I wanted so badly to hug my friends; they looked shaken and dazed, not able to bounce back as fast as fae.
“Get them out of here. Tell Zuz to help you watch them. There might be people trying to rescue these two.”
The man nodded, moving Hanna and Caden toward the exit.
“This wasn’t for a rescue.” I shook my head. Scorpion was the only one who could hear me. “This was meant to destroy.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “And kill.”
“Scorpion!” Birdie’s voice screamed. Her tone made my stomach burn.
We both took off, heading toward the direction of my uncle’s office, a sob nesting between my ribs.
Crawling over rubble, I spotted Birdie’s blonde hair... and the figures she was leaning over.
“No!” I screeched, seeing Ling and my uncle covered in the wreckage as Wesley and Maddox tore through the rubble, uncovering their bloody, broken bodies.
Birdie felt Ling’s pulse. “Ling is still alive.” Her eyes filled up with tears. “But...”
I knew.
My uncle was dead.
His human body couldn’t withstand the explosion.
Every memory of him flashed in my head, the little things he would do, like the treats he would sneak me with a conspiratorial wink. The stories he read Caden and me. The stuffed animal, Sarkis, he gave me so I’d feel protected and safe when they were gone. The love he and Rita always gave me. Even though Mykel was my real uncle, Andris was my family. He was all I had left in this world.
I lost my mother, father, friends, and home. Finding Andris again was like finding a piece of my father. My heart.
The thought of losing him . . .
No.
Fuck. No.
Anger, grief, and fierce love built in my chest. I could hear my heavy breathing. I could feel myself sitting both next to my uncle’s body underneath the rubble and also far away in the cold night at the High Castle.
“Kovacs?”Warwick called me through the link, but my determination was drilled on one thing.
My uncle.
“We should get his body out of here.” Wesley’s throat bobbed with grief, all of them nodding with him.
They laid a hand on his corpse.
“Nooooooo!” Fire roared from me. My hand slammed down on his chest at the same time it grabbed for the nectar back at the castle.
I heard the last bell of the midnight hour strike in the distance.
An explosion popped behind my lids, funneling from the nectar, tangling with the thick magic still in the air. Electricity scorched up my throat and down my veins, burning everything in its wake. Energy surged my spine, the nectar’s force powering through me.
Then I knew what I was.
I was nothing and everything.
The bridge between life and death.
The in-between.
I wasThe Grey.
