I’m going to prove every single person who ever called me selfish and destructive and untrustworthy absolutely right.
Or—
I’m going to prove her right when she looked at me and saw someone worth loving.
The power builds to a crescendo. One more second and the choice is made forever.
THIRTY-THREE
ROMULUS
I waketo the sensation of freezing.
Not the gentle drift from sleep to consciousness I’m used to—this is violent. Searing cold that burns through every nerve ending we share, followed by the nauseating sensation of weightlessness.
Where the hell are we?
I try to open my eyes—my eyes, the ones on the back of our head—but everything’s crystallized. Ice crusts my lashes. I force them open anyway and immediately wish I hadn’t.
Space. We’re in fucking space.
And Remus, that reckless idiot, is flying us toward?—
I strain to see past the frozen edges of my vision. Creatures. Massive, glowing things heading toward the sun.
The Devourers.
Of course. Of course he’d do this. Launch himself into the void without a plan, without backup, without even waking me to strategize. Just pure chaotic impulse as always, and now we’reboth going to die out here in the cold and dark because he can’t think past the immediate moment.
I try to seize control. Try to wrench us back toward Earth before it’s too late.
Nothing happens.
The vampire’s blood. He’s still riding the high from Vlad’s feeding, and it’s keeping him firmly in control even though by all rights, I should be able to override him by now.
Trapped. Again. As always.
I can only watch through crystallized eyes as our tail snaps off, as our wings begin to fail, as Remus’s consciousness grows fuzzy and dim.
This is it, then. This is how we die. Because my brother couldn’t resist playing hero for once in his miserable existence.
Except—
I feel something shift in him. Not surrender. Something else.
The sun’s warmth reaches us, and sensation floods back into our limbs. Our wings regenerate. And with the warmth comes something else—awareness. Clarity.
Remus isn’t just flailing around up here. He’s figured something out.
I watch—trapped in the passenger seat as always—as he flies straight into the first Devourer. For a moment I think he’s finally lost his mind completely, that the cold has addled his brain beyond repair.
But then the creature explodes from within, and I feel it. The power flooding through us. The way Remus instinctively understood his own nature—division, separation, destruction at the cellular level.
Holy shit.
He’s actually doing it. He’s actually winning.
One Devourer after another falls to him. And with each one, more power floods into us. Our body begins to glow, not justfrom the angel-spark in our chest but from everywhere. Eyes, fingers, the tips of our hair.
