And they deserved something real.
“I love you,” Hudson said fiercely, his face pressed against the side of her neck as he slid inside her. His hips slammed against hers in a familiar rhythm, and she could feel him deep,deepwhere he belonged. She wrapped a leg around his waist, taking him even deeper, and choked out his name. “I love you, I love you—”
Ellory dragged his head back up to hers, kissing him again and again. “I love you. I won’t forget. I’ll never forget you again—”
He said her name like an oath, and her orgasm spilled over her.
For a moment, everything went dark.
Then light erupted between them as two worlds collided and tore them apart.
40
Someone was screaming.
Ellory was back on the roof of the tower, surrounded by blue light. Instead of a globe caging her body, magic pumped through her blood, lit her arms, her hands, her chest, waiting for her to direct it. Tearing free of her dreamworld, emerging from Boone’s liminal path into freedom, she was awake for the first time in almost four years, back in the real world, harnessing her real power.
The screams grew louder. Ellory looked down.
The older Arthur O’Connor was on his knees, his head thrown back as light poured from every orifice: his eyes, his ears, his screaming mouth. His son writhed beside him, clawing at his own face as if he could tear the power out from under his skin. Blue bolts sizzled toward Preston Colt and Nathaniel Graves, forming the links of chains that dragged them to the floor. They, too, thrashed around in impotent fury, but none of them could break free of her magic.
Their magic.
Because she wasn’t alone. She never really had been.
One by one, the ghosts of the Lost Eight appeared on either sideof her, their smiles victorious. They had told her that she’d know what to do, and she did. She had needed only toremember. This plan was hers to execute. This power was hers to command. These enemies were hers to destroy. They had thought they had her right where they wanted her, but Hudson had warned them of the truth:
This is my creation.
“This ismycreation,” Ellory said, raising her arms.
Magic spider-webbed toward her as Letitia Rose, Manuel Sharp, Angel Mclaughlin, Olivia Holloway, Tasha Butler, Eugene Kang, Kristopher Douglas, and Joel Carroll linked hands with one another and with her, feeding more power into the roots she had woven between them. She had never met them, and she never would, but she cared enough to tell their stories. She had summoned them from a past that had forgotten them. Their spirits rippled with the kind of magic that had been restored to them only in death, and they gave it, all of it, to her.
Ellory slashed the air.
Again and again and again.
With each sharp movement, a globe shattered into sparks that then faded, freeing the disoriented bodies of the students inside. She destroyed all the cages she could see, and then she felt for the cages she couldn’t see and destroyed those as well, until she was certain every siphon had been cut off.
Her attention returned to the Old Masters, powerless except for the stolen magic still contained inside their traitorous bodies.
Without shadows for them to hide in, she could target them one by one. Gaia Hammond doubled over, vomiting as Ellory’s spell ravaged her, eating away her powers from the inside out. Miles Clairborne was trying to claw a path to the stairs, but he was crying, weak and pale, and she knew he wouldn’t make it. Even if he did,his magic would not. She tore it from his body like she was ripping out his still-beating heart, her mouth a grim line.
She did not revel in his pain, but she didn’t try to ease it either. This was what he deserved.
This was what they all deserved.
From that loss, you have to build.
Tai approached her, followed by Cody and Sofia, David and Ximena. She opened her mouth to tell them what she was doing, but there was no need. After being freed from their orbs, they had watched for long enough to piece together her retribution, and they were ready.
Their hands glowed as they drew on their magic to build her spell—not a sacrifice but a gift. They shuffled like newborns learning to walk again, some of them using the stone walls to hold themselves up. But like the dead students they likely couldn’t see and had almost become, they fed their magic to her so she could do what none of them had been able to do alone.
Because it was not just about the Old Masters. It was about the privileged.
It was about the people like Gaia and Miles, born in ivory towers, who thought that taking was their birthright.
It was too much power in the hands of the hidden few.
