Page 77

To My Own Darkness

I jerk my gaze upward just as Cain jumps off Bene’s back to land basically on top of me, swinging a spear in a circle and clearing the soldiers that disappear as he strikes them.

My knees threaten to go out from under me as I’m pushing to my feet, elation and shock a burn in my blood. Bene? Bene is here?

I shake my head. “How—”

“Later.” Cain only has time for the one word before the shadow soldiers descend on us again, and we’re both fighting.

Automatically, Cain and I fall into a rhythm I’d forgotten. A rhythm that he taught me when he schooled me in hand-to-hand combat as children. I didn’t realize I missed this part of us until right this second.

In the middle of a battle for our lives.

We move like a dance, circling each other. I keep one hand on his back or his shoulder whenever I can to let him know where I am, even as I’m wielding my sand with the other.

I tap his shoulder, and he immediately plunges his sword into a shadow soldier getting too close. He forces my head down and I spin out from under him and skewer four shadows with a single spear of sand.

“Left!” I call.

Out of the corner of my eye I see him take down a shadow with a rolling tackle. In the same instant, I run my knife through another’s neck.

I quickly lose track of how many we take out. They just keep coming.

I catch his eye as I swing under a shadow’s blade, and he shoots me a grin that is entirely out of place for the moment. I want to return it. Instead, I snap, “Focus!” and hurl a dagger over his shoulder. He jerks around in time to see the shadow soldier disappear, and the blade drops to the sand.

He chuckles as he scoops it up, tossing it to me. “You’ve gotten good at that.”

Then he looks over my head and any hint of levity disappears from his face. I trust our history and dive into a roll, coming up behind him, knowing he’s got whatever was coming at me.

“Hold them off me!”

I don’t question it, moving closer to him as the glow of his power reflects off the shadows around us. I’m too busy fighting to see what he’s doing. Not until a wall of water slams into the ground in front of him, then splits, circling us and pushing the soldiers back in a rush.

My arms drop to my sides, and I heave in air as he takes care of the threat. He’s drawing water from the Sea of Terra on the other side of the city from where we are. I can see the water coming over the shadow dome like a rainbow. I’ve seen him do more in Tropikis, but that wiped him, but this is still impressive as hells.

“Get ready!” Cain shouts.

“For what?” One look tells me the shadow soldiers are moving through the water, using the darkness it creates naturally.

Cain shoves it out even wider from us.

The movement of darkness overhead is my only warning before Bene comes down on top of the clearing Cain has made and plucks me up. He misses Cain, though, but he must feel that because he doesn’t take off. Instead, he drops lower, his sandy wings beating against the buildings. But the soldiers are already breaking through the water and crawling up the walls around us. Spears and weapons made of darkness thrust into Bene and he roars but doesn’t fly away. Even without being able to hear him in my head, I know what to do.

I lean through his sandy talons, stretching a hand down to Cain. “Jump!”

He looks at the water one last time, then leaps and his weight about jerks my shoulder from the socket, but I have him. “Go!”

Bene takes off into the skies, and I meet Cain’s gaze. “He’s alive. How is this possible?”

His gaze skates over my features, even as we grip each other so tightly, and I know he’s checking that I’m okay. “No clue, but I was damned glad to see him.”

Me, too.

Mother goddess, me too.

“The others?” I grimace. Cain’s weight is jamming me up tight against Bene’s talons, the sand grinding against my neck and cheek. Maybe we should wait to talk until we’re safely on the ground.

“Pella’s with—”

Cain’s eyes go wide, and almost in the same instant, a sword made of shadow shoves up from his belly and through his open mouth.

That’s when I see the shadow soldier clinging to his legs.

My heart lurches, then shrivels when fear twists Cain’s features. A sound I didn’t ever want to know a human could make rattles deep in his chest, and then—

He lets go.

“Cain!” I flail to grab him, but only grasp air as he drops away through the skies. I know he’s already dead before he hits the edge of a building, then tumbles the rest of the way to the ground. I’m too far from him, but I feel and hear the impact all the same.

The battle falls away. Everything falls away.

The day Eidolon took Reven away from me felt something like this. That moment after terrible loss when everything goes quiet inside and around you. As if the entire world takes a breath, bracing for what comes next.

I desperately want to cling to that last moment of peace before the quiet fades and the pain comes rushing in its place, but this…this is more than I can bear.

One of the Shadows breaks through my hold. “We told you you’d get him killed.”

Those words, the truth of them, forces me to blow past the peace, the world crackling back into stark focus. But on the heels of stark pain, rage hot enough to burn down the world sears through my blood and fills the quiet inside me. Fills the hole left by the man who has been my constant friend and companion almost my entire life. A hole no one can fill.

I pull Eidolon’s power to me so hard and fast, the ice battles with the fire inside me, all of it swirling to a fevered pitch of energy that can’t be contained. The faces of my fallen friends and family, of Omma and Horus and Vida, of Tziah and Cain, of everyone Eidolon has stolen from me in this life, flash through my mind.

We’ve been reacting to him for too long. Letting him get the better of us too often.

I have enough awareness to shadow away from Bene to an empty place in the sky where I hover—something I’ve never done before, and yet it comes so easily with the anger coursing through me.

And into that emptiness, I release it all .

My head throws back hard on a scream that comes from my soul, from my bones. Pain wrapped in rage drives the shadow that blasts out from me, blanketing the entire world in a darkness so pure it’s impenetrable.

Nothing can exist in this darkness.

Nothing except me.

I can sense everything around me. Reven is near, searching for me. I can feel him through our bond, but he’s not who I’m looking for.

I travel through the void, the nothing, until I get to Eidolon. So easy to find him here, standing on the rubble-strewn palace balcony. All I have to do is follow the iciness of his power that binds us until I appear before him.

This time the king isn’t in charge. I fucking am.

His darkness is mine now.

I smile coldly. “My turn.”

Responding to my will, the darkness disappears from everything except the king who I hold without effort. Only his head and hands can move, and they do, wriggling like the worm he is.

Reven is here, too, now. He takes in the scene, what I’m doing, and…smiles, his satisfaction curling through me and around me. “That’s my bondmate.”

“You know who will come for us,” I warn.

And he nods, in lock step with what I’m planning.

Good. We need to be ready for her.

Holding Eidolon, using his power against him, I bring my own power forward, wielding both at the same time. The sand and glass around me are all I need. I gather it, bringing it close—

Tyndra appears in front of me.

Got you .

My little display was a beacon to her—after all, she is where this power over darkness comes from—and now I’m trying to kill her son, who I’m dangling before her like bait.

Bait that caught me a goddess.

She studies me, tipping her head from side to side. “What are you?” she demands. “No Imperium wields two powers without turning into a monster.”

I don’t get a chance to answer because Tyndra wheels away, bracing for a hit a second before Aryd manifests out of nothing and slams into her.

Which is when the Sea of Terra erupts .

The explosion of water even reaches where I am on the far side of the palace, the debris not hitting me as Reven forms a shield of darkness around us, taking the brunt. The sounds of strikes against his shadow are eclipsed by roars that are just as unmistakable as the forms now towering above the roofs and spires.

Seven heads writhing. Tentacles waving. A razor-sharp horn.

The Devourers are here, very much alive.

The Gorecutter rams into the palace, sending parts of the building and dust into the skies and tumbling down on us, maybe even destroying more of it. I can just make out the Revoker and the Hollow and the Revenant as they crawl their way onto land and head for the city streets. I don’t know where the Reverie is, but she’s got to be with them.

They bellow their challenges, blasting sound out over the city, but it abruptly cuts off on whimpers of pain.

Allusian is there, hovering before them.

The goddess of death clasps her hands before her breast and all the Devourers growl again, but the sound is different this time. Pain, or maybe joy, I don’t know which. From them, the goddess draws out a single, glowing turquoise piece of her heart. As she does, a blue mist comes up and over the Devourers, obscuring them from view. As it dissipates, they’re…gone.

I hope she didn’t send them to the hells.

But then the last of the mist evaporates and I see them. Five men and a woman stand side by side, looking dazed. No longer monsters. No longer mindless with bloodlust and rage. My chest fills with a long, slow breath. The Devourers aren’t dead. They’ve been returned to their previous forms.

Tyndra’s whisper tears from her throat. “ Zolta .”

Before she can go to him, Reven throws a mesh of darkness over Tyndra, trapping her to the ground. Then he nods to me. In an instant, I form my glass, pulling it together and shaping it the way I need. It just needs to hold the goddess long enough for Allusian to put an end to this.

I slam the glass cage, the inside lined with jagged, dagger-like pieces, over Tyndra.

Allusian knows an opportunity when she sees one. She also knows who the true enemy among her sisters is.

In a heartbeat, she’s standing in front of Tyndra. Her hand changes shape, her fingers, now tipped with points, lengthening and thinning. Before she can react, Allusian plunges her hand past the glass cage and into Tyndra’s chest.

My breath hitches on a gasp. But then she draws her hand free, and in her palm lies a small piece of what looks like rock—no, like jedite—only instead of blue, it glows ruby red.

A piece of Tyndra’s heart?

“No!” Eidolon screams a sound that is raw fury, unnatural. He punches out of the bindings I have around him with such violence it sends me flying.

Reven catches me.

Before the king can so much as twitch in my direction, I right myself and wrap darkness around him hard and fast, even as he fights me with all he has. I can feel Eidolon’s power over darkness pounding at mine. Goddess, he’s so strong. Dropping my power over sand, I change what I’m doing and siphon the reserves of shadow I’ve tapped into, suck it right out of him. Eidolon starts gasping.

Pure satisfaction rips through me. Good. I’ll drain the asshole dry if I have to.

“I’ll hold him. You kill him,” I say to Reven in a voice that isn’t mine but is something else entirely.

He deserves to kill Eidolon more than any of us. Even me.

What Reven does next isn’t violent. It’s almost…gentle.

He pulls the Shadows, the fragmented shards of Eidolon’s soul, out of me like lifting a misty, ghost-like version of himself from my body. Drawing it out of my skin. And I let him this time. I give them to him.

The Shadows spread out before us in a line, each a carbon copy of Reven but with so many different faces. Some harsh and hard, some daring, some laughing, all compelling, reminding me of the first night in Wildernyss when I saw them for the first time.

Allusian drops down from the skies. “I can take it from here, young Imperium.”

“Don’t you dare ,” Tyndra snarls.

Allusian looks over the shadowy souls of Eidolon, then smiles at her sister. Not with malice but a sad sort of warmth. “You made him into what he became, and you know well that no mortal escapes death and judgment forever.”

Allusian snaps her fingers and instantly more versions of Eidolon appear beside the others.

“That’s all of you,” she tells Reven. “Every piece—past, present, and future. They are yours to decide what to do with.”

She snaps her fingers again, and instead of darkness, the Shadows of the king are colors. Two colors. Purple and yellow, like the lights of Enfernae and Hylorae.

“The purple have much to answer for,” she says.

Reven nods and then I can feel him channeling his power. Our power.

I feel it as those now yellow pieces of Eidolon are pulled together into one soul, the same way I heat sand from tiny individual pieces into a cohesive single entity of glass. And I don’t have to ask why. I already know.

When he is done, he forges all the purple shards to the current version of Eidolon. The king doesn’t make a sound. Or maybe he can’t, the way I’m holding him. But his eyes bulge.

Then Reven moves closer to Eidolon. Close enough to touch.

“It is done,” he says. “Your original vow to free your mother, to undo what Esha did, is fulfilled. I want you to know that the good of you, of us, will escape the punishment that the rest of your soul has earned. I pray that part will be reunited with Esha in some other afterlife. Only Allusian knows what will happen to you. But as for me and Meren…we will never think of you again.”

Then he places his hand over the king’s heart and Eidolon goes rigid. His entire body shakes like Hakan struck him with lightning, and starting from his fingertips, he dissolves into shadow. The darkness eats away at his flesh, moving in toward the center of him until he is no more.

“Goddess.” Reven gives Allusian a pointed look.

Then, with a snap of her fingers, the good and the evil of King Eidolon Calix I is gone.