The Soul-Eater had escaped.
44
Julian
It was all over.
One of the guards bolted, disappearing into the frayed edges of the enchantment just past the door.
Dead.
“I thought we would have longer.” He staggered to his feet.
Francine put her shoulder under his arm. “We have longer here than we would anywhere else in the fortress. This is the way your ancestors planned it. If the spell breaks, it unravels the most important room for last, so that if there’s any hope—”
The monster thrashed again. A voice in a language he’d never heard thundered through all the minds in the room. Francine cried out.
“The Soul-Eater is free,” Julian growled. “What hope is there now?”
Eloise was still holding out the injector, eyes wide. She leaped forward, jabbing, and the Soul-Eater swatted her away.
Something flowed from her into him, and she screamed.
Julian swore, dragging Francine away. Eloise’s horrified cries filled the cavern. The Soul-Eater hesitated, its sides heaving with the first breaths it had taken in a thousand years.
Dozens of voices rammed against her mind, their words jumbling together, a vortex of ancient languages and rage.
The creature rose up on its hind legs, staring at the paw it had swiped Eloise with.
“Why wouldn’t you let me save you?” Julian’s voice cracked as he held her. “I couldn’t save any of the others. But you could have survived. The Soul-Eater would be dead, but at least someone would be alive to warn the world to watch for his reincarnation—”
“A child?” She closed her hands over his. “Your niece is somewhere out there. And two more eggs.”
“That’s why I have to do this. So they can have a world where the Soul-Eater can be captured again—”
“But the Soul-Eater reincarnates. What if it reincarnates into one of them?”
He felt her instant regret, and then the determination that dashed it away. She would be cruel if it meant saving him.
And he loved her all the more for it.
“Don’t do this just to save me,” he warned her.
“What if the next dragon egg hatches into a shifter we have to lock away? A Soul-Eater whocan’tbe locked away, because they can escape shadow dragon magic?”
“There’s no chance. A tiny chance. Insignificant—”
“Some other child, then. Another baby. Someone’s tiny infant, with no idea of the curse about to crash down upon them. A life already written out. To be hunted across the globe until someone like Eloise gets their hands on them. Or we do. To lock them away again. Or maybe we would bekind.Watch them every second of every day, just waiting for them to put a single foot out of line and become everything we’re scared they will be.”
He stared at her, then at the monster, still choking through its first breaths. Was she … sorry for it?
“It doesn’t matter,” he said hollowly. The frayed edge of the enchantment was past the door, now. The strange glow of the ice prison was fading, replaced by the green-black of ancient ice too far underground for the sun to reach. “It’s too late to do anything.”
“No.”
Something in her voice broke through the dread crackling in his heart.
She turned his face to meet hers. “Julian, if I die down here with you, I die. But your niece would like to meet you. She’s outside. The kraken is here, too, all our friends—my brother—” her voice cracked. “If I die, I die. But I’d rather live. With you.”
