Certain death for a vampyr.
I brace for it. Fucking welcome it.
Retribution in the form of a fiery end.
Amber fire billows around us, turning everything golden and glittering across his silhouette, but for some unfathomable reason, he doesn’t carry through.
I’m lying right at the edge of the mountain ridge, the jagged rocks pressing into my shoulders, wind rushing across my head.
“Do it!” I roar up at him. “Burn my crimes to ash. End me! But do it now, Maxim, or I swear I won’t spare you.”
My fist is already rising, my fingernails sharp, my healing muscles bunching, preparing to slash open his neck where he looms over me.
Without a word, he sways and tips forward, and it’s only because my other hand is wrapped around his shoulder that I stop him from toppling past me, over the edge of the mountain ridge, and into thin air.
I halt the killing blow, but he doesn’t react.
His eyes are blank.
What the fuck?
As quickly as I can, I push him off me and onto the rocky surface beside me. Now he’s the one with his head at the cliff’s edge.
Crouching, I stare down at him, waiting for him to revive. Any second now…
A memory flashes back to me. Cassia breathlessly telling me how Maxim nearly killed her. She said he had his fist around her throat, he wasabout to end her, but then he appeared to black out. He fell to his knees. As if he weren’t there anymore.
That’s how he appears now, staring sightlessly upward.
Well. He may prefer to look his enemy in the eye when he kills them, but I am far more monstrous than that.
My fingernails extend, once again primed to slit open his throat.
Just as I swing my arm, another golden blaze streaks around me.
Impossible. Maxim is unconscious.
Then I realize…
It isn’t fire.
It’s energy. Golden energy. The same color as the magic that would streak along Thyra’s arm before she had a blade vision.
Somehow, it’s coming for me.
A heartbeat later, sharp pain strikes through my chest, my body seizes up, my hand an inch from slicing through Maxim’s neck, and then?—
I’m on my hands and knees in dust. No longer crouched on the black mountain ridge.
Now, ash swirls around me, and a field of dust extends in front of me. A barren land as dark as the bloodlands, the sky muted with gray clouds.
A dust storm swirls in the distance.
I recognize this place.
It’s just like one of the illustrations in the Chronicle, a magically protected book in the royal library. Thyra had opened the book to a page depicting a field that looked exactly like this one.
She was struck by the sight of it.
