Putting her hand over her heart, she told herself she could feel the beat. But what if she’d died again and just been in a different version of the Fade all day long? Except then why had she seen so many living loved ones?
“Stop it,” she said.
Maybe this was a dream—
Down at the end of the porch, Dev jumped out of an open doorway, looked at her with pure terror on his face, and put both of his palms forward. “Go! Oh, God,go!”
Something came out of his palms, some kind of energy—
All at once, a dark shadow covered him, sure as if he’d been grabbed by a mystical fist, and he disappeared back into the house like he’d been yanked inside.
“Dev? Devlin!”
Riding a sudden panic, Lyric rushed forward, her bare feet slipping over the ice and snow as flurries from out of nowhere blew into her face like they were also trying to warn her to go back, stay away. And then, when she got to the sliding door, it shut in her face. There was some kind of coating on the panes so she couldn’t see inside, but in her fear, she pounded on the—
The flash of light was so bright that the interior lit up to a point that the tinting couldn’t cut the glare. She had a brief vision of Dev surrounded by a ball of energy—
And then something broke out of the house to the right of her, glass shattering as whatever it was catapulted into the air.
Moving over to the ragged, jagged hole, she looked inside.
Dev was standing with both feet planted and his palms forward, his face full of such fury, he was, indeed, the son of evil, begotten of a demon, the grandson of the Omega.
Yet the energy he sent out was not dark.
It was… something else.
And then he focused on her with haunted eyes. “Lyric… you have to go. Nothing matters but you.Nothing.”
Right before the evil grabbed him on an existential level, Dev prayed that Lyric would listen to him and get the hell out of there. Except there had been no time to talk sense into her—hell, he didn’t even know what she was doing at the house at all. But then his father had reached out and snagged him, and he’d been pulled in by an undertow so powerful, there had been no fighting it.
Determined to keep her safe, at any cost to himself, he had ducked and rolled, sprung up and fired back at his sire, sending out a burst of energy that made them change places: He might have been sucked into the house, but Lash had been expelled.
It wouldn’t keep his father busy for long, however. And he needed to get—
Lyric burst into the bedroom, going barefoot right over the broken glass. As he caught the smell of her blood, he rushed across and swept her up off the carpet—then rerouted for an interior door. Opening it with his mind, he was about to start running out of the suite when the lights flickered and went out.
He glanced around his shoulder.
Lash was coalescing in the night sky, like a flock of crows pulling together, and the rumbling underfoot was a harbinger of what was to come.
If you give all you have, all that is within you, your destiny will come true.
Dev stopped and looked Lyric right in the eyes. “I love you. And I’m sorry.”
Before she had a chance to respond, he put her behind him, sheltering her with his body, and closed his lids. All around them, thunder rolled through the sky, and he could tell there was lightning, too, the reflections of the strobing registering and constricting his pupils.
But he had to ignore all that. He had to tap into the wellspring of what he felt for this female.
With grim resolve, he thought back to the way he’d spent his day, spinning a pathetic fantasy where he actually was the just-normal-mortal he’d pretended to be, and the two of them lived happily ever after like everybody else on the planet who was mortal. No curses, no magic—and not because he was shutting it all down as he’d been doing for the last decade.
No curses and no magic because there was none inside of him—
The pulses started with the beat of his heart and emanated out from there, great waves of energy gathering around him from the very origins of the universe, the power that had brought the first spark of life into being, the essence of the Creator, doubling and redoubling within him.
His soul purged everything that he’d been born with and hadn’t wanted into a barrier that protected Lyric, surrounding her, fortifying her… protecting her.
And just in time.
