“Absolutely not!” I shout and pick up the dagger. There’s only one choice Icanmake. Everyone is struggling against the fumes now; they don’t even see me do it.
“Meryn, no,” Anassa shouts in my mind, reading my intentions.“There must be another way. Nocturna needs you.”Her mind opens to me: visions of her mother, father, killed for the throne.
Her lonely years in the mountains. Friends falling away, one by one.
Until nothing was left but her belief in the Sturmfrost line.
Her belief inme. Her yearning forme.
Tears stream down my face as I pull back from her mentally. If I’m going to have the courage to do this, I have to do it fast. I gulp a breath of air and then choke on the smoke, doubling over.
In my mind, again, clearer than ever before: my vision. That body on the floor. Stark, shouting in rage and pain as he leaned over it, obscuring the body’s face from view.
I think I knew as soon as I saw it.
“It has to be me.”
Anassa is silent.
“I can’t ask any of them to do this for me, Anassa.”
I show her what I’ve held back: the vision, the body. That glimpse of the future I held secret even from her.
She goes still.
Sorrow blossoms inside her, singing through her mind and into mine. It’s pure and true, swamping me until I gasp from the intensity.
“You did not tell me,” she says gently.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her.“It has been the privilege of my life to be bonded to you.”
She agrees, then. To sacrifice herself, alongside me. To save Cratos. To save all of them.
My direwolf. My heart.
My heart…
My next breath doesn’t fill my lungs entirely because of the gas, but it doesn’t matter. I lift my head and look at Stark again, drinking in his strained features. He has his nose and mouth covered, coughing. Tears rise again, blinding me.
I’m doing it for him. This way, he can live. They all can.
“Take the Tear,” I tell him, voice strangled. “Get it to Lucien, and bring down Killian. And—Saela. Protect her.Please.”
Stark’s eyes widen until all I can really see are their whites. He sees what I’m about to do too late. He lunges for me, but for the first time since we started sparring, I’m faster.
I drive the dagger into my own breast.
Right into my heart.
Darkness.
Pain blooming bright and wild and hot. Some part of me is agonized as my lifeblood rushes out.
Screams and cries. It’s my friends. Stark.
I open my eyes, and I’m there: that shadow realm.
I almost laugh. I sacrifice myself for them, and I’m broughthere?! Will Killian be here, too? Is this some sort of fucked-up afterlife?
