Page 221 of Keldori By Daybreak

A second shot echoed across the bay.

I’d half-expected to feel the bite of a bullet piercing my stomach, but no pain came.

Then a gentle thud sounded behind me.

It was soft and muted, which was strange as it was the sound of my entire world crumpling to the ice.

Gams lay in a growing pool of blood, curled in over the gunshot wound in her stomach and gaping at the sky.

“What’ve you done?” Mom’s shriek sounded a million miles away, as did her ensuing struggle with Maxwell, as I ran to Gams and fell to the ice next to her.

“Gams,” I cried. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I can help.”

Her eyes found mine, but they were hazy and out of focus. I’d come so far. I’d done so much.

This was not how it would end.

I pressed my hands over the wound, feeling the warm stickiness of blood seep between my fingers.

I could heal her.

“The volcanoes, Wren.” Ciarán crouched next to me to place his hands over mine. “Your magick—”

I shook my head. “Then you do it!”

“I don’t know how.”

“Figure it out!” I looked up at Iseult, Orla, and Fana, desperate for someone to step forward and reveal they possessed the same advanced healing magick I had all along.

None of them did. They all stared down at me with stark, helpless faces.

Blood. There was so much blood. It spread through Gams’s dress, crimson against blue. Bile rose in my throat, and my stomach heaved.

The slap of a fist against skin sounded from the Rift, distracting me enough to keep down my rising vomit. Mom stood over Maxwell with flames in her hands.

He looked around at us as if just noticing we were there, then at the strange, two-mooned sky.

“Eliza?” He gasped. “I was just driving—how—”

“You shot my mother!” she screamed.

“No, I—” He found me on the ice where I crouched over Gams. “You! The blackouts, they are because of you!”

“Now, now, don’t give her too much credit!” A new voice, one that stole the breath from my lungs and filled me with dread, called out. “That little trick was one of my own discovery. Do you like it? A whole new way to control Nightmares.”

We’d all been so focused on Stanley, the armada, and Maxwell’s heroics and subsequent betrayal that none of us had noticed Ferrin Quillguard, hands in his pockets and goggles glinting on his head, as he strode towards us through the storm's lingering haze.

44. Chaos Theory

Horrible understanding crept in my chest. My father’s blackouts had been Ferrin all along. I wondered if it worked similarly to how Ciarán and I had shared my body using our tether. The difference was that I had been Lucid, as I always was when under the employ of a nocturmancer.

Maxwell, meanwhile, had been the perfect puppet.

“Is it true?” Even at his cruelest, there had always been a hint of mirth hiding in Ferrin’s words. Now, however, his words carried only malice and venom as they echoed over the ice. “Is Caitria dead?”

“She got what she deserved.” I stood up.

That wasn’t true. Caitria had deserved to die ten times over for everything she’d done. She was lucky she’d only had one life to lose.