Then we are in the Spine—above the Spine, really—and I look around with a horror-tinged sorrow that makes nausea boil in my stomach. The stained-glass ceiling, the marble floors, the rich banners and beautiful arches—all gone. The Spine is, like the Crypta, little more than rubble. The moment Nyatrix pulled that sword free, everything I loved about Lumendei fled—or perhaps, even worse, had never really been there at all.
Nyatrix swoops around a crumbling tower—Militaire Annex, I think—and plummets toward a relatively intact battlement. The ground rushes up at me, and I turn into her shoulder, my body tensed for impact. With a grunt, she catches herself on the landing, though shock jolts through me. After a few unsteady, running steps, she manages to throw her wings out behind her and come to a halt just at the edge of the battlement.
I raise my head from her shoulder, asphodels clinging to my senses, and look out. Dawn breaks over the far horizon. The Sundered Lands stretch like a wound. Rubble pokes from wind-worn soil, the broken teeth in a shattered jaw. To our right, the sea shimmers. These things, at least, are the same as always, which brings me some strange relief.
But then my gaze catches on a new horror. Around the curve of the battlement lies the edge of the gardens. My solace, my refuge, the one place I felt near-normal. Where I begged Saintess Lucia for my Sainting. Harvested blackberries with Carina. Cultivated roses with the novices.
The gardens are no place of beauty now. Brambles crawl across the rotted ground instead of neatly trimmed hedges and flowering bushes. A few crooked lines in the soil look like potato plantings—even though that’s where the lemon trees grew. I can only see part of the gardens from here, I know, but it is quite plain to me that, like the Crypta and the Spine, everything I loved is a lie.
“Do you see now?” Nyatrix asks. Her voice holds no triumph. Just a bone-deep weariness that I feel in my own body. “Do you understand, Ophelia?”
“No,” I admit, tears escaping my eyes, filling my mouth with horror and salt. “I don’t understand anything at all.”
Nyatrix sighs. “I have to go,” she replies, her gaze locked on the horizon. “I will take you with me, if you want. To Liminalia. It’s better there. I promise. Not perfect but better than this. And you’ll be free.”
I choke back a sob. Free? What evenisfreedom? The freedom to scavenge this rotting corpse of a world? Is that better than a gilded cage?
Before I can answer her, a shout rings out from the far edge of the battlement, back toward the Spine. I turn, my blood melting to ice in my veins.
A man—a soldier—stands there, a bent and battered sword in his hands. “Stop!” he commands, moving a few strides closer. I recognize his voice—how it’s haunted my nightmares—before he even steps out into the wan dawn light.
“Sergio,” I whisper, my voice raw, my eyes fluttering closed, the terror and the pain becoming too much to bear.
“Release her at once,” Sergio commands, turning his head just slightly, as if to check for his fellow soldiers. But there is no one, just the sweep of night and a crumbling corridor. “That woman ismine.”
The pit of darkness in my belly boils, steam rising up my throat until my face is hot, my tongue laden with poison. I’m about to open my mouth and scream all the things I’ve always wanted to say to Sergio, liberated by the best warrior of my people’s enemy. But that’s when I feel naked steel slide against my neck. I choke in a breath as her fingers close, vise-like, around my shoulder.
“If you come any closer,” the Lupa Nox growls, “I’ll kill her. And then, of course,you.”
So much, I suppose, for freedom.
“Let us go, Sergio,” I urge him. My pulse pounds in my ears like war drums, my palms gone slick and hot. “I’ll go with her. Nyatrix, I’ll go with you.”
Sergio takes another step closer and then holds still. I can see his too-light eyes darting about the space, the hungry curl of his mouth. Still, no one comes to his assistance, though I can hear the thud of footfalls and the clang of weaponry in the distance.
Nyatrix’s hand closes tightly around my waist a split second before Sergio charges. His teeth are bared, his rusted sword raised. Fear overtakes me entirely as I watch him—the Imperator, the leader of the Holy Guard, a commoner so undeniably skilled in combat that he was raised to a position typically reserved for Noble Houses. The man who has mademy life a living Inferna, his power wielded undeniably and absolutely.
In a single, lazy downbeat of her wings, the Lupa Nox lifts us a few strides from the ground and flicks out her sword as if to bat away a fly. I shrink closer to her, preparing for Sergio’s strikes, for his violent flurry of steel and fury.
Instead, as Nyatrix settles us back onto the ground, I find myself looking at the Imperator, crumpled on the ground. He’s slit from navel to throat, entrails seeping out from the red-black wound in his belly. His head lolls to the side, blood hemorrhaging from his neck.
“Are you all right?” the Lupa Nox asks.
I don’t answer. What is there to say? My single greatest problem, a man gone mad on his power, disposed of with a single swipe of her blade.
“I think so,” I finally manage.
Shouts echo out from the ruined halls, and Nyatrix shifts her weight.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her breath ruffling the edge of my braid, speaking just loud enough that I can hear.
And then she explodes into movement. With one powerful leap, she twists and propels us to the edge of the battlement. Both of her arms close around me, and I feel thewhooshas she opens her newfound wings. My heart plummets into my stomach, and I bite back a scream.
“I’m sorry, Ophelia,” the Lupa Nox repeats. All the world holds still for a long second before she jumps off the edge of the crumbling pile of stone.
And then I am falling.
Fallen, I suppose, just like the pontifex warned. The Lupa Nox brought me to my knees with that glowing fawn skin, the sharp planes of her face, those thunderstorm eyes, the wicked curve of her mouth. And then I Fell the rest of the way on my own.
