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“Look,” someone whispered. Malakai.
Slowly, Loren opened her eyes.
Light and heat spread through Darien. It began in the wound in his side, and it flowed from her palms and into his body, until his entire form was limned in white and rainbow light.
He looked ethereal. Even with blood all over him, even while he was hanging on by an inch of his life, he looked like he’d come from the Fifth Dimension, every part of him glowing.
A startled laugh slipped out of several mouths.
“It’s a miracle,” Tanner whispered.
“No,” Ivy said quietly, voice thick with tears of happiness. “It’s love.”
Love works its own magic.
Loren closed her eyes again and kept going. And as her aura flowed into him, healing every part of him that was hurting, she absorbed his pain. Took it away. She could feel every wound he’d suffered tonight as if she’d lived it herself, the pain unbearable. But she took it, enduring every bit of it. Every bruise. Every scrape. Every blast of raw magic. Every drop of otherworldly poison.
Every last thing. She took it all away, willing it to leave his body and enter hers instead.
Darien had given too much. He always gave too much. He could believe all he wanted that he was a sinner incapable of redemption, his soul too dark to be saved, but Loren knew better. She could spot an angel when she saw one, and this angel’s sin was that he loved too much.
As she knelt there, eyes still shut, she listened to Darien’s heartbeat, fluttering under her palm.
The seconds wore on. And then those seconds turned into minutes.
That heartbeat strengthened. The flutter of his pulse shifted into a strong, determined beat, and soon the back of his hand was brushing across her jaw.
That hand was no longer cold.
Loren opened her eyes. When she looked at Darien’s face, his skin was still filthy with blood, dirt, and Venom, but the wounds—they were all gone. Every single one, not even a new scar left behind.
His eyes were exceptionally soft as he studied her face, knuckles brushing away the tears that slipped down her cheeks.
But she saw the intent in his gaze—the kind that told her he was seconds from acting, those eyes that were no longer bloodshot snapping to the mouth of Spirit Terra at her back.
He would fight her on her next decision—she knew he would.
“I love you,” she whispered on a ragged breath.
And then she was up and running, fingers ripping through his grasp before he could stop her.
"Loren!” he shouted. She heard him attempt to stand. “Stop her, please!”
But she was already at the pillar, already slapping her hand on the space just below the Moonstone on the left side. Power crackled in her teeth. As she poured her magic into the stone, giving everything she had left to give, she was vaguely aware of the others restraining Darien. Darien, who was shouting and thrashing, calling her name.
She kept going, knowing that if he stopped her, she wouldn’t have the strength left to start again. She had to fix this. She had to. The others had nearly died again, and she would be damned if she let this night repeat itself by not closing this gate.
Her magic was draining quickly, she could feel it, the final drops dripping out of her as she poured her aura into the pillar.
There were more creatures coming. That pitch-black mist in the distance in Spirit Terra was spreading, poised to engulf everything in its path, and if it got in here…
Out and out and out, she poured her magic. As it left her body, she began to feel stretched thin and hollowed out, her hand trembling on the pillar. Her blood felt icy, and her teeth chattered.
Once her magic had filled the left pillar, it spread into the right, until both were shining like smaller models of the Control Tower, the adamant shifting into reflective glass that illustrated the destruction behind her, the terrified faces of her family watching.
The moons engraved in the pillars switched into suns with a snap that carried through the tunnel, as if a light switch had been hit.
Suns that looked just like the solar amulet she’d worn since she was a baby, the necklace her father had given her.
