Nyx sobs as she rocks him, and I… I’m frozen. Incompetent.
In all the time we’d been concentrating on protecting Nyx because of Laurant’s vision, I never once considered… and why hadn’t I? Didn’t Zephyr want to protect Nyx just as much as we had?
I reach a tentative hand out to touch him. My beautiful Omega. My Zephyr.
He doesn’t look injured. There isn’t a mark on him. But those eyes. His beautiful lilac eyes, lids partially closed, uneven.
I scream. Roar. Turn to look at the machine that attacked my beloved, seething, the beast within my chest roaring along with me until fire shoots straight from my mouth, powered by my lungs, encases that monstrosity and its dead driver, melting the entire thing down to the ground in a molten puddle of metal mixed with sinew and bone.
“It can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t be,” Nyx mumbles between sobs, still rocking our love.
Laurant is so ghostly pale, I think he might die along with our Zephyr. But he can’t. None of us can. We have to stick together.
But isn’t that what I’ve been saying all this time? And what good did it do us?
I grip the back of his neck and squeeze. It’s the only sign of strength I can muster.
Nyx’s face snaps from broken into determination. “Everybody, get back.”
I hesitate, but Arlowe doesn’t, and neither does Laurant, who’s looking a bit less pale as he drags me backward by the arm, my ass sliding along the floor.
Nyx begins whispering to Zephyr, lays him flat on the floor, places her hands on his chest. When those hands glow blue, his body jerks beneath them.
“Please, Zeph,” she sobs before shocking him again. “Come back to me. Come back to us.” Another shock. “We can’t live without you!”
One more shock, and Zephyr’s eyes fly wide open.
And I nearly faint in surprise, grasping at my consciousness with every bit of strength I have left.
But there’s no celebrating.
Something is terribly wrong.
His eyes are solid black, his body rising off the floor where he hovers, his dark energy swirling around his entire body as the building around us begins to shake, glass shatters.
His vacant face scans the room eerily slow, stops on Arlowe.
Then, one of his black holes swallows his body, and Zephyr is gone, leaving us all gaping in his wake.
But the building is still somehow affected by his power, despite his not being here with us. It creaks, groans, and shakes in his absence.
Arlowe rushes back to Nyx’s side with a strange look on her face, and in a blink, they’re gone, too, swallowed by Arlowe’s shadows.
“Nyx!”
While I scream for her, Laurant forces me to my feet, starts to push me.
“We have to trust them. Arlowe knows something.” He pushes me closer to the enormous hole that was once the entrance doors. “We have to help the others.”
I don’t know how I maintain enough sense not to say it aloud, but right now, I don’t give a fuck about anyone but Zephyr and Nyx.
Nyxeris
The ground beneath my feet is purple. The dirt and stone are dark, the grass is shades lighter, but still, unbelievably, purple. Trees of all sizes, kinds I’ve never seen before, despite their color, pepper the landscape. One particularly large tree with plumes like cotton balls is close enough to touch, its purple bark rough and speckled with black.
The sky is the only thing that’s a different color, swirls of green in all shades from yellow-tinged to evergreen, an angry storm brewing overhead. In the distance are floating mountains, some upside down as they swim through the air, dark and foreboding. Black waterfalls pour from peaks high and low, flowing down and up.
Gravity has no meaning beyond the horizon, yet here, our feet are flat on the purple ground beneath us.
