“Not Fox!” Veronica cries. “Not him!”
She pushes me backward, hard and powerful. I fly across the grass, eyes wide, as I watch the Empress’s sword swing. Veronica attempts to pull back, but the sword meets her neck.
Dark blood pours from the wound.
She staggers backward, clutching her throat. Now there’s emotion on the Empress’s face – shock, horror, disgust. The two women stare at each other, the blood seeping through Veronica’s fingers.
For a moment, they’re both frozen.
Then Veronica staggers backward. One step, two steps, and then she’s racing my way, blood running down her neck, soaking into her clothes. She finds me and pulls me into the mist.
We’re somewhere out by the trees now, the mist not so thick, the battle behind us. She’s swaying on her feet.
“It’s okay,” I say, with a little disgust. “You’re immortal. You can heal it.”
She looks at me and takes a deliberate step away.
“Veronica?” I say.
She keeps looking at me. The blood continues to seep from her neck. She falls to her knees.
“No,” she croaks, her voice torn and shattered. “No, Fox. This is the end.”
And I understand, the Empress’s sword was no ordinary sword. That dark magic it contains is unstoppable. Deadly – even to an immortal.
“Veronica,” I say, falling to my knees as well, frozen leaves crunching beneath me.
“Your wish has come true. You wanted me dead,” she says, her painted mouth curling into a weak smile. Before my very eyes, the life, the strength, even the shadows are draining from her.
“No, Veronica. Not like this.”
“You were hoping to kill me yourself?”
I open my mouth but no words come. She turned me into this monster. She ripped my life away. She tried to kill my mate – Briony. Yes, I’ve wanted her dead. Yes, I’ve wanted to kill her.
“It’s time,” she says, her eyes falling closed.
She collapses forward, and I catch her in my arms.
The magic has always resonated fiercely from this woman. You could taste it on the tip of your tongue. You could feel it on the ends of your fingers. But there’s nothing now. Not even a flicker of a shadow. She’s literally shriveling and fading away in my arms.
She murmurs something against my ear, but her words make no sense to me.
“You saved me,” I whisper, still unable to fathom it. After everything – even knowing I would kill her given the chance – she chose to save me. To sacrifice herself for me. There’s always a reason with Veronica, a hidden motive, a deceptive intention. But this time I don’t understand why she did it. “Why?”
Her eyes flicker open for just a moment. She peers up at me. I don’t know if she even sees me. Blood trickles from her mouth, a line of it running down her cheek like tears.
“Because I love you, Fox,” she says. “And I always have.”
And then she closes her eyes and her body fades to ash, ash that catches on the wind and blows away into the forest, leaving me alone on my knees on the hard ground, my hands and clothes soaked with the blood she’d stolen from some other being.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Thorne
I keep Briony close by my side. I won’t let her out of my sight, not even for a second.
“We have to stick to the plan,” I yell at her over the sounds of explosions and battle. “We have to get to the towers.”
