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With only a blade, the queen was killable.

“I’m done,” I said. “It has been a pleasure being your undoing, Kakias.”

I nodded at Barrett, handing the control to him.

He took two slow steps forward and crouched before his weakened mother. The woman who had trapped him—the one who had tried to turn him into a monster. But Barrett had fought back. He had retained the good naturally born in his heart, despite the malice nurturing him.

Kakias’s lids lifted slightly, giving her son a dead look. “You may as well do it,” she said. “There is nothing left of me. I can go be with my child now.”

My heart stuttered. Barrett’s frame trembled with a ragged breath.

“This is for every life taken on your battlefields. For every family now in mourning. For every time,” Barrett muttered through clenched teeth, his voice shaking as his fingers did around his dagger, “that you were a tyrant instead of a mother. That you tried to beat the kindness, the compassion, and dreams out of me.” He lifted the blade and stilled his grip. “This is for my brother whom you tortured. It’s for the woman behind me now. It’s for me.” He swallowed, gripped her shoulder. “And it’s for Dax.”

And Barrett drove the dagger into his mother’s heart.

Kakias gasped a small, pained sound that did not capture the severity of a knife through the heart but somehow seemed to make the moment all the more fragile. It hung on the air until her eyes closed.

Between the two of them, it seemed like a shared release of so much animosity, of so much pain felt throughout both lives, and a sense of closure.

Barrett was still for a minute, watching the place metal sank into flesh and blood dripped around it.

Where he took his mother’s life with his own hand.

I thought a sob might have slipped past his lips, though she’d been nothing but cruel to him. But before I could offer any reassurance, Barrett took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and wrenched the knife from her chest.

And light poured forth from the wound.

Similar to the burning intensity of the light I invoked from the emblems, it erupted like a beast kept caged for far too long. Alive and sentient, pulsing as if it breathed. Blinding, the light filled the cell, scorched rock and melted earth with its tendrils of golden threads. It pushed against the walls, an ancient pressure wrapping around my frame. A caress to my cheek.

Hello, child.

That presence grew and grew, taking a humanoid form with two large protrusions extending from its back that morphed into a fluttering pair of feathered wings.

The frame seeped through the cracked rock walls, absorbed into their surfaces. There was a whisper of understanding, a familiarity in that sentience?—

“Bant’s Spirit,” I gasped.

“I know,” Barrett exclaimed lowly, still in shock over what he’d done.

“No, Barrett.” I gripped his arm and pointed at the disappearing golden glow. “Bant’s Spirit.”

The queen contained living magic.

We had been working to undo it, but I didn’t think about what it was beyond the immortality ritual. Didn’t consider what had allowed Kakias to speak to Annellius, conduct the dark magic, or survive after sacrificing her soul.

The spirit of the Engrossian Angel, the Prime Warrior, had been trapped within the queen since the day they made that deal.

It was shed unto me. This magic saw many millennia.

“Bant tried to turn Kakias into a chosen—into the one able to find the emblems.” The pieces slid into place, and Barrett watched me with wide eyes. “Bant and Damien feuded for centuries; you said it yourself. Bant lost a piece of himself at the Blackfyre, Barrett! He left his ring there in the battle, and centuries later gave up his spirit there, as well.” I gripped his arm.

“He tried to turn your mother into his weapon—to replace Annellius after he failed and make me unnecessary down the line. It had not been Angelblood Bant had shed into the queen. It had been his fucking spirit itself.

“That’s why her power felt like it was warring with my own in my blood. Because mine is tied to Damien, and those two Angels left a legacy of feuds.” I had seen them on the plane. The answer had been right there. “It’s why there was a weird tie between your mother and me in that scar, why she fed off my power and fainted at the trench when it was disconnected.”

Breath of lungs and threads of heart. A living spirit. Had Lucidius known, too?

Barrett gaped between the dagger in his hand and the bleeding wound on Kakias’s chest.