“Our time runs short,” Eona said now. “For soon the darkness will break through the walls, into this sacred place. You must do what you can to protect the heart.To save Dohrsar from the soul that seeks it.”
“Cade?” Karr asked.
“No.” Eona shook her head. “Not entirely. Cade is only a pawn. There comes a deeper threat. Because there was another soul that survived, one that would not allow itself to be laid to rest. The greed, the desire to reach this place… it allowed my brother Eder’s spirit to keep on living, so that someday he could make it back to the heart again.”
She pointed upwards, into the sky. It had lightened, to show them an opening as the boat began to rise back towards the cave where the heart sat; where Azariah and Jaxon peered down, frozen like time itself had stopped. “My strength fades. My message is completed, my souls returned to this space. You will take over now. Protect the heart.”
“How?”Karr asked.
“I’m afraid I have given you too much already. The afterlife will not be kind to me, the goddesses furious, for what I have already done. I have waited a long time to finally lay my spirit to rest. If I say much more, I fear that I will end up like my brother. That when Eder dies, too… we will spend eternity together, fighting a war that neither of us can win.”
“Tell us how to defeat the darkness,” Karr said.“Please.”
For when Cade arrived, there would be an army.
His power was not enough. A few Shadowbloods against an army… they would not win.
Eona was fading from view. The boat disappeared, and suddenly Karr and Sonara were back in the cave, kneeling over the heart as it turned solid again. But before Eona disappeared, he heard her whisper her final words.“Find the missing pieces of the planet’s heart. You have all you need to awaken her. To put her back together again.”
The heart solidified, and Karr felt thrown back into his body, as if perhaps all that had just transpired was only inside of his mind.
He pulled his hands away as time snapped back into motion again. Behind him, Jaxon’s voice returned, his words picking up right where they’d left off. “Don’t touch it!”
Markam’s body was still unconscious beside Azariah.
It was as if nothing had transpired at all, while they were inside.
“His heart,” Sonara whispered.
She pulled her hands away and turned to face Karr. She reached up slowly to grip the necklace around her throat that had once belonged to Soahm. “You carry his heart,” she said. “It’s why you carry his aura on your blood.”
“Sonara,” he said gently. “I’m—”
“Don’t apologize,” she said, turning her back to him. She seemed numb; as if all the rage and grief within her had been pushed deep down. “It won’t bring Soahm back.”
The space was still. Only the beating of the planet’s heart, the sighing breath, the scent of death from the piles of bones, remaining from the battles Eona had waged against Eder.
The silence broke when the far wall of the cave temple shook once.
Twice.
Then it exploded, a rain of mountain rocks caving in, as a hole finally broke through. The silver tip of the massive drill stopped spinning as it was turned off from the outside, the screech of it dying out as it finally came to a stop.
Karr coughed dust from his lungs, waving his hand before his eyes as a small cluster of shadowed figures emerged first through the rubble.
Cade, and Rohtt shortly behind him. Following them, the Dohrsaran army stood waiting to widen the entrance, the mites still attached to their necks. Forced to do his bidding, or there would be pain; and then, death.
But there was a third figure who emerged and shook off the dust, then rose to standing at Cade’s left, her hand on his wrist as he guided her over the rubble and into the clearing.
She dropped to her knees as she beheld the heart. Karr couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to, for the wolf skull gave her away.
It was Thali.
Chapter 39
Cade
Cade Kingston loved trouble, had lived it and breathed it since the day he’d come back from his errands on the starship docks, and found Jeb Montforth kneeling over his parents’ corpses.
