Every hint of pain in my body vanishes in that instant.
My back gently arches as the dark magic Diavolo’s pouring into me fills my mind.
Ashefills my mind.
When the keeper healed my shoulder after Jonah left a hand-sized burn on it, the keeper’s magic only descended skin deep, healing the scorch and leaving the rest of my body alone. But as the wolf-woman said, the light magic I was attacked with this time struck to my very bones.
The keeper’s power descends beneath the surface of my skin, coursing through my flesh from my head to my toes and it’s only getting stronger. The ribbons of dark light become a continuously moving coil, looping back to the keeper, connecting him and me in a whirlwind of sensation. Pleasure. Pain. And suddenly, it feels like breaking, even though I know I’m healing.
His eyes meet mine, the color of his irises shifting through a myriad of colors, from the deep brown of his in-control persona, to the dark blue of his angry soul, to the fierce bronze of a dragon, to the dark amber of a wolf, to the pure black of a demon, and finally… a color he’s never shown me before: a gentle green. Not bright green like the eyes of the children who were here only minutes ago, but a soft teal. It reminds me of the palest green leaves.
As his eyes settle into that color, his hair color also changes, bleaching of color until it looks like strands of silver. Just as quickly, it darkens again, becoming black once more.
I can’t tear my eyes away from him, the tension pouring from him hitting me hard.
He’s healing me, but… it’s costing him.
Sweat beads on his forehead. His chest is heaving. He drops to his knees on the ground beside me, the dark light filling the air around him with shadows.
They engulf me, blocking out the forest. Blocking out Lucian and Anarchy.
Until the world is just the keeper and me.
It’s as if we’re back in his realm and the darkness will never let us go. I feel it pulling at me, tugging at my body, threatening to cage me again.
My chest hurts and it feels exactly like the sharp pain I experienced when I gave him the power in my heart.
It’s pounding in my ears now. A rhythm that threatens to destroy me.
And him.
I fight the pressure around me, struggling to turn toward him, reaching out across the distance between us, stretching my fingertips toward his chest.
I need the contact, the connection beyond the dark light twining around us both.
I need it desperately or I fear I’ll break.
CHAPTER TEN
The keeper’s gaze burns me like the flames he consumed when he took me from my father’s lair, a hint of fire once more licking across his skin.
His focus flashes to my hand a second before I brush his chest, the tips of my fingers meeting the location of his heart.
In that moment, I experience the vastness of his power, the limitless energy he controls, and then, something unexpected: a sharp twist of fear.
It’s gone as suddenly as I felt it.
He catches my hand in his and just like that, the dark light vanishes. The power he was conjuring disappears, the black ribbons are no more, and silence falls.
My body lowers slowly to the ground while he keeps hold of my hand, lifting my fingers away from his chest but clasping my palm firmly in his.
The dark magic that had been rushing around me was so intense that I wasn’t able to feel anything else while it continued. It’s only when I touch the ground again that I can sense what’s happened to my body.
My broken leg has knitted and reformed, my left eye is opening easily, and my cheekbone has healed. My right handand wrist have most definitely been repaired because that’s the hand I reached toward him.
The feather that was embedded in my shoulder must have lifted out of it at some point—although I didn’t feel it happen—because it’s now resting in the air beside me.
When I sit up and run my free hand over my face, I find all of the swelling is gone. My skin, where I can see it from my torso down to my feet, is no longer bruised.
