Seraphina rolls her eyes. “Better had he made them immune to love altogether. Then perhaps all of this could have been avoided. Ezra certainly wouldn’t have begged me so pathetically to spare his brother.” She sighs. “I did warn him there would be repercussions.”
I feel them—the repercussions.
The curse spreads like ice through my veins.
“And now this dear girl.” She tuts. “One more tragedy in a long line of tragedies.”
The cold is unbearable.
Inescapable.
“I’ll kill your sweet Selah while you watch,”she tells Jude, her voice soft and cruel. “But you can go on in misery. That I will allow. Mind you, it will be nothing compared to two hundred sixty-eight years trapped in there, left to rot.”
Seraphina reaches for the final gemstone as I pull off the locket, my hand tightening around it.
Jude meets my gaze.
His love burns like a flame, the only warm thing within me.
Seraphina lifts the pearl.
The air around it ripples, and I know what’s coming. The locket may be tucked inside my fist, but once she wields the power of the pearl, I won’t be able to hide it any longer.
She narrows her eyes. “What is that you have in there?”
I open my hand.
The silver chain dangles between my fingers.
Behind Seraphina, Rafe shifts, as though to get a look for himself.
“Oh, how splendid,” she says with a smile. “Are you one of my own? And is that your protection? Unfortunately for you, your life matters not to me. My bloodline has become quite vast. Ridding the world of you will do nothing to diminish my power, silly girl.”
“It’s not for my protection.”
She frowns, as though she can’t imagine why it would be for anything else.
I pick up Rafe’s knife and cut my finger.
Blood drips onto the silver.
The locket begins to glow.
Then it opens, and the wind returns and alarm ignites in Seraphina’s eyes.
Evil may have corrupted what is good, but it doesn’t get the final say. Seraphina turned love into a weapon of destruction. But all my life, love has given me strength. Maybe not from my mother, but certainly from my father, who has been there always, waiting up on his recliner. And Twig, my co-adventurer, who not only believed in the wild things but explored them with me. And the Calloways, who made sure a warm supper would be waiting for us after every expedition. And Jude, the steadfast skeptic, who in the end, would battle all the things he doubted to keep me safe.
With the strength of that love, I lower my finger to the tiny beating heart—fates entwined by the touching of blood.
But something happens then that I do not expect. That I did not anticipate.
Jude grabs my arm, his eyes blazing, steady and fierce. Before I can object, before I even have time to react, he takes the opened locket with the very same hand he cut with a rock.
“No,” I gasp, like a sucker punch to the gut. The kind that doubles a person over.
But it’s too late.
A bolt of white-hot power bursts from his chest. It lashes through the air and wraps around Seraphina’s wrist like the creature she drew forth, only this one is made of light. A luminous strandof supernatural energy stretched taut and crackling with heat.
