I could ask Bellamy, but I’m not interested in chatting. I want to be back out there, knife in hand and ready to carve the Cataclysm’s fucking heart out of his fucking chest when he finally gets around to showing up.
Rath takes off, lumbering back up to the house and expecting us to follow like willing little soldiers. He’s not wrong about the willing part, but whose orders we’re all following is definitely still an argument to be had.
I set my gaze on Bellamy. “The last part of the spell?”
She nods reluctantly. “Let the first casting settle for a —”
Energy explodes from somewhere nearby, pulsing outward. It shudders through the beach house and rumbles under our feet.
Gigi runs for the door, tearing out into the night, heading toward the main house but no doubt on her way to the apartment off the workshop-barn to guard Coda.
“He’s here,” Bellamy whispers.
Snatching up the knife as I move, I’m just a step out the door myself when the next essence explosion hits — centered over the fucking bluff, right where I knew he’d try to break through. More energy pulses out from that point, almost taking me off my feet. Behind me, Bellamy grabs the doorframe to stay upright.
Zaya steps out on the back patio of the main house. Her eyes, glowing a light, bright purple, cut through the darkness.
I feel the moment she decides to let him in. Maybe the intersection point would have kept him out. Maybe Zaya is trying to mitigate the damage to its power. But she fucking grants him fucking entrance either way.
A yawning maw of noxious darkness opens on the bluff. Writhing with warped energy, it screams through all my senses, as it did the last time I faced that power.
“He doesn’t have many berserkers left,” Bellamy murmurs.
“He’ll come alone,” I say darkly, raising the knife between us. “He thinks he’s a fucking god. Give me what I need to kill him.”
Bellamy wraps her hand over mine on the hilt of the knife, essence radiating from her palm. She fixes her glowing lavender eyes on me.
“A life for a life,” she says.
Then she slits my fucking throat with the fucking knife.
Shocked by the pain, blood streaming down over the blade of the knife, I go down on one knee. Energy writhes over my hand, still tight on the hilt under Bellamy’s grip.
Another pulse of power crackles through the open portal seething on the bluff, and I gasp as the wound on my throat knits together. Under the press of Bellamy’s essence, the blood coating the blade somehow embeds into the metal, coating it red-black.
She sways, falling to her knees before me far more gently than I did. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she says. “Because I’m tapped out.”
Bellamy releases the blade into my hand, slumping back against the doorframe and fixing her gaze over my shoulder.
On Zaya. Flanked by my brothers, the Conduit is walking across the back lawn toward the bluff, toward the portal.
My father steps through that seething miasma of power, cranking his neck side to side. The portal snaps shut behind him.
“I’ll go to Precious,” Bellamy says.
I nod, already gaining my feet, already turning away and ready to shove past the three people who were meant to be mine, mine before anyone else in this fucking universe.
They look like they’re out for a fucking Sunday afternoon stroll, so it shouldn’t be difficult to catch up.
I don’t give a fuck that the bonds we once shared have been stripped from me, from us. All our destinies rewritten.
I stood between all three of them and my fucking father on that same fucking bluff before.
I’ll do it again.
Only this time, he won’t get his hands on Zaya. And Disa isn’t here to get between him and me — or, more specifically, between him and the cu-sith — so I can fucking kill him.
Twelve
