I tried to pull away, but he held onto my hand with crushing strength. Emmerick stood abruptly. He pulled me up with him and spun me to press my front against the wall.
“Did you truly think killing one part of me would stop me, Isleen? You’ll need to kill this one too, or I’ll simply rise again from the ashes.”
Straining against his grip, I shouted, “Guards!”
“You can’t, can you? I knew you wouldn’t be able to see this one fall.”
“Guards!” I screamed.
His hands slipped around my throat. I heard the clatter of armor, but before they arrived, Shadows pried the fingers from my throat. Krait had Shadowed in, and he pulled Emmerick’s possessed body away from me.
“Cuff him now,” he told the guards, who had finally reached the cell.Now?Why not before? When Krait’s eyes met mine, the same sadness lingered there that I’d seen at the top of the stairs, which made me pause.
He’d known.
“You needed me to see it,” I said through clenched teeth, and Krait nodded, a flash of shame crossing his features.
“I’d planned to be quicker to Shadow in—I’m sorry.”
I could kill him.
That seemed to be how my life would be with the King of the Sahlms—in a constant flux between wanting to kiss or kill him. Or both.
“We need to use the Sethe curse,” Krait said as the guards bound Emmerick’s wrists. Em slumped down against the wall, subdued again. Panting, he stared at the ground before he drew in a deep breath, warm brown gaze returning.
“No. The cuffs can keep Caym at bay,” I argued. But even I knew that was a risky plan. Cuffs could be removed.
Emmerick avoided making eye contact with me and said through a heavy breath, “He’s right, Sybilla. I am not safe for this world. Keeping me alive at all poses a risk. Darvanda offers the mercy to let me live. The curse will give you more time—and if, in the end, it is the only means to end Death’s reign, then you kill me.”
Our backs were against the wall, and all the Sethe curse gave us was delayed inevitability.
“How long?” I asked them, hating that it seemed like they were teaming up against me. The two men who cared about me most had discussed this—they’d gone behind my back while I was incapacitated.
“We agreed on twenty-five years,” Krait said, and Emmerick swallowed hard with a nod.
“Syb, this is the right decision—you know it. I’ve left a letter with all my requests for while I’m asleep. A letter for my parents too. I don’t want them to have to say goodbyes.”
I slumped in defeat. Twenty-five years of sleep.
Hopefully it was enough time to search for a way to wake Emmerick from the curse, to raise a child, and to find the relics needed to end Caym for good.
We had so much damned work to do.
Death would not take me. He would not keep Emmerick either.
“Fine,” I agreed. “But I have conditions.”
Chapter 68
Krait
12 Years Later
Our trunks were packed and piled by the Egress, ready for our journey back to the Sahlms, where we would spend the winter. Asterie and Fenris would have a good handle on affairs here in the Central Corridor in our absence.
Walking into the Luz Palace’s main hall, I found Sybilla loitering, looking up at two bronze statues displayed between the grand staircase. She leaned down to light a candle at their feet. Hundreds were scattered around them in varying colors. We held open hours for those who wished to come and celebrate the fallen rulers of Phynx.
Sybilla had convinced me that Ryn and Freya’s memorial belonged in Luz, just miles from the ruins of their ancestral city. Some days, it still pained me to look at their faces. But most days, there in the hall, with sunlight spreading rays across them, the memories I had of my late wife and her brother shifted to brighter moments—their smiles, their laughter. They were not ghosts here.
