Page 3 of The Fallen and the Kiss of Dusk (Crowns of Nyaxia #4)

At those words— you’re wrong —Vincent straightened sharply, the anger of a challenged Obitraen king flashing in his eyes. But before he could speak, a grinding roar wailed through the air.

I whirled around. “What was that?”

“We need to leave,” Vincent said, grabbing my wrist as if he intended to haul me around like a sack of flour.

But I remained rooted in place, frozen by dread.

In the distance, through desolate puffs of mist, fresh cracks of bright red slithered across the landscape.

A distant, crooked tower, silhouetted against the white, collapsed. Souls scattered like frantic ants.

A second tower started to fall, painfully slowly.

I stared, horrified.

“Are those people ?” I choked out.

“They were,” Vincent said coldly. “Soon, they will be nothing.”

I couldn’t look away as the structure fell in slow motion, crushing countless dead beneath it.

The hunched-over monsters had turned their attention to the wreckage, closing in to scoop up the fleeing souls.

One swept up an entire handful of them and raised them slowly to a wide, gaping mouth of white nothingness.

Another boom. The ground quaked.

“We—we have to help them,” I managed, because it was the only thing I could think to say—but even as the words left my lips, I knew how ridiculous they were. The only thing I could do was stand there and watch as dozens more dead fell.

Vincent gave my wrist an unceremonious tug.

“Move,” he barked. “We need to leave before?—”

I pulled my hand away and whirled to him.

“You don’t get to drag me around without telling me what’s going on.”

Anger flashed in Vincent’s silver eyes, reminding me that in life, he had been one of the most ruthless vampire kings. Once, that disrespect would’ve been enough to send me to my death.

But I was already dead. So what the hell could he do to me now?

“You have some nerve speaking that way to me, ” he hissed, “when you are the reason this happened.”

Me?

My mouth opened, but no words came out.

“Do you think I’m eager to be doing this with you ,” Vincent went on, “who helped push my daughter to the man who killed me? In life, I would have?—”

“What do you mean, I’m the reason this happened ?”

Vincent was silent. His silver eyes took me in, feet to head, in an assessment that I clearly was failing.

“What do you remember of your death?”

My death.

Pain skewered me—burning straight through the center of my chest. My hand flew to it.

A sword through my heart. A god tossing me aside. And fire?—

I died. I died. I died.

The truth twisted inside me. And with it came a sudden grief so intense it made me want to curl up on the ground.

I felt something wet on my cheeks, falling like rain.

I blinked and saw my final moments. Asar’s face over mine. And gods, the pain in those eyes.

Not rain.

How could my chest hurt so much if my heart was no longer beating? I pressed my hand to it like a tourniquet, a futile attempt to quell the bleeding.

But I could feel a little solid thread somewhere in that ache. A little sharp stab of pain that reminded me of the spell Asar had drawn between us, once—the spell that had allowed me to pull him from the ritual circle.

I clung to that thread of familiarity. Pain that felt so alive .

“I killed Atroxus,” I managed. “And the sky—and Asar—and the gods—and?—”

Asar’s tears. Shiket’s blade. Fire everywhere.

And darkness. So much darkness.

“You killed Atroxus,” Vincent confirmed, though his tone seemed almost insulted he had to admit I’d done such a thing. “The sun fell as he did. Ushering in an endless night.”

He sounded practically lustful. Like he was lost imagining all the things he might’ve done with such a gift in life—all while he gave me a critical once-over, as if he couldn’t imagine how I, of all people, had been responsible for it.

That made two of us. The words still echoed in the back of my head, reverberating with my disbelief.

“You attempted to resurrect Alarus,” he went on. “But instead?—”

“I saved Asar.”

I remembered pulling him from the ritual circle, clinging to that tether to him that I refused to sever.

And yet, with the memory of my choice, I saw another face, too. Saescha’s, tilted to Atroxus’s light, bright with adoration.

“You saved him in a sense,” Vincent said.

“You refused to sacrifice his soul to the resurrection spell. But the spell was already in motion. You ended it before you completed it, but the incomplete resurrection, along with the destruction of the relics Alarus used to construct the underworld, put stress upon the underworld that it couldn’t bear. Thus.”

He gestured to the wreckage around us. I stared out into the mists, dread rising in my chest. Far in the distance, another mountain collapsed in slow motion. Silently, mundanely, hundreds of souls fell beneath it.

I shook my head.

“No. That can’t be—I can’t have?—”

“It is. You did. And this is only the beginning. It will collapse if your lover doesn’t take action.”

I whirled back to Vincent. Somehow, for some reason, I expected this was some kind of joke. But he was stone serious.

“You mean Asar,” I said.

I remembered the gods dragging him away. Dragging him away as he screamed for me.

“Where is he? Is he—” I almost couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Is he alive?”

“From what I hear, he’s better than alive. He holds the power of a god.” Again, that hint of envy. “And only with that can he repair the underworld before it disintegrates altogether.”

“He will.” The words slipped out easily. The memories hit me with such piercing intensity—Asar leaning over countless broken doors, repairing countless shattered glyphs, leading countless lost souls back home. With them came a flood of affection.

“If the underworld needs to be repaired,” I said, “Asar will do it. There’s nothing he loves more.”

And yet, as I said the words, I thought of his tears on my face, and I wondered if perhaps they were untrue.

“He is imprisoned by the White Pantheon,” Vincent said. “He isn’t doing anything as long as that remains true. And, I’m told, if he is to do this, he needs you.”

“Me?”

“You conducted the spell that gave him his power. I’m told he will need your help to gain enough of it to do what must be done.”

Strange that the dead still got headaches. I rubbed my temple. “But?.?.?.?why?”

He looked irritated by this question. “I’m a messenger. Don’t expect me to understand the intricacies of your Shadowborn tricks.”

A wrinkle formed between my brows at a new thought and a new cascade of questions.

“A messenger,” I repeated. “So a god sent you.”

Vincent said nothing in a way that I knew was a confirmation.

“Nyaxia?” I said.

It would have to be Nyaxia, wouldn’t it? Vincent had worshipped her for a lifetime of centuries. Her favor, after he won the Kejari, had put the crown on his head.

After a moment, he said, “No. Not Nyaxia.”

“Then who?”

“It isn’t your concern.”

“It is my concern. And why you ? I don’t even know you.”

He looked offended. But even at the best of times, I wasn’t known for my tact, and these were not the best of times.

Vincent was a vampire king. And what would any vampire king do to regain their throne after it was snatched away from them so brutally? What would any vampire king do for revenge ?

I hated being so cynical. And yet.

He let out an annoyed breath. “Look.”

He pointed to the sky, where the upside-down mirror of the underworld hung over us.

I wasn’t sure at first what he was gesturing to, until I noticed that he was tracing a shape with his fingertip.

When I looked carefully, I saw that the wisps of light and darkness were not, in fact, random.

They collected around the cracks and then extended in a shape that reminded me of veins splitting through a body.

I’d seen such patterns in the Descent, too.

“Every structure has weak points,” he said. “All planes are connected to each other—the land of the gods, the land of the mortals, and the land of the dead. What happens here will soon affect the mortal world, if it hasn’t already.”

A chill ran up my spine. I didn’t need Vincent to tell me what that might look like. I’d spent months witnessing the terrible consequences of the Descent’s slow crumbling. The thought of those nightmares spilling into the land of the living was horrifying.

“The boundaries between planes are thinner in some places than others,” he went on. “And some vampire kingdoms were built around these pressure points, precisely because of the power they offered.”

Now I understood. “Like the House of Night.”

“I spent centuries building my kingdom. Dead or no, I refuse to let it fall.”

Of course, it was all about a kingdom. But the sheer enormity of this responsibility settled on my shoulders. Dizzy, I leaned back on my heels, head in my hands.

“Your lover will be looking for you,” Vincent said. “I have been told to bring you toward the veil.”

Asar.

I will find you.

An oath that I felt down to my soul, even now. But my heart ached. With grief, and with the ghost of our connection.

I had lied to him. I had planned to betray him. And even in saving him—in saving all of vampire life—I had still managed to lead the world to the doorstep of so much death.

Saescha’s face flitted through my mind.

But then I thought of the way Asar had looked at my skin, marred by my greatest shames, as if it was still worthy of worship.

I was no stranger to divine missions. I had committed my life to my faith. Had given it every part of my body and soul, in every literal and figurative way. But in the end, the god I had given my soul to had been ready to slaughter my entire race without a second thought.

A small part of me was devastated by this, even now, after everything.

But a bigger part of me was angry.

I turned to the underworld. A sea of suffering.

I heard a million invisible souls crying out, Asar had told me once. They needed someone.

And now, they needed me.

He needed me.

I looked at Vincent.

Going on a mission to save the world with my friend’s dead father was not at all what I expected to be doing in death.

I said, “Tell me what we need to do.”