Nadi’s body went limp in his arms. Her heartbeat, which he could feel against his chest, began to slow. To stutter. To fade.
And somethingstrangehappened.
He felt it in his own chest—a corresponding flutter, a matching weakness. As if his heart was slowing in sympathy with hers. As if the bond between them wasreal, not just superstitious nonsense, not just old words spoken in a glowing cavern.
For one of us to die, we both have to die.
He was dying with her.
And somehow, impossibly, that feltright.
No. He refused to go. He snarled into her throat as he sank his teeth deeper, and forced himself tolive.If she died, he would live for both of them.
This would work.
It had to.
It had to.
Nadi’s eyes fluttered closed. The flow of blood from her neck was slowing. Her breathing stopped. Her heart gave one final, shuddering beat?—
And then she was still.
Raziel lowered her gently to the marble floor before staggering backwards, his own body trembling with a weakness he’d never experienced before. His vision was graying at the edges. His limbs felt like they were made of lead.
He fell to his knees. He thought he might be sick. Or pass out.
Nadi was dead.
“There.” Lilivra’s voice washed over him like ice water, sharp and satisfied. “Was that so difficult? I knew you had it in you, grandson. I knew you could make the hard choices when the moment demanded it.”
She moved up to him, stepping over Nadi’s supine form with the casual indifference of someone avoiding a puddle. She reached down and cradled his cheeks in her hands. Her touch was warm. Warm like Nadi’s had been.
“Now,” she continued, smiling down at him with all the tenderness in the world, “we have much work to do. The transition of power must be handled carefully. There are factions that will resist, families that must be brought to heel, resources that must be?—”
She stopped.
Behind her, there was a sound. Soft. Almost imperceptible.
The sound of someone getting to their feet.
Lilivra turned.
Nadi Iltani stood behind her, very much alive, with her own silver sword gripped in both hands and fire burning in her dark eyes.
And before Lilivra could move, before she could summon her ancient power or issue a command or do any of the thousand things that had kept her alive for millennium?—
The silver blade sang through the air.
Lilivra’s head left her shoulders in a spray of blood that was darker than any vampire’s, older than anything Raziel had ever seen. It hung in the air for a frozen moment—that beautiful, terrible face still wearing an expression of absolute shock—before it began to fall.
Raziel caught it.
He didn’t know where he found the strength. His body was still trembling, still weak from the near-death the blood bond had pulled Nadi through. But he caught his grandmother’s severed head in both hands and turned toward the fireplace that dominated one wall of the ballroom.
Lilivra’s eyes were still moving. Still alive, somehow, in that decapitated head. Her mouth was forming words, but she had had no air to propel them.
“You should have stayed hidden,” he told her. “You should have let the world move on without you.”
