of power straight into Corvus's writhing shadows.

Not Fae magic. Not even witch magic.

But whatever magic we'd brought to this world with us.

I shoved so much godsdamned magic into him, those dark, devouring flames shuddered, like a dam about to give way.

"How do you like that?" I hissed, magic flowing from my hands in a solid stream of frozen starlight. "You think because you were born to power you should forever have it, no matter who you have to thieve it from."

His spikes were the first to go, curling and bending then cracking off.

Then the vines, writhing frantically until they curled into ashy powder, sifting to the floor around him in delicate little piles of gray.

"Before you die, I want you to know this. Your sister told me how to kill you. ‘A fire can be snuffed out just as easily by too much fuel as by not enough.' Those were her words."

Beneath the nest of blackened slime, shadows shredded, turning to ragged, tattered rags, twisting in desperation as if he was trying to piece himself back together from the inside out.

And still the magic flowed into me—out of me—as if this power was bottomless.

His dark corona crown flickered out, the rest of his ashy skin sloughing off like a snake's. The creeping malevolence eased as he was faded away, clawing at his existence with the kind of wild desperation only the dying possess.

Until there was nothing left in the cave except me and the four bodies of the males who were my entire life.

Tristan was still alive.

Breathing, semiconscious, and I counted eight deep, gaping puncture wounds along his sides and back, blood running down his scales, dripping to the floor.

"For the record, this is probably the most disgusting thing I've ever done, and that's saying a lot. But let's not forget, you gave me the idea." I dragged my hand through the blood and covered his gums liberally, his long, black tongue flicking out to clean off my fingers.

"Corvus is dead. Do not get up. Save your strength."

Then I dragged my hand down his side and headed for Zor.

"Please don't hate me for this." I eased him into a sitting position, gagging as bones cracked and shifted beneath his sallow skin, one wing hanging crooked. I hesitated then rubbed my thumb over his lips before I plunged it between them.

Raziel wasn't even breathing, the entire side of his face and body lacerated. I pressed my fingers to his throat. Nothing.

"Gods, Raz. If this works, I'm going to totally kick your arse for playing the hero." I rubbed Tristan's blood all over his wounds then painted the inside of his mouth. When I checked again for a pulse, it was faint. But it was there.

I knelt beside Tavion, both hands dripping blood, when the inside of the cave hollowed out, my ears popping.

"What have you done?" Gelvira raged, hands clenched into fists as she swung her gaze around the utter destruction. Ignoring the four bodies.

Snagging on the absence of her brother.

"What needed done." I took one last look at my mate, body smeared in wyvern blood, and wrapped my slippery fingers around my keystone, power echoing through my bones and turning my own blood to mist.

"You fucking killed him." Her fury spiked the air, turning the atmosphere to a chilled heavy fog.

"I did."

The cave turned dark as night, starry shadows spilling from her until I wondered if they would ever stop. Was Bexley right? Were the twins so closely intertwined she'd die now that her brother was gone?

Gelvira didn't appear to be knocking on death's door quite yet.

She looked pissed.

"That's what happened with the witches, then. I should have known," she mumbled to herself.

"You set up a diversion to keep me occupied while you came here and killed my brother." She cocked her head slowly. "Ruthless. I underestimated you, sister. I underestimated all of you."

While I wondered what, exactly, Bella's diversion had been, Gelvira's gaze skated over the cave again, only this time she paused on each of the prone forms, finally stopping on Tristan.

"If I'm going to die, it won't be all alone, withering away in the dark." Her smile was death and cruelty mixed into one. "I will take everything from you, sister. We will die here together, all of us, where our lives began."

I lifted my chin, daring her to try.

"So it's true. You can't live without the monster your brother had become?"

"This would have been your fate, too, had you survived long enough," she said steadily as if stating a simple fact.

"Life is cruel, even to beings like us. But you would have discovered that, while the universe changes around you, who you love and how you love never does."