“Thank you for coming, my King,” she says, bowing her head ever so slightly.
Her words both surprise me and ground me to the present. If Adira is acknowledging my royal status, my dominion over the kingdom, she isn’t doing it out of deference—she’s doing it out of kindness.
A final show of respect before I’m forced to shred myself apart so surely, there will be no repairing the damage.
Adira has been so many things to me over the years: my enemy, my penance, but most importantly my friend. “Princess,” I say, nodding my head to her in equal deference. “I’m at your disposal.”
“The children are hidden in my tree house. The Nyawa cannot fall, Niko.”
I don’t reply, and Adira doesn’t need me to. We both know the cost of losing not only the tree of souls, but the only innocents in Letum. The only untainted magic. With a breath, I turn away, lowering my head to stare at my brother across the battlefield.
Strayed and Silva Lucai alike give me a wide berth as I walk toward him, all scattering like leaves in a harsh wind to escape the touch of my death. And they’re right to run, as my ribbons spiral for them all, friend and foe alike. To death, it matters not whether you’re in possession of a soul—it only matters that a heart beats, that blood pumps, that breath echoes. It only matters there’s a vitality to consume, a life to drink.
Arrows whistle around me, but my ribbons snatch them from the air before they touch my skin. Unlike Willa, I have no immortal healing, my body just as easily injured as any other.But my death protects me with a jealous fervor, because if I’m incapacitated, there’s no one to feed its thirst for violence.
Slowly, I let go of the hold I always keep on my magic—the one I keep even on the edge of unconsciousness, lest I ruin everything around me. The green moss at my feet shrivels to dust, the rot from my heart seeping into the atmosphere and staining everything with death. The black blight spills over the earth, climbs the trunks of the trees. A spiral of void, an echo of the stain of my soul; the filth that bleeds from my veins.
The stain spreads until it coats my tongue, spills from my tear ducts. Until I lose hold of my heart, of my body. Until my name is lost in the want of bloodlust; until I am not a king or a person—I am only death.
My heart pumps and my muscles scream as my death shreds through every piece of me. It devours my skin, burns my nerves, and it’s all I can do to hold on for one more moment as the pressure of it builds. My bones creak as it pummels against them, as it searches for a way out. I let out a roar of agony, keeping it trapped for one last moment: a space of time to thank the star above for one thing:
Willa.
For granting me the chance to know what it is to touch her; the privilege to glimpse the depths of her. I wish bitterly I could end thinking of the way she feels: sacrilegious, wicked. Fucking divine.
But the thought is too pure to survive a dark power like mine. Too beautiful to surviveme.
It crumbles along with the world around me. Destroying everything until the only thing I’m left with is death and carrion.
With one last push, I prepare to let it all go.
Chapter thirty
My death freezes in the air, as the world around me suspends the way it did in the atrium.
The Strayed, the Silva Lucai. The trees, the flames: it all washes into a blur of color.
Everything but Willa.
She sprints between the trees, her caramel hair whipping behind her, as she leaps over frozen Strayed. She’s replaced the gladius that tumbled off the balcony with two short swords, both gripped comfortably in her hand as she darts toward me. Through the chaos, her eyes find mine.
Determined. Furious. The most stunningly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Wreathed in smoke and starlight, her path never wavers as she darts through the vile ranks of the Strayed. Toward me.
Willa is here forme.
I’d been cruel and horrible to her, betrayed every small piece of herself she’d trusted me with, and still, she came. To spare me the pain.
I don’t know whether to be furious, or to drop to my knees and weep.
There’s no time for either as undiluted panic spills over me. I am already inundated in my death; it spears from my heart, through my veins. It fractures through my skin in ebony ribbons, shrouding everything around me in shades of void. And itwants.
A ravening hunger, a furious need. My death snaps tight in my grip, spearing indiscriminately toward every bit of life nearby. Including Willa.
I gasp, fumbling and desperate, as I struggle to pull it back into my heart, to contain it in my veins before it can ruin Willa as it ruins everything else. She’s immortal, but every power has a limit. What are the edges of hers? If my raw power spears through her, will she desiccate from the inside out? Be forced to endure the agony of healing every part of her body?
I groan with exertion, slowly dragging my death back into myself. It’s both slippery and sharp, slicing my palms, piercing my lungs as it thrashes against my control. As it lances toward the nearest life, it’s rapacious appetite becoming nearly unbearable, as it mingles with my own desperation. Terror grips me as Willa skids to a stop, the green and gold of her eyes winking in the frozen firelight.
