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Chapter One Hundred Twenty-One

CARMINE

How have I let this happen?

I was talking myself into trading myself and the ring. Once my power and immortality returned, I could overcome loyalty to who wears the ring and just kill him. Then I could go back to Luna. Return Laro to the fold, where he belongs.

If I lived, it would take time.

Manod would find a way to enslave me.

Maybe it would work.

But I hesitate. The ring has subtle power. This monster shouldn’t have it.

In the second it takes me to decide, Manod picks up Luna like a doll and with a cry of, “Enough!” and throws her against the wall behind me. He is merciless, sparing not one ounce of strength. She is splayed against it, then drops, rolling onto her back.

All plans abandoned, I scramble to her.

Her eyes are open and still. Her lips are parted and breathless. Her skin is white and clammy. There’s no overwhelming sweetness in the air, but I check for blood anyway and find none.

She’s sleeping. Knocked out.

“My love,” I whisper, stroking her face. “Luna.”

Her arms are limp and her cheeks seem to sag off her jaw like the old woman I wanted to know so badly. A human lifetime of laughter. Of the unexpected.

“Come on. You’re not supposed to surprise me this way.” I stroke her hair away from her face. “Please. It’s not funny.”

I put my ear to her chest. There’s no sound.

Manod’s back to a gargoyle’s crouch.

“What did you do?” I touch her chest, thinking my hands will feel what my ears cannot hear.

“What you should have done.”

I have learned nothing. It is disappointing. My life should be empty of any human desire. It’s the only way Manod has survived for so long. He filled that emptiness with the hunger for power. I should have done the same.

Luna shouldn’t be in my heart.

“No.”

This can’t be happening. I won’t believe it. She was supposed to die before me, but not for me—and not now. Not yet. I have power that cannot be taken. I examine her head, front and back. There has to be a wound somewhere. I have to heal it, but how can I heal what I can’t see? Where is it? Shit.

“Open your eyes,” I say to her, kissing them. I lick the lids, coating them with venom. “Breathe, please.” I kiss her nostrils.

More venom. So much of it.

Her lips. I lick them, sobbing. My venom heals. Her neck, her ears, her forehead. I will make a cocoon of venom.

“Please.”

If air passes through these lips, she’ll live.

If I kiss her deeply and my venom reaches deep in her throat, she’ll breathe, and live, and make me laugh again.

Nothing works. She does not breathe. Her heart doesn’t make a sound.

“Tell me where to kiss you.”

Her face is coated in spit and I don’t know what else to do.

Maybe what spit cannot fix, words will.

“I love you, Luna. I loved you all this time. I was so afraid, after you said you changed me, but nothing changed. Nothing. You didn’t force me to love you. You didn’t have to.”

I pull her up by the shoulders and her head falls back too far—as if it’s only connected by skin.

Her neck is broken.

He broke her neck.

Spit isn’t going to fix that.

She’s gone.

Broken neck. Shattered.

I put my ear to her chest one last time.

Broken everything.

I have lost my everything.

Manod crouches, held up by his knuckles, only standing above me when I look at him.

It’s his erection that does it. The massive shadow of it on his belly. The way he wields it like a weapon even after he’s won.

I will die. I spent all this love and energy trying to live and now I will die. I was greedy for more time. More and more, to eternity. Then I made those years not worth living.

The walnut of sorrow at the bottom of my throat gets hot, growing into a molten wheel of anger that cannot be contained. I stand, throwing my hands out to him.

I cover him in flames. The pain of the stake is excruciating and the fire won’t consume anything but the last of the power I have left. All it does is throw this crypt into light and shadow.

When my anger is spent, I fall to my knees. I am depleted. I have nothing left. I am weaker than a sick human.

Manod goes back to the wall and takes the knife from my son’s face. The body drops to the floor. Another heap that I loved and killed with greed. I try to fold into myself but can’t.

With my forehead on the stone floor, I hear Manod cross the chamber and stand over me. “I will give you this knife for the Ring of Corvids.”

I look up. He is infinitely tall, falling back into space behind the rod of his cock.

“I don’t want it.”

“You don’t have long to save her.” He taps the top of my head with the blade. “Come on, beautiful one. Trade.”

My Luna is splayed on the floor, her tangerine dress hiked up, one sleeve hitched to expose the tape bracelet, spit-covered eyes still open.

I can’t look at him. I can’t speak the words to agree. All I can do is squeeze my thumb and pointer finger around the black raven ring and pull it off.

That tells me everything I need to know. I am finished. I am no longer worthy. I can think about why later.

I let it go. It hits the stone with a click and rolls until it hits his toe.

A few steps from me, the knife clatters to the floor.

He really kept his side of the deal.

I look up wide-eyed. He’s got the ring in his palm as if weighing it.

I get up before he changes his mind, grabbing the hilt, and turn to rush back to Luna. But my right leg collapses and my hand isn’t holding it tightly enough. My body isn’t taking orders from my brain. “Fuck.”

Manod tries to put the ring on his finger, but it’s too small. It won’t fit. The ring chooses the worthy wearer, and when he realizes it won’t accept him, he’ll take back the knife, or worse.

On my hands and knees, I push the knife toward Luna and drag myself there on my elbows, one after the other, launching on my left foot just far enough to reach her. I take the knife in my right hand. The one that works.

I drop it.

I can’t get a good grip. My entire body has gone rogue.

“Shit!” Laying both hands around the hilt, I pick it up, but can’t hold it. It drops uselessly on her stomach. “I’m so sorry, Luna. Hang on.”

Wedging it between my shaking elbows, the blade faces me and I don’t know how to turn it around without dropping it again.

“Dad.”

What?

That has to be Laro, but it can’t be my son. This is a man’s voice. It’s some trick Manod is playing on me.

A man of about twenty-five years kneels next to Luna and holds out his hand.

“Let me help you.” Even in the dim light, his eyes are crystal blue, like his mother’s.

A frustrated scream rises from behind him.

Laro looks over his shoulder which, among all the tears in his clothes, has a seam burst from the inside—as if he suddenly got too big for his tunic. My son so quickly became a man after five hundred years.

He’s blocking my view of Manod, but I hear the frustration continue. We don’t have long until he realizes he’s not ever getting that ring on. Then we’re all dead.

“You should run,” I say helplessly as my elbows lose their grip on the knife.

“Here.” He takes it and puts it in my right hand, then picks up my left as if it’s made of wool stuffing and wraps it over the other. “Don’t move.”

He holds my hands together around the knife and comes behind me.

I can see Manod now. He’s stopped crying out. He’s standing, twisted from the torso as if he’s looking behind him.

Laro tightens his grip around my hands, pressing them together around the hilt with the blade pointing toward Luna. She’s turning stiff. The blood is pooling. Shit. I want to shake her, but I have a knife at her chest.

“What now?” I ask.

“What’s the injury?”

“He broke her neck!” My shout is full of blame without the power to exact justice.

As if in response, Manod screams in victory. I don’t look at him, because Laro’s directing the knife upward from her chest to the throat that has nourished me, and that I have loved.

This is wrong.

“Do it,” Laro says.

Won’t this kill her? Isn’t this the exact thing that ends a human life?

“I can’t.”

I could never stab her. Not unless my brain had stopped talking to my body and my son was directing the blade. Not unless I was this desperate.

“Just one-two-three-go!” Laro pushes forward.

Together, we count. On three, we stab Luna in the neck.