“Hang on,mo chuisle. We’ll be away from here in a second.”
“Put me down,” I pleaded as flames began to lick over his shoulders.
“Never,” he breathed, managing a crooked smile despite the pain as he gazed down at me with the kind of fierce love that Ihad a feeling wouldn’t run out for an eternity. “You’re my wife, remember? Where you go; I go. No take backs.”
Liam’s legs gave out. Even then, he managed to curl himself around my body in an effort to protect me from the fall.
Nathan roared Liam’s name and attempted to fight his way toward us.
Anton and Eric looked over, their faces hardening at the sight of us on the ground, Liam’s body still covering mine. Daniel went berserk on his side of the battlefield.
Despite their dwindling numbers, the Lucies managed to close ranks around the enforcers, preventing them from coming to our aid.
“It’s okay, lover.” I looked over Liam’s shoulder to lock eyes with Muiredach. “This time it’s my turn to save you.”
To defeat a monster, sometimes you had to become one.
I could feel Muiredach’s filthy power trying to infiltrate Liam’s defenses via the wounds he’d made.
I wouldn’t let him. Not my Liam.
Raising my hands, I cupped Liam’s face, bringing my lips to touch his.
“I love you,” I whispered.
If a nightmare was what it took to stop this, a nightmare I would become.
Darkness tore from me. Oozing slowly from my shadow to blanket the land in the abyss that lay at the heart of me.
“Hello, lunch,” a woman purred.
She sounded like me. Smiled like me. Big and pretty with her sharp fangs on display.
She was me. Though also not.
“What have you done?” Muiredach asked, his light preventing my abyss from encroaching on the small patch of sun he stood in.
The rest of his and Vitus’s forces weren’t as lucky. The abyss sucking them down and absorbing their powers.
“I’ve become.”
Jenna crept up behind the king, raising her rifle and pressing the barrel to the side of his head. She pulled the trigger. A boom sounded as fragments of skull and brain matter flew.
The combination of iron and a special type of magic I’d never felt before wouldn’t be enough to kill him.
Though it did leave me an opening to spear my magic into his heart.
Shadows and night poured into him.
Rather than allow my abyss to devour him—an attempt I sensed would turn me into the same sort of monster that he’d become—I targeted the connection he’d forced with the realm. Unless I destroyed that, he’d use it to regenerate from all the damage we’d done him.
Touching that wellspring of power sent pain ripping through my entire being. Stripping pieces of me away.
I endured.
Despite my best efforts, my magic began rampaging through his, gobbling his power and the realm’s down like it was a never-ending buffet.
When it reached the bottom of him, the abyss refused to stop. It kept going, consuming the magic that comprised his very cells.
