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ChapterForty-Seven
ALEK
Fear and dread mingled in my belly, my berserker waking up in response to my tangled emotions. I couldn’t be sure, I was still too new to its presence inside me, but I think the only thing that kept him from taking over entirely was that there was no enemy for him to fight. Only this soul-deep knowing that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
“I’m sorry, the what now?” Kingston asked, pushing himself off the ground and helping me refocus.
Natalie shook as she pointed to Sunday. “That child... it’s the end of everything.”
My gaze found Sunday, still sitting in a daze on the floor. She rubbed absently at the swell of her belly, eyes shining with tears. “You’re wrong.”
Moira clung to Ash, her hair now bone-white ringlets. Before the ceremony started, it had been jet black and stick straight. “She’s not lying, Sunday. We all saw it.”
“What did you see?” I asked.
Her panicked gaze shot to mine. “The end of the world. If that baby is born, not only will Sunday die, we all will.”
I stood, legs shaking as my stomach churned and nausea took hold. “That can’t be the only outcome. Visions aren’t absolute.”
“This wasn’t a vision,” Natalie interjected. “This was the truth. There is nothing good that will come from this baby being born, and there is no way we can stop it. You five put something in motion that has been on the horizon for millennia.”
“Usfive?” Noah asked.
Natalie nodded, reaching a hand out to Sunday. “Yes. All of you were instrumental in this.”
“That’s impossible. I may not know a lot about magic, but I know how a fucking baby is made,” Kingston snarled. “One egg, one sperm. That means one father, not four.”
Natalie raised a brow. “And yet here we are. This child is not a mortal, not even a child, really. It is a cataclysm. A growing mass of chaotic energy brought into being by all of you. When it is unleashed, it will destroy the world as we know it.”
“It is ashe,andsheismine.” Sunday snatched her hand back from Natalie’s grasp after she helped her to her feet.
The flash of black in Sunday’s eyes sent a warning through me. The berserker was close to the surface for both of us. If I didn’t get her away from here soon,shemight be the one to destroy their world. And I might be right alongside her.
“Don’t you have anything to say about this, Padre?” Kingston asked. “This fire and brimstone shit is basically your wheelhouse, yeah?”
Caleb’s face was stricken, but I wouldn’t say he looked surprised by the news. Considering how the rest of us were quite literally bowled over by it, I would have expected at least a little something more from him.
“You fucking bastard,” Noah snarled. “You knew. You fucking knew.”
He launched himself at the priest, grabbing him by the throat and shoving until he slammed Caleb into one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Leather-bound tomes fell to the floor in a shower of fluttering paper and heavy thuds.
“I knew it was possible. I didn’t want to believe it was true.”
“And you didn’t think to mention it to the rest of us while we blindly went about our merry fucking way?” Noah asked, his voice rich with the promise of more violence.
“What did you want me to say? By giving her everything she needed, you were bringing about the end of the bloody world? That you loving her was going to kill her?” He shoved Noah away hard enough the vampire prince stumbled. “Why do you think I tried so fecking hard to stay away?”
My gaze went to Sunday, and my heart caved in on itself. We were sad excuses for mates, leaving her standing alone and trembling. In a few long strides, I crossed the now permanently charred lines of the pentagram and pulled her into my arms.
“Alek, I can’t...” Sunday’s voice shook as she tried to speak. “She’s real. I can feel her moving. We’ve heard her heart beating. She can’t be some horriblething.”
I cupped her cheek, knowing that nothing made in Sunday’s image could ever be anything other than perfect. “She isn’t. I felt her too, remember? She’s ours, Kærasta. Created out of our love. Nothing is set in stone. The path can always be altered. Just because they believe this to be true does not make it so.”
Tears splashed down her cheeks as her face crumpled. My words seemed to deepen the cracks in her heart rather than fill them. Damn Natalie, damn Caleb, and damn the Blackthornes. It destroyed me not knowing how to make this better. How to heal the wounds they’d inflicted. How to take away the doubt their thoughtless words had planted.
“What do you need, Sunny? Who can I kill for you? Tell me, and I will bring you their heads.”
“Enough. No one is dying tonight.” Cashel spoke for the first time since before the ritual, his voice strong and determined. “Take her to her room, Noah. She’s had enough excitement for tonight.”
