He won’t reach me in time.
He—
Blood pools beneath me. My blood, mixing with the ancient stone and the residue of power that’s older than human memory. The wound in my side—the one from the alley, the one I hid—has reopened. Or maybe the Blood Regent’s drain tore it open. Does it matter?
My heart stutters.
Darkness closes in from the edges of my vision, narrowing the world to a single point of sickly yellow-green light. Thecollapsed ceiling. The ruined altar. The bodies of Ash Cardinals crushed beneath falling stone.
And heat.
Distant at first, then closer. Burning through the darkness like a sun rising in the depths of the earth.
Izan.
I try to speak his name. Try to tell him—tell him?—
The words won’t come. My lips move, but no sound emerges. My body has failed me at last, the way bodies eventually fail everyone.
But he’s here.
I feel him before I see him—volcanic warmth cutting through the cistern’s wrongness, pushing back the cold that’s crept into my bones. His hands find me, impossibly gentle for something that burned through stone to reach me. His voice, raw and broken in ways I’ve never heard, calling my name over and over as a prayer to gods neither of us believes in.
Alerie. Alerie. Stay with me. Don’t—don’t leave. Not now. Not ever.
I want to answer. Want to tell him I’m trying. Want to tell him that I picked him, keep picking him, will keep wanting him until there’s nothing left of me to want.
But the darkness is stronger than wanting.
Stronger than will.
Stronger than everything except?—
His mouth finds mine.
And then there’s only fire.
TWENTY-NINE
IZAN
Iburn through the last of them without mercy.
Soldiers. Cardinals. Blood-bound shells that throw themselves at my flames with the empty determination of the enslaved. I don’t care who they were or what choices brought them here. They stand between me and Alerie. They die.
Threx’s body lies crumpled near the ruined altar, his fanaticism silenced by my fire. I killed him on my way through—didn’t even slow down, barely registered the satisfaction of watching his life drain away. He hurt her. He’s dead. The equation is simple.
The Blood Regent fled when his ritual collapsed. Part of me howls to pursue, to hunt him through every shadow until I find him and tear him apart with my bare hands. But that part can wait.
Alerie can’t.
The cistern’s ceiling continues to crumble, stalactites of crystallized aether crashing down around the collapsed chamber. I navigate the destruction by instinct, my dragon senses tracking her heartbeat through the chaos. Fading. Slowing. Each beat weaker than the last.
Faster.
I tear through rubble with hands that have already begun to shift—scales rippling across my forearms, claws extending without my conscious permission. The dragon doesn’t care about control anymore. The dragon cares about one thing.
Her.
