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“What?” Raiden whirled. “You vicious little prick, get out of his head!”
Raiden strode toward Octavius.
By the gods, and all the vicious darkness in all the worlds, nobody hurt Octavius and lived. Saint roared, and from deep inside, he pulled every facet of his nyktelios being to the surface. The ropes holding him burst, and he swooped down on Raiden.
“Kill him,”Octavius’s voice demanded, thrust into Saint’s head, and he obeyed. Raiden was nothing in Saint’s grip, just the creature who had thought to kill the man Saint loved, and nobody dared hurt Saint’s little wolf.
Saint clamped Raiden in his arms, heard the sweet sound of the fiend’s pathetic screams, and bit into his neck, snipping that scream off. Then he crunched down harder, pumping more and more venom, harder still, until he got hold of the traitor, one hand on his shoulder, the other in his hair, and yanked, ripping Raiden apart. Now there were no more screams. His head dangled, his body sagged, and then both pieces dissolved into ash and rained across the enraptured nyks.
“Kill them all,”Octavius demanded.
Saint scanned the hundreds of nyks and smiled.
CHAPTER39
Octavius
Mikalis was in his head,but Octavius was also hooked deep in Mikalis’s, and there they fought, locked together, pushing and pulling, vying for control.
He saw in his mind’s eye how Saint tore Raiden apart, and then how Saint tore into the nyks, ripping them asunder, one by one, in a flurry of blood and claws, fangs and venom. He was devastating, wild, rabid, and horrifyingly beautiful. Pride made his heart swell. Saint was Octavius’s, in heart and mind and soul. They were one.
“Yield!”Mikalis pushed into Octavius.
“Stop this madness!”Octavius pushed back.“This is not you!”He didn’t know what this was, just that the Mikalis who had found him silent and broken, a ghost in the world, and had saved him so long ago, would never betray them. He still believed it.Hopedit.
Mikalis, already on his knees, slumped onto a hand.
“Surrender.”
“Octavius, no! Do not do this. Believe in—”Mikalis’s mental assault spluttered.
Octavius understood this had to end. The huge, pulsing primal being of complete darkness was almost through the gateway. But with Mikalis on his knees, and the nyks falling under Saint’s wrath, the gateway had begun to contract. The tide was turning. They were winning.
Mikalis’s wings dissolved into static sparks and vanished, leaving him on his hands and knees, panting and weakened.
“It’s over,” Octavius said aloud. He freed Mikalis’s mind and stumbled backwards. Exhaustion tried to drop him to his knees too, but it wasn’t over. He cast his gaze out across the ash-covered warehouse. “Saint… stop.” And Saint did, as the nyk dust fell like rain around him. Zaine was there, Storm too, and Kazimir, Aiko, Felix, and Eric—all here, coated in nyk dust, weary as they picked each other up, but alive.
It was over.
Raiden was gone, torn in two.
The nyks were dust.
Mikalis’s rasps filled the silence. “What have you done?”
The laugh that bubbled from above was the sound of thunder, the sound of earthquakes; it was all the storms in nature poured into one being and unleashed upon the world. Octavius looked up, and there she was. Nyx, a god before gods existed, the night sky brought to life, and hunger flashed in her starlit eyes.
She poured down from the collapsing gateway and slammed through and over the scaffold, blasting over Octavius like a vicious wave of black, glacial ice, stealing his thoughts, his breath from his lungs, and the beats from his heart.
In a long, vicious wail, she was turned into a whirling vortex of darkness, and then she vanished in a scatter of static sparks. The sparks rained to the dusty floor, and she was gone, pulled back to wherever she’d come from.
But the spot where Mikalis had knelt was empty.
No, not empty. Octavius staggered forward, knelt, and picked up the black rose. Ice had frozen its petals stiff, but as his warm fingers touched the rose, the ice melted, and the rose wilted, then died, curling over and turning to ash that fell though his fingers.
It was done, wasn’t it?
It was over?
