Raziel smiled—not his predatory grin, not his cruel smirk, but something soft and genuine and real. The smile of a man who had everything he’d ever wanted, standing in the ruins of everything he’d been told to become. It was the smile of thefrightened child he’d once been, before Lilivra’s whispers had turned him into a monster.
Perhaps that child wasn’t entirely dead, after all.
Perhaps neither of them was beyond saving.
“Come on,” he said, steering them toward the door. “We have a world to burn down.”
Leaning on each other like the broken, bloodied creatures they were, the Serpent and his assassin walked out into the night.
TWENTY-FOUR
The walls came down on a day when both the Mother and Father moon hung full in the sky.
Nadi stood at the edge of what had once been the eastern ramparts—the great stone barriers that had kept the Wild at bay for centuries. Now they were nothing but rubble, their ancient stones scattered across the earth like the bones of a fallen giant. Crews of workers—fae, human, and vampire alike—swarmed over the debris, clearing paths for the new roads that would connect the metropolis to the outer territories beyond.
It had taken months of negotiation, of careful diplomacy, of moments when she’d been certain everything would collapse into violence. There had been factions on all sides who’d wanted war—vampires who saw integration as weakness, fae who could never forgive centuries of exile, humans who feared what change might bring.
Some of those factions had tried to stop them.
Some had died trying.
Now she stood on the ruins of the old world, watching a new one take its first stumbling steps.
It helped that more than once, Raziel had simply threatened to blow up the metropolis and start from scratch. And everybody knew he meant it.
“You’re thinking too loudly again.”
Raziel’s voice came from behind her, warm with amusement. She felt his arms wrap around her waist, his chin coming to rest on the top of her head as he surveyed the scene below. Even now, months into their so-called reign, she still felt that flutter in her chest whenever he touched her. That dangerous, wonderful warmth that had no business existing between two creatures like them.
“I’m thinking about how many times we almost died to get here,” she said. “How many times we almost killed each other.”
“Only almost.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “We’ve always had remarkably poor follow-through when it comes to each other.”
“Lucky for you.”
“Lucky for us both.”
Below them, the streets of the metropolis—thenewmetropolis, as people had started calling it—teemed with life. It was a strange sight, one that still made Nadi’s heart clench with something between wonder and disbelief every time she saw it.
Fae walked openly through the market squares, their varied forms no longer hidden behind glamors or confined to the shadows. A woman with bark-textured skin haggled with a human vendor over the price of fabric. A group of children—some with pointed ears, some without, some with fangs glinting when they smiled—chased each other through an alley, their laughter echoing off the stone walls. An old fae sat on a bench, feeding crumbs to pigeons while a vampire sat beside him, the two of them deep in conversation about something that made them both shake their heads in apparent disgust.
It wasn’t perfect. It would never be perfect. There were still tensions—old hatreds that ran too deep to be erased by a few months of new laws and forced cooperation. Just last week, a group of vampire “traditionalists” had tried to assassinate her.
Luckily, she knew the guy they had paid to do the deed.
Professional courtesy and all.
The week before that, a fae separatist cell had bombed a human government building.
But, overall, the majority of people were trying. All of them, in their own imperfect ways, weretrying.
“The delegation from the Grove arrived this morning,” Raziel said, his thumb tracing lazy circles on her hip. “Kalo’s leading it.”
“Of course he is.” She couldn’t help but smile. Kalo Lohti had become one of their most passionate allies. He was still insufferable, still too clever for his own good, still looked at her like he was perpetually reconsidering whether to stab her. But he was effective. And in this new world they were building, effectiveness mattered more than old grudges.
“He wants to discuss the vine integration project.” Raziel’s voice took on that particular tone he got when he was talking about something that genuinely fascinated him. “The engineers think they’ve finally figured out how to merge the Wild’s bioluminescence with the city’s electrical grid. If it works?—”
“The whole city could be lit by living light.” Nadi finished the thought for him. It was one of many such projects—initiatives that seemed impossible until you realized that the impossible was just another word forunprecedented. “No more darkness hiding the boundary between the Wild and the city. No more separation.”
