Page 81 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion (Tales of a Monstrous Heart, #2)

You’re named after a warrior who never summoned a flame. Never held that blade and yet she was more powerful than any elder. Those words pierced my panic. Stilling my heart for a moment. Words my father had given me all those years ago.

I wasn’t just a Kysillian. A danger to this world or its chaos.

I was his daughter and I needed no flame to prove that.

Show me, Tauria, his ghost whispered into my ear and I could see that warm smile that never faltered in my memory.

Mine . Emrys was mine, and I wouldn’t lose. Not like this.

The fury in my blood made my breath steady, made the pain abate for the barest moment.

A horrid destructive boom came from above, shaking the chamber. Dust raining down as cracks spread across the stone. Chunks of brick fell from the supports above, the hunters crying out. Then water followed.

Something was wrong. Something above. Making Montagor pause for the barest moment. A mercy from the ancestors or from the fate I had no idea.

‘ Kinsfyre !’ I roared, the command pulling on my aching muscles and bruised skin.

Montagor turned, those dark and deadly eyes meeting my own. Not understanding the true danger before him.

Kinsfyre was the name of my father’s blade. Kysillia’s heart.

Not my father’s blade. Not anymore. It was mine, to protect what was mine.

Emrys lurched. The blade leaving where it had wrapped around his finger.

Soaring towards me. I threw out my hand to claim it.

Fingers curving around the hilt as it materialised.

All the fire the sacred blade had stored roared free.

Enveloping me and the hunters closest to me.

They screamed, recoiling, but that fire didn’t let them go.

Not as it roared across the chamber. Catching on the shelves and the scrolls there. Heating the glass until they exploded – summoning smoke streaking through the darkness – awakening the other slumbering magic here forcing all the hunters and fiends Montagor had brought back. Consuming them.

Fire consumed me, melted the dart in my thigh until it ran down my flesh like molten blood. Rendering the hunters closest to me to ash that caught on my lips.

Then the fire guttered out, steam and the stench of burning flesh remained. I felt the deadly sting of Montagor’s brewing summoning, whatever defence he’d thrown up to save himself.

I lurched forwards through the smoke. Letting the blade lengthen despite the pain in every limb.

Montagor recoiled, teeth bared. He raised his summoning arm, lips parted to command the shard from Emrys’s chest.

To kill him.

I threw myself forwards just as fast as my father taught me. Despite the agony – I’d faced worse than this monster. I turned and brought the blade down. Severing through Montagor’s summoning arm.

He screamed, stumbling back, blood gushing from the stump to splatter the stone. I screamed too, baring my teeth as I pulled the blade up to slice across his face, making him tumble back against the stone floor.

The fiends screeched as they battled the remains of my flames – the crash and boom of feral magic feasting.

Stored down here too long. The surviving hunters barked their commands.

The room shook again with another horrific boom from somewhere above, water spilling down the walls as stone crashed around us.

Dust filling the air, the flames my blade had left making smoke curl and catch in my throat.

BOOM!

I fell to my knees with the might of it. Trying to shield my head from the falling chips of stone. Only for blue aether to fill the room. A crackling storm of witch power. Making those fiends and hunters scramble in the darkness.

I sobbed with relief. Gideon.

‘What the bloody fuck have you done now?’ came the enraged voice of Gideon from between the bookcases. In disarray, as if he’d run the whole way here. Sodden and covered in dust. His blonde hair dark and stuck to his face.

I ignored him, ignored the roaring of Montagor and his hunters as the aether made the magic in the room erupt. Booms made my ears ring as the stone beneath quaked. Too unstable.

‘Emrys,’ I panted, crawling. Slipping in my own blood until I was beside him. Pressing my hand against the wound desperately.

‘Emrys,’ Gideon snapped, but I heard his voice break. Saw the panic as he dropped to the other side of Emrys, saw the tremble of his hands as he tried to help me stop the blood.

How he froze when he realised what it was. The strange sheen to the forsaken metal buried there.

‘Tauria,’ Emrys panted so weakly. His fingers curling into my hair to hold me closer. An unfocused nature to the darkness in his eyes.

Too weak. His breaths too laboured. Too much blood spilled on the stone between us.

He wouldn’t leave me. Not like this. I looked around desperately, expecting Thean and Alma as the room shook again. Distant screams from above, as if the house was collapsing. That couldn’t be us.

It had to be something else.

It was coming down on top of us.

We had to move. We had to leave.

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.

Alma. Where was Alma?

‘Kat. You need to cauterize the wound.’ Gideon tore off his jacket, bundling it and forcing it against the wound around the blade shard still buried there.

‘I-I can’t.’ The words broke between my lips. ‘He took my flame.’

The agony in my thigh. How cold my blade was in my grasp. All the flame spent.

When those blue eyes met mine, there was nothing but desolate hopeless pain. Too much of Emrys’s blood coating my hands.

Breath too heavy in my lungs.

No.

In an instant my mother turned to ash in my memories. The echo of my screaming filling my ears. The cold, bloody and bruised flesh of Alma beneath my small hands. Slipping from me.

No. Not Emrys. He promised.

He promised.

Did you think you could keep him, Tauria? That voice mocked once again.

The ground trembled, runes appearing to slip between the stone. Illuminating a circle around us.

‘Emrys! Stop!’ Gideon demanded.

Only the dark summoning of those runes didn’t feel familiar. The wishing stone around my throat was so still. Too quiet. The same runes Emrys had summoned in that village when he’d lost control.

‘It isn’t him,’ I whispered. No, the runes were too dark. Too unbearably cold. Too strong for how weak and limp Emrys was in my arms.

This was something else.

Serus? A little voice called into my mind. Curious and distant. Come.

The light grew blinding, a screeching buzz filling my ears as the rush of water started and the room’s supports faltered. I barely had a moment to understand what was happening before the stone vanished from beneath us as we were torn through a portal.