All I can do is wait.
She exhales, a soft sound that reaches me beneath the humming light.
“I have to try,” she whispers, as if she’s trying to explain her reasons to me, even though I don’t know what she’s deciding.
Without another moment’s pause, she slips her hammer from the belt at her waist and drops it to the ground, where it lands with aclang.
Then she turns her left hand over, palm down.
The dragon-imprinted medallion and the plain, black band fall together to the stone, clattering and landing near the hammer.
But the medallion fused to her palm stays where it is. It’s part of her and would never simply fall off…
Her chest is rising and falling rapidly as she uses her free hand to press against the end of the band where it wraps beneath her left thumb.
Her face fills with pain, strain in the lines around her mouth and eyes, as she rams her fingernail under the medallion’s edge.
With a scream, she rips the metal upward.
Chapter 47
The muscles in Asha’s arms bulge as she tears the black medallion off her palm.
The band must be fighting her because she’s gripping it hard enough to turn her knuckles white, straining against it, her body shaking and her teeth gritted.
“Let me go!” she screams at it, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I don’t want this. I never wanted this!”
Her pain and anguish force me back a step.
I was the one who made her pick up the hammer. I forced her to connect with the darkness. I told myself it was the only way to keep her alive, to make her into something the humans needed and couldn’t do without.
The final edge of the medallion lifts up. The brilliant-blue light immediately washes down her forearm and converges on her palm.
She drops the medallion and it hits the stone beside the other two with a heavythud.
I catch a glimpse of her palm where her flesh is red and raw.
Then the sapphire light bursts into a renewed flame, billowing and rushing over her entire body. It forms a tornadothat buffets her, plucking at her torn clothing and her hair, once again too bright to look at.
The way her silhouette moves tells me her knees are buckling.
This time, the dragon doesn’t make a move to push me away. Maybe he will, but I can’t stay back.
I launch myself into the brightness, reaching Asha just as her legs give way.
“Asha!” I catch her before she falls to the ground, both of us enveloped in the light.
She rests in my arms, her face turned up to mine, a soft exhalation on her lips.
I thought the light might burn me, since it wasn’t intended for me, but it’s soft, brushing my skin like feathers.
It flows across Asha’s hair and skin in waves, and my eyes widen when it seems to draw out the tarnish as it goes, leaving her skin pale and new, stripping the darkness from her eyes and hair.
As the energy finally recedes and silence falls, she is, once again, silver-haired and her eyes seem to shift between blue and green and even violet.
“The light allowed me to lift the medallion from my hand,” she whispers. “It gave me the strength to fight back. I’m me again.”
But then she slumps in my arms. Her eyes flood with new tears and she lets them fall. “I’m powerless again.”
