Page 88 of A Flame of the Phoenix (An Heir Comes to Rise #6)

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

Zaiana

W hen the surge of warriors charging forward became too much, Zaiana lost sight of Maverick and Reylan. Her heart raced, pushing through the crowd, trying to catch an opening large enough to splay her wings and chase after them.

He’s going to kill him.

Zaiana should let Reylan have his revenge. Maverick had killed his mate right in front of his eyes, then he’d killed his king. Two unforgivable crimes that justified Reylan in his course.

She didn’t know what it made her to abandon her station in pursuit of stopping Reylan in the vengeance he was owed. Would she be Faythe and Reylan’s enemy again? She wouldn’t blame them. She could live with that.

It was Kyleer who crossed her mind. The thought of having to flee as the enemy once more and leave him behind.

He’ll get his memories back one day. Then he’ll be glad for it.

The thought didn’t make her heart ache any less.

Too much time was slipping by, and Zaiana grew frustrated at being smaller than most soldiers, pushing her way through like a fleeing child in an overcrowded market.

Finally, she’d made it back far enough to use her wings, and she shot up, scanning the ferocious battlefield for parrying strokes of blue. There were many. Firewielding was fairly common among the fae. Her attention darted from each fireball, but Reylan and Maverick had removed themselves from the thick of the fighting. Maverick’s instruction would likely be to get the general as far away from aiding Faythe as possible.

Zaiana flew around a small, sharp piece of mountain. Several warriors fought in the smaller passages through the mountain fringe. The sound of war lessened the farther she got from the main field. Then she caught the unmistakable sound of Maverick’s flame. It was unlike others, or maybe in all their years she’d become attuned to his particular sound of fire. How strange , she thought. It had never crossed her mind before, and she knew it was her panic tormenting her.

All she would do was make sure Maverick got away, far away, and that he would never come back. Zaiana justified her actions to defend Maverick by fairness. She’d been accepted by Faythe and her companions despite what she’d done…but the murders Maverick had carried out had come close to being her crimes. Even if he’d done it for his own gain, she couldn’t let him die for acts that should have made her the villain Reylan targeted right now.

Zaiana’s wings beat harder, flying around a tall, thin piece of rock.

She found them. Just them.

But she was too late.

Reylan stood poised, an arrow nocked in his bow, ready to release.

A second arrow.

The first had already made its mark in Maverick’s chest, and what was worse, as she flew closer, she felt the hideous sensation of the Niltain steel the arrow heads were made of.

She flew faster. Faster. Faster.

The second arrow fired, striking close to the first. Maverick fell to his knees, coughing black blood.

Reylan nocked again.

Zaiana dropped down in front of Maverick with a scream. “STOP!” Her chest heaved, staring off with the frightening loathing and rage of Reylan Arrowood.

“Get out of my way, or this goes through you both.”

“Wait—please.” Gods , she sounded pathetic, but her desperation didn’t care.

“Move…Zai-Zaiana,” Maverick said through labored breaths.

“You’re a damned fool,” she seethed at him, but it lacked its usual malice when she beheld the weakened sight of him.

The two arrows weren’t in his heart—there was still a chance to remove them and find a healer to stop the Niltain poison from killing him. Nerida would do it.

“I don’t want to kill you too,” Reylan said, not yielding.

“We’re fighting as one people,” she said, scrambling to make sense. “You forgave me. I’m not asking you to forgive him for killing your king and Faythe, but just let us flee. We’ll never come back to this continent again.”

Reylan’s eyes narrowed. “We?”

She swallowed hard. “I don’t expect you to forgive me for betraying you like this. You’re owed this kill, this vengeance, for what you lost—I know that. But I am asking you, as friends, if that’s what we found in all the twisted treachery and battles we faced against each other, to let us go.”

“What about Kyleer? You made him care deeply for you, only to abandon him for that ,” he seethed, his arrow finding a precise path to Maverick’s heart this time.

“You know Kyleer deserves better than me. When he remembers everything, he’ll know it too.”

Zaiana didn’t know what she was saying. What she was doing. The thought of never seeing Kyleer again was tearing her apart in places that had never been touched before. But so was the thought of Maverick dying.

Reylan’s jaw worked, contemplating both their lives in the tip of his arrow. She listened to her heartbeats like they were a countdown to the last.

Then, to her immense relief, Reylan lowered his bow, and all the tension that had built in Zaiana’s body deflated. “I don’t do this for either of you. Mercy is not what I know for the crimes he committed. But Faythe does. It’s because of her you live.”

Reylan stood a moment longer, rigid and still furious. Zaiana held her breath, knowing he could change his mind in a second.

Only when a flare of light engulfed him and a white eagle took off, flying around the mountainside and out of sight, did she finally relax.

Zaiana’s anger returned, however, when she turned to Maverick and kneeled to assess his wounds.

“Why did you do that?” he growled.

Her hands stopped just shy of touching him. “I just saved your gods-damned life,” she snapped, incredulous at his tone.

“I didn’t ask you to do that. It means everything was for nothing .”

“What are you talking about?”

Their bickering and resentment was familiar, inspiring both comfort and irritation.

Zaiana reached for one of the arrows to pull it free, but he caught her wrist. Their stares locked, hateful and passionate.

“Leave me,” he said.

“I hate you, Maverick. But I don’t desire a world where I don’t get to hate you. Not unless you leave it on my terms.”

His black eyes flared. Their stare-off intensified until his grip loosened on her, and she reached again for the arrow.

Her next breath choked in her throat when he pushed her roughly. Caught completely off-guard, she lost her balance, falling hard onto her side.

Zaiana pushed herself up…and was met with the most world-shifting sight.

How hadn’t she felt Mordecai approach? How had he gotten close enough to strike her in the back completely unaware? How had she been so slow to feel the Spellthief aimed for her heart…that was now plunged through Maverick’s instead.

Zaiana screamed .

There was power in the sound the expelled from her. Waves and waves of unleashed lightning that blasted into the high lord, and she lost him in the violent waves of jagged purple lines.

Though she’d wanted to look him in the eye as she took his life, Zaiana hoped he’d burned to ash in the power of her lightning he tried to steal.

Maverick’s groan snapped her attention to him. She gasped, lunging across the short space as he fell forward on his knees. Zaiana caught him.

Her heart slammed rapidly against his as it struggled to beat. Zaiana didn’t know what to do, and it was strange what loose ends and silly questions demanded answers now time had turned to sand and was slipping through her fingers.

“What did you want to say?” she breathed.

When Maverick didn’t answer, she pushed him off her chest to look at his face. She shook him when his lids fluttered, desperate to keep him conscious in her complete denial that there was no saving him.

“In the cave that night, do you remember? You wanted to say something, and I stopped you. What did you want to say?”

His trembling hand rose, barely grazing her chin before it fell limp to rest on her neck. “It wasn’t just one night for me,” his voice rasped. He was fading fast.

A sharp sob escaped her lips with a shake of her head as she gripped him tighter. “It wasn’t just one night for me either.”

Maverick tried to smile, but it was pained and short lived. She grappled his dark stare, the fear in them cleaving so deep within her.

“You once said we were the monsters that don’t get a happy ending.” His words were barely a whisper of gravel. Zaiana tuned out everything but him. The howling wind, the distant cries of fighting, the clashing of weapons. Like she’d done so many times before, Zaiana masterfully tuned it all out to catch every one of his last words. “I used to think there was no happy, only endings. But you showed me differently. You showed me…how to love again in this second hollow life.

Zaiana’s emotions choked her.

“I know you feel love. I’ve seen it. My happy ending is getting to tell you that. Might we have met in a different time or realm, we would have met on the same side of the battlefield…but I’m glad in this life we didn’t. I’m glad…you chose the right side.”

It was only death— death —that could explode the vault of denial she’d sealed in her mind. Death that could grip every suppressed memory and feeling and drown her mercilessly.

“You can’t die like this , ” she said through gritted teeth while his body fell into her again.

“I died a long time ago, Zaiana. More than once. The day they changed me. Then the second I stood before my own mate and didn’t recognize her until it was too late and she’d died by my hand, I almost ended it all…until you.

“After the Blood Trials, you killed Finnian. And I knew that spiral that started within you. Love wasn’t what either of us needed—it was hate. Something to deflect our self-loathing onto. I think you’ve known it too. Every time we battled, verbal blows or with steel, it was like attacking the person in the mirror. Unleashing all we felt about ourselves because we were one and the same. At some point, I suppose exhaustion took over, and I started to fall for you when I didn’t want to. I knew you could never be mine. We would have both been stuck here, tragically cursed to never move on from our pasts.”

Tears spilled over her eyes as she stared up at the night sky over his shoulder, holding him, listening to the broken countdown in his chest through all his confessions. Her throat was too tight; her chest swelled with agony. She thought she might die here with him.

He said, his voice slipping away with every word, “Please…let me die as Maverick Blackfair, but can you tell them to remember me as Callen Osirion? And tell Faythe Ashfyre…tell her it was all for you.”

“Stop,” she croaked, holding him tighter when he fell limp, the weight of him crushing her, but she didn’t care. “Stop dying !”

It was too late.

That plea left her lips to be heard only by the wind Maverick’s last breath carried on.

She captured his final heartbeat in her own.

Then he was gone.

Time…it no longer felt like an anchor to reality.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Zaiana held him, wondering how this moment had come. Unable to find a reality that could imagine the days passing by without accounting for his presence. She didn’t regret anything about their relationship. Not the hatred, not the malice, not the taunting, not the way she’d never realized…she’d been falling for him too.

“Zai.”

Her name from Kyleer zapped through her as violent as her lightning. It snapped around her like a shackle to the present, and she looked down at the still form she held.

Maverick was gone.

“No,” she said—a vacant word of denial. Zaiana frowned, shaking her head. “Get up.”

“Zai—”

“NO!”

She held Maverick tighter as if Kyleer would rip him from her, and he was afraid to hurt him if he tried.

It can’t be over. Not yet.

“Your life is mine,” she said vacantly.

No—not anymore.

Mordecai had taken him from her.

“I’m sorry,” Kyleer said gently.

Too gently. As if breaking the news she didn’t want to accept.

Her arms began to loosen, the weight of Maverick’s body becoming too much to bear.

“Me too,” she whispered, looking over his still face.

She waited for his dark eyes to open. For him to say something insufferable.

A hollowness opened in her chest with every passing second. Something in her she didn’t know had taken vital occupancy died slowly with her acceptance of the truth.

Died…with him.

Laying him down, he’d never looked so peaceful. As if he were just asleep.

He was finally free.

And for a second…Zaiana envied him for it.

A hand on her shoulder strapped her to this land. Zaiana shrugged it off to stand.

“You don’t have to pretend you’re not glad for it,” she said, her voice cold like the death that lingered.

“I can’t be glad for anything that causes you pain.”

The smile that curved her lips was slow and villainous. Her grief sharpened her claws of rage and resentment, volatile to anyone in her path.

“You should leave,” she warned.

Zaiana couldn’t even turn to look at Kyleer. Anything kind and warm was a trigger to the loathing inside her that wanted to hurt. And when it became too much to bear within, the claws would come out, and they would make bright things bleed.

“I’m not going to leave you.”

“I don’t want you here.”

“I remember.” Those two words locked her spine. “I remember everything, and I’m still not going anywhere, no matter how many times you push me away.”

She was so torn between falling to her knees in surrender or hurting him; doing whatever it took to make him leave if only to spare him.

“Then you’re even more of a fool to be standing here.”

“I want you,” he confessed, edging closer.

“Stop,” she begged.

“No matter how many times you fight me. No matter how long it takes for you to want me back. I’m not giving up on you.”

How could he not know how desperately she wanted him already? Had she really been that awful to have not shown it enough to erase his doubt? She pulled him close only to push him away hard. He deserved better.

“I can’t love you, Kyleer. This is what happens,” she snarled, casting her hand toward Maverick, but she couldn’t look down.

“I’m not afraid.”

Zaiana mocked him with a cruel laugh. She was ready to unleash more of the ugly within her, stirring to hurt them both.

A flicker of movement caught her eye just over Kyleer’s shoulder. A flash of cobalt blue. Zaiana threw her lightning toward it in the same breath. Kyleer pivoted out of the way, shifting back until he was beside her.

She stared at the threat, utterly shocked and building with a rage so fierce and deadly she could split this mountain apart with it.

Mordecai still lived. Of course he did. But what racked her body with an acute, blinding vengeance was the blue flame in his hand. The Firewielding he’d stolen from Maverick with the dagger before it had killed him.

The cobalt flame mocked her grief. It was an insult to Maverick’s sacrifice to save her, and Zaiana lost herself to raw anguish.

Her storm gathered in a lethal force, and she shot bolt after bolt at Mordecai. Though he’d only just been reunited with magick, his skill with it was so familiar. He moved like she did, in a dance of storms, displaying exactly where she’d inherited her powers.

Her teeth gritted, and her emotions chose the worst time to make her weak. Every flash of blue tore open her grief at the reminder of Maverick.

The distance had shortened between father and daughter, and when the last collision of amethyst and cobalt faded out, they stared off in a heated gaze of hatred.

“It’s not the power I desired, but it is a close contender,” he said, as if taking Maverick’s life for it meant nothing . “You are every part my daughter, Zaiana. Every year that passed, I grew more certain your potential was a reckoning to this world.”

“She’s nothing like you,” Kyleer snarled. Then a powerful blast of darkness hurtled for the high lord, striking him true.

Mordecai slammed against rock. Kyleer advanced again, but Zaiana stopped him with a hand around his arm. She wouldn’t let him fight this battle for her.

As Mordecai peeled himself off the ground and targeted them with a vengeful stare, a colossal boom resonated over them.

Zaiana caught the flares of dark and light collecting in a devastating hurricane across the fringe. Faythe was battling Dakodas in a ferocious war that could destroy much of their land.

“Despite everything, you became more than I could have dreamed of, Zaiana Vesaria. I hope you find the will to use your potential. It would be such a waste for you to let yourself be overshadowed by these pathetic world saviors.”

His words touched her like a goodbye, and she surged toward him, desperate with a shaking urge for violence to not let him get away with his life and Maverick’s stolen power.

He threw a large ball of blue flame toward her, and she had no choice but to defend with a shield of lightning. When the magick dispersed, he was gone.

Zaiana snarled in frustration, scanning the skies to chase the coward, but she couldn’t track him, and the blasts of world-shaking power coming from farther down the fringe tugged at her to answer like a call.

“Do you want to go after him?” Kyleer asked tentatively. He would follow her if she tried.

“He’s nothing more than a rat who escaped with a new trick to play with. Dakodas is our real threat.”

But a large part of Zaiana didn’t want to fight anymore. She wanted to sink to her knees with grief. She couldn’t look at Maverick’s body, instead throwing her head back and closing her eyes to keep her eyes from spilling tears. They wouldn’t help her. Nothing could help her.

She would avenge Maverick. She would make Mordecai suffer greatly for it.

In the darkness of her own mind, she knew what Maverick would say right now.

Get yourself together, Delegate.

Her eyes pricked more, but her resolve sharpened.

The war was still raging. Their enemies were still circling. She had to go on.

As Zaiana found the will to open her eyes, she grounded herself, facing the world that would always have an empty space now.

She sealed the vault on her heart that bled and grieved. It was the only way she could go on.

Zaiana turned her gaze and set her steel course of anguish on the sky, illuminated with light and dark.

“If we end Dakodas, we end the war.”