I needed to pull away, but I was trapped, Nyx’s skull the glue holding us together. In the distance, I heard the rumble of something else. Earth shifting, not thunder. Listened as shouts sounded around us.
When I breathed in, it wasn’t rain that filled my lungs, but smoke.
From the rush of adrenaline came pain. Scorching, unbearable pain. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. It struck me like lightning, running through my body without remorse.
It wasn’t my pain I felt, but the agony of all those around me.
The students at the academy boiling alive. The demons drowning trying to keep his forces away. The Fae swallowing earth as it engulfed them.
The magic wasn’t just being absorbed by him, it was beingexpelled.
For a moment, I saw a flash of the Old World. Long cut off from my power, I felt it open up. Tasted the rotten death on the wind, felt the moment my magic, which once tried to destroy them, leak into their realm.
Like a match being lit, magic exploded throughout their realm, trying to finish what it started over three thousand years ago.
“What’s going on?” Dante whispered, sounding almost pained. “What is that?”
I focused on him, on what he felt. Faery, ever the catalyst of struggle, burned. It shouldn’t have surprised me. It wasn’t the first time the power had gone to those lands and unleashed its anger on it. Deep in my bones, I could recall the other time my magic sought out release that was not through the body of a Daughter of Nyx. It’d been during Pandora’s reign, when she first took the power and didn’t have her mates.
Back then, the power had released a storm upon the realms. Burned forests, flooded cities, froze lands.
It was doing it again.
Only this time, it would succeed.
There was no Goddess here to stop it from destroying us all.
There were no forces strong enough to tear Dante and me apart.
There was only me and him and the skull.
“You aren’t strong enough to control it, Dante,” I said, my voice sounding outside of my body somehow. My eyes were closed, and yet I could see everything. All four realms tied to me, connected tome. I felt them deep in my body, and as they were punished for Dante’s treachery, so was I. “You were never meant to.”
The male growled, but I felt fire inch up my legs, curling around my shins while ice filled my lungs with every breath I took. The storm raging around us clouded my vision, turning it dark.
“Release it to me,” he said, pulling at the magic. “Give it to me!”
I can’t, I said to myself. It wasmine, not because the Goddess commanded it, not because I wanted it. But because it was so ingrained within me.
If I let it go, it would cut me open and tear me apart.
Dante was a fool to think it would ever be his easily.
As I fought him for control, I tried to rein it in. The fire destroying the Oberon campus, the storms floodingAvalon and the Underworld. I even tried to take hold of the earthquakes rocking Faery, but with each pull of power, there was a push from Dante.
Push and pull. A tug of war I needed to win.
Through my bonds, I watched the battle around us; Aither Fae and Wrath demons falling through the air as howling winds tried to keep them down; shifters locked in their animal forms bowing to a new Alpha—to my mate; witches tearing apart their mage counterparts while vampires were locked in a never-ending battle against their own.
“This is how the worlds will end,” I whispered, eyeing him with tears blurring my vision. “You are not the king you think you are.”
Dante bared broken teeth, the first sign that he couldn’t handle it. Although pain threatened to crush me, I knew I could bear it. I could take it all if I had to.
That was the difference between Dante and me: he’d never had to carry the weight of others’ pain on his shoulders. Never had to hold it together when they couldn’t, never had to understand their suffering while also choking on his own. There was never a time where he had to be the strength for someone else so they could break and be the one to mend them once they were done.
Dante would never understand sacrifice, because he’d always had someone else to do it for him.
He could never give up everything—his life, his family, his world—for the betterment of others.
