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Yes, it is.
I look at Dusk and Onyx. Something changes in their faces, and Onyx shakes his head. They know I'm going to try something reckless.
"For Ann," I mouth, then I turn away from the panic in their eyes.
I have one chance to do this, to make it so my brothers have time to get away. I leap forward and grab my father, but as if he expected it, he’s grinning. I try to ignore the look on his face and pull his dagger free, but it's caught in his shirt. I yank the material, shredding it, drawing the dagger and part of his shirt free. Around us, his beasts are going wild, but none of them attack, which I don't have time to think about.
Untangling the dagger from the shirt, I raise it above my head and stare at his chest. Then I freeze, feeling my eyes widen. My father's chest... it's wrong. In the center of his pale skin is a red jagged item, one that glows like the moonstone.
It's... a shard of the stone. Not just any shard, but the central part of the goddess's heart.
And now I know. I understand everything that I didn't understand before.
He’s pierced his heart with the shard of moonstone. The power of it flows through him. It has given him the strength to do all the cruelties his inflicted on us all. But the moonstone changed the man we knew once into this one. It unleashed the physical darkness inside him. The one that has erased all care and love from his heart. Because man was not meant to hold the power of the goddess within him. This power was meant to allow our world to live, not to be stolen by one selfish man.
My realization only takes a moment, and then I'm pressing the dagger down, directing it toward his chest. Toward the stone. But inches before it touches his flesh, my father catches my wrist in a grip too powerful to belong to him. Within seconds, he's twisted me so that the dagger is nearly falling from my hand, and I'm on my knees.
With his free hand, he takes the dagger from me like I'm a child and he flips it around, pointing it at my throat. I hear chaos behind me, probably my brothers trying to fight to save me, but I know they're struggling in vain. I didn't create the distraction I hoped for. I didn't hurt my father enough to distract him from the hold over his beasts so my brothers could get free.
The tip of the steel slices into my throat. "Say goodbye, son," he whispers, his smile filling his whole face.
"No!" I hear Ann's voice above the chaos.
Ann and Rayne—who have no business here in the shadow realm—jump from behind the crowd. She lifts a hand and points it toward us, emitting a light bright enough that I wish I could shield my eyes. I’m not in danger in my human form from being destroyed by her magic, but after the darkness of this realm, the light hurts me.
My father screams, "Stop her!"
A shadow beast hurls through the air at her and she turns to him, the light in her hands brightening. She aims the beam at him and within seconds, he evaporates into ash in a quiet puff not befitting such a torturous death. Many of the shadow beasts split off from the circle that surrounds us, racing toward Ann and Rayne. Rayne withdraws his sword and stands beside Ann, the look on his face saying he'll kill anyone or anything that tries to hurt our mate. I just hope he can. She rids the realm of several more shadow beasts while Rayne fights off a couple others. He’s the easier target and they begin to descend on him, drawing Ann’s focus from my father. Grave trolls roar and move toward them too, and the rot monkeys begin to race toward the battle from their dead trees.
She puts more and more of the beasts down while my father watches her. “She’s extraordinary, isn’t she?”
And that's enough to shake me back to what needs to be done. I smash his hand away, sending his dagger flying, then leap to my feet. His gaze snaps from Ann to me, and I grab him around the throat, bringing him so our faces are inches apart.
“Look at me, father,” I command.
He chuckles like I’ve amused him, even though he shouldn't have the breath to chuckle.
I grit my teeth and squeeze as hard as I can manage, ignoring the way my body ached from my fight with the shadow beasts, ignoring the fact that the moonstone in his chest seems to give him uncontrollable power. Because this is all I have. This moment. And my two hands.
Behind me, Ann’s glow grows brighter. Lighting our battlefield. Lighting beyond it. Spreading across our lands like the very sun.
But she doesn't seem ready to stop. The glow continues.
Brighter.
And brighter.
The shine is so bright, I can’t look in that direction at all, but I try. Because I need to know she's okay. Because I need to know the brightness isn't because something terrible happened to her. I turn my head, just a little, to see her. And the instant I do, I'm glad. She's exquisite. So beautiful I can’t breathe in the face of her light. “Ann.” I whisper her name, and she looks over at me like I’ve screamed it to her.
“Phantom!” Her voice wavers as she reaches out to me, and her light shifts toward my father from the beasts surrounding her and Rayne.
My father surprises me by jerking me closer, putting my body between him and Ann, and I realize belatedly it's to protect himself from the light. She turns, briefly, to vaporize another shadow beast who made it around Rayne and was coming at them. Then she turns back to me and my father.
My stomach aches for her, to be near her, to see her safely away from this. I want to protect her and shield her from my father and this dark world, but I can't. I have to trust that she can survive without me by her side, at least until I can get back to it. So, I turn back to fight my father, ready to yank him into her light at the smallest sign of weakness, to blast him away, to end him in a way that means he can never hurt her again.
I don’t see the shard in his hand until I feel it pierce my skin, until I hear the shallow scream erupt from my own lungs, until I look down at his hand. The pain is immediate but short and then I feel nothing.
NINETEEN
