Page 66

“Cousins, you said.” The world was shrinking. Tightening. Going hazy. “Plural.”

No. Please, no.

A tear tracked down Lyriat’s cheek. “Yes.”

Brand stumbled, his knees going weak. No, no, no. Not her. Not… He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe.

“How?”

“Thad, go fetch the witchling. Now. They’re in the ring.”

Black spots filled his periphery. Brand lunged and Mag’s robes were clenched in his fists, their faces inches apart. “No. You keep her away from me.” He shook his brother, fabric tearing. “I don’t need her help, I need some fucking answers! How?”

Every day, when his brother disappeared… Every night, when he came back filthy…

Brand hadn’t been able to look. To see the Horned City and know this reality to be true. If he had, he might have realized. Might have noticed.

They hadn’t been protecting her by keeping her away. Nyri was… She was…

Once again, his voice wasn’t quite his own when he caught Thad backing towards the portal. “Don’t even fucking think about it,” he sneered, low and layered.

He knew where the little pissant was going. Who he was getting. Had to stop him. Had to⁠—

When had he gotten hold of the pup? Why was there blood on his hands? Lips were moving, arms waving, but there was no sound. No words. Only the ringing in his ears and a pinprick of light, getting louder, growing smaller.

It didn’t matter. He couldn’t let that Sorcerit bitch touch him. It hurt when she did. Burned and seared and stole his hard-won control. She was the reason this was happening. He would be fine if they just left her out of it. If they⁠—

He was on his back, the Demon King of Straelon raging above him. No, more like gloating. Showing him just what a piece of shite he was without the Greater. How helpless. Useless. Pathetic.

The floor cracked beneath him as he thrashed in the king’s hold, searching for the other piece within. The part that would make him complete. The one that would change everything.

Stone swept up, eating him alive and taunting his inability to command it himself. The sounds that left him were not ones he recalled making before, rising like poisoned bile to shred his throat and lay bitter on his tongue. Of course, he’d never been such as this before, either. Weak. Fragile.

He fought the surrounding enemies anyway, incensed that such inferiority bested him. Power, delicious and toxic, crashed over him in a tidal wave. Hers. Everywhere and nowhere at once, those rutting arseholes shouting as she appeared.

The world went black and searing at her touch, their war breaking loose inside of him. Ancient as the Unknown, the clashing parts contained within this lesser vessel were wrenched in opposite directions and slammed back together. Over and over. Her magic clawed and tore and scorched. Through blood and nerve ending, through muscle and sinew, all the way to his fragile, mortal bones.

He was going to die like this. A worm in the dirt. A fucking pathetic piece of⁠—

Soothing. Life-giving.

Like a creature lost to the desert, Brand the Greater drank the nectar of his mate’s incandescence and wept his relief. Through the wind and waves, the heat and chill, he gorged himself, doing his best to remain unnoticed as he fought. As he trudged and dodged. As he searched, keeping to the perimeter of his enclosure until…

There.

There it was, his light in the darkness, flashing and flaring so sweetly. He could almost find his way to reaching it. To plowing through the mess of shadow and horror so he could breach the surface for a single breath. But if it found him on the way. If it got hold…

No. He shouldn’t risk it. Not yet. It already came too close to getting what it wanted. Brand hardly remembered why but he had to wait, hiding, no matter how it killed him little by little.

It was all he could do to hold himself back. To watch from the depths as the life in her sea glass eyes faded with every passing day. As the hope dwindled and cold acceptance took its place. As he bloody lost her in order to save her, and everyone else he loved.

He didn’t understand it. Didn’t know why or how it was all happening. The only certainty was that forces were at play beyond his comprehension, and he was ensnared in the maelstrom of their conflict—and succumbing meant the demise of everything.

If only he could speak to her, somehow. Get close enough for long enough that the intruder was rendered useless. His mate was the antidote to its evil. All they needed was a little more time. For her to realize he was still here.

The world went white and infinite, his body weightless, the shadows…gone.

His feet touched back down. With a hesitant step, he ventured out from his hiding place, hope flaring as the full force of her power hit his battered skin. It rained down like rainbow shards beneath Solyrian, and for a single, blessed second he was free.