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“What?” she hissed, recalling those tendrils to gather around the hem of her dress.

I gestured toward the slithering wisps. “When did you stop owning your dark magic? When did it stop listening to you?”

Kakias’s face twisted minutely, but she remained firm.

“That will happen, you know,” I said, trying to expand my shield. To get a handle on my own light. “Power takes over if you’re weak.”

“I am not weak.”

“But you are weaker than what you harness.” I thought of my claims to my friends back in the cave. Of Kakias’s poison and my Angelblood dancing together in my veins for weeks. Of Bant’s light mirroring Damien’s. “Not everyone is made to handle the power of Angels, Kakias. What made you think you were strong enough?”

“He told me I was!” Kakias snapped. “As a piece of the deal, that Angel shed his own self into mine—shed his power into my veins.”

“Were you ever going to tell me we had Angelblood?” Barrett asked.

Kakias laughed. Barrett and I exchanged a wary glance. “You think you know so much.”

“You just admitted it,” Barrett accused. “He shed himself into your veins, and you would have passed that power on to me—though I can’t use it.” He gestured his sword at the Angellight protecting us from his mother.

Kakias’s eyes flicked around the gold curtain, a gleeful confidence in that dark gaze. Her cheekbones were more pronounced than before, her curls bigger and wilder and that scar across her face starker. The heaving of her chest looked like more effort as she stretched her magic toward my Angellight.

I thought back to what she’d been musing over while we listened from the balcony. Who she’d been talking about.

“You called on Annellius,” I said. Her power slashed at mine, but I dragged in a ragged breath and continued. “You summoned his spirit…how?”

“No.” She grinned a sharp-toothed smile. “I did not.”

She did not call my ancestor’s spirit, but?—

“How old are you, Kakias?” I forced my Angellight out further. “How long have you been playing these games?”

And if it was possible, that smile widened.

No. There was no way. Annellius had lived and died centuries before us. Centuries before Kakias and Lucidius and all their schemes began.

“Parts of me have been indulging in this feud longer than you could imagine, little Angel child.”

Barrett stilled beside me, but his stunned gaze was hot against my cheek.

Behind us, boots shuffled over rock. A low chime like metal against stone echoed a few feet away, quiet enough that the queen couldn’t hear it. My second pulse beat wildly.

“Whatever power you think you have, you’re making a mistake. You were not born with it,” I sneered, but kept the queen’s attention on me as Barrett sank into the shadows. “Your body is not adept to it. And now you’ve put your blood and bones through too much. They cannot contain the power—a mortal body too frail.”

“I am not mortal!”

“As long as I breathe, you are not immortal either.” She lingered somewhere between the two. I didn’t consider what that meant as I took small steps backward until my boot met those small metal items I’d heard rolling across the floor. “And here’s what you have not considered, Kakias: I am not immortal, but I am kissed by the Angels. I am born of myth and legend.”

Tossing my dagger in the air, I caught it by the blade, reopening the healing slice to my palm. Blood poured through my fingers.

“I thought by now you would have stopped underestimating me.”

Dropping my dagger into my other hand and sheathing it, I swiped up the three minor clan Angel emblems Santorina had dropped for me. Held tightly to them despite the shining pain of the open wound.

But nothing hurt when light exploded from me, and shock widened the queen’s eyes.

Three different channels of Angellight sprung up in the courtyard, feeding into the veil. Kakias’s tar-like power drifted to them, tugging against her like they were being siphoned, pulling at the lines of her frame. She roared against it.

One beam of Angellight floated across the stone surfaces of the courtyard, turquoise tinged gold that I knew in my Angelcursed bones belonged to Gaveny.