No.
No.
No.
Not him.
Not sweet Honor.
Not for me.
The loss cracked open inside of me like a cavern swallowing me whole. There was a gaping space in my heart…
He was gone, melted from the inside out by his own alpha, his uncle, his king.
The grief clamped my throat, and I released a guttural wail.
Then I felt it. A slice of breathtaking pain as another mark branded me. This one at the top of my head. The searing pain crawled down my spine, and my vision disappeared with an explosion of white-hot agony.
A fifth mark? How? What?
When I opened my eyes, I knew what the fifth element was. The one no one spoke about, the one no one at school had. My gaze shot to the silver-cloaked mage, and he offered me a sad smile. And then he pointed…
At Honor’s ghost.
He stood over me, watching as I held his dead wolf, with a frown on his lips.
My eyes filled with fresh tears, and I scrambled to my feet.
“No,” I gasped. “Please … come back.”
“Oh, Nai,”he said, his voice a mere echo of its normal strength. “It doesn’t work like that.”
He leaned forward, and I felt a whisper of a kiss against my forehead.
“I’ll miss you,”he said.“And my brothers and Mom, but I have no regrets.”
He turned and strode away, walking without his limp, right to where his grieving mother pounded her fists on the forest floor. He paused there, bent down, and tried to give her a hug, but his arms went right through her. He straightened and squared his shoulders, turning to meet my watery gaze.“Make sure you tell them that and that I love them—and when Mom is ready, tell her too.”
I stood there, numb with grief and shock, but nodded, unsure of what else I could do, then glanced at the old high mage, the one with the silver cloak, the one who must be the master of the element of spirit.
He merely pointed for me to keep watching.
Almost as if everyone had been frozen and then thawed, a cacophony of wailing and yelling erupted.
The headmistress leapt to her feet and launched herself at the king. “How could you!”
Four guards struggled to pull her off, and Honor blew her a kiss before he walked into the trees toward a blinding white light.
“Honor, no!” I stood, dropping his wolf’s body to the ground with a sickening thud and moved to go after him, to beg him to stay. Maybe I could stop him…
“You’ve been living on borrowed time,” Kian growled, stepping toward me. “That ends now.”
There was so much commotion, the students backing into the trees averting their gaze, uncomfortable with death, the king and his wife fighting in the woods, the guards holding her back. Rage at the edge ready to rip his uncle’s head off. Justice and Noble nuzzling Honor’s dead wolf with their noses as if they could revive him.
Kian’s lip curled with disgust. “High crimes deserve their fate. You’re an abomination. Half wolf, half high mage.”
That might even be true, but if I let Kian hurt me, then he’d hurt the Midnight boys. One by one, they would fall, and I wouldn’t let that happen.
