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Pollux pivoted to the boys. Fixed his stare on Brann. Pure, brute power flared around the angel.
Lidia screamed as Pollux unleashed a lethal spear of his power toward Brann.
Ruhn couldn’t turn away. Didn’t want to watch, and yet he knew he had to witness this crime, this unforgivable atrocity—
But Lidia ran, swift as the wind. Swifter than a bullet.
Ruhn didn’t understand what he saw next: How Lidia reached Brann in time. How she threw herself over her son, knocking him to the ground as she burst into white-hot flames.
They erupted from her like a brimstone missile, blasting Pollux off his feet. Not some freak accident or bomb, but fire magic, pouring out of Lidia. Searing from her.
“Brann,” she was panting down at her son, the boy untouched by the flame, scanning his stunned face, tugging the gag from his mouth. “Brannon.” She stifled a sob around the boy’s full name, but then Actaeon was there, hauling his brother away as best he could with the bonds still restraining them.
“What are you?” Ace breathed.
Still panting, blazing with fire, Lidia said, “An old bloodline,” and got to her feet.
It was Daybright, as Ruhn had seen her in his mind. She’d presented herself—her true self—to him all this time.
“Get them out of here,” Lidia said to Ruhn, hair floating up in a golden halo, embers swirling around her head. “Get the mer to a healer.” It was a miracle that Tharion wasn’t already dead, given the hole blasted through him.
Pollux got to his feet. “You cunt,” he spat. “What the fuck is this?”
“Shifters, as they used to be,” Lidia said, fire rippling from her mouth. “As Danika Fendyr told me we were. Now free of the Asteri’s parasite.”
Ruhn gaped at her. She was free of the parasite? She must have gotten that antidote, somehow—from Tharion?
Lidia was glorious, wreathed in flame and blazing with fury.
Pollux’s power surged again. “I’ll kill you all the same, bitch.”
“You can try,” Lidia said, smiling.
Pollux ran at her, striking with his magic. The hallway shook, debris raining down—
A wall of blue fire leapt between them. Pollux collided with it, then stuck. A fly in a burning web.
Lidia stalked toward the angel as Pollux struggled against the flames.
“You signed your death warrant when you touched my sons,” she said. And exhaled a breath.
Flame rippled from her mouth into Pollux’s flesh. The angel screamed—or tried to.
Freed of any secrets, of any need to keep them, Lidia seemed to unleash all that she was. Ruhn could only watch as fire poured down Pollux’s throat. Into his body. Roasting him from the inside out until he was nothing but smoldering cinders, a pillar of brimstone standing mid-strike, mouth still open.
She’d incinerated him.
Lidia held out a finger. And poked the towering pillar that had once been Pollux.
It sent Pollux’s ash-statue crumbling to the ground.
Her sons got to their feet, shock stark on their battered faces. The knife in Ruhn’s boot helped him make quick work of prying open their gorsian shackles, but it was Actaeon who whispered to Lidia, “Mom?”
She looked over a shoulder to her son. Her lips curved upward—at what he’d called her, Ruhn guessed.
The palace shook again—whatever was going on outside, it had to be bad.
“Get the mer to Declan to be healed. Even after taking the antidote, I don’t think Ketos’s own body can save him,” Lidia ordered. “And that’s the last vial of the antidote in his bag. My sister figured it out. Don’t jostle it, though—it’s volatile.”
