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Falling into a crouch, I trained my focus on the oncoming wave. Closer and closer it came until I could make out individual shapes charging at me: kings and queens, humans and faeries and what had to be vampires with bared fangs.
I hurtled my knife at the nearest figure.
The instant my blade struck, its color exploded into glassy shards, and whether my Object Summoning still worked in this in-between world or whether it was another, more ancient magic at play, the handle ended up back in my grip. Just in time for me to twirl. Slash. Hack.
Destroy.
On and on they came, these figures that separated me from Coen. And it wasn’t fear or even rage that made me cut them down one by one. It was hope. Love. The determination to see Coen’s mouth form the shape of my name right in front of my eyes rather than from across this endless chasm.
A new wave rolled in, this time composed of more obscure attacks. A bucket-full of flaming stars crashed down upon me, bursting over my head with a feeling like liquid heat. Lust twirled through me, followed by a dozen handsome males smiling down upon me, holding out hands to lead me astray…
None of them were Coen. With a scream, I flung my knife at every single one of them until they shattered and the liquid heat dissolved.
Just in time for me to look up as a mountain rolled over me like a tide. The weight of it crushed me, suffocating my lungs with the rotting tang of grief that reminded me too much of losing Garvis, and it would have been all too easy to curl into a ball and forget my love and let it eat me away.
I didn’t. Lungs shrieking for air, I wacked my way out, out, out with the tip of my blade until I emerged, gasping, to find—
A throne. So immense that this in-between world must have swelled to accommodate its size. The top of it scraping a cavernous ceiling as high as the sky itself, the throne began to tip and totter toward me.
I was almost too transfixed by the sheer enormity of it, the power of it, to unlatch myself from my trance. At the last second, I scrambled down what remained of the mountain and rolled out of the way. Pressed my back against a column just as the throne came shattering to the ground right where I’d been standing moments before, its grandeur breaking apart with it.
“Rayna!”
“Coen!” I cried back. Closer this time. So close.
I broke into a sprint, cutting my way through everything that separated us until I was hacking through a forest of rose-riddled brambles, its thorns catching on my clothes, trying to snare me and hold me back.
“Rayna!”
I tore free and swiped through a final wall of thorns, and there he was.
Coen, sword held aloft, desperation melding into something infinitely more tender when his gaze landed on my face and our eyes hooked.
Real, real, real, my subconscious whispered from somewhere infinitely back. Even though this couldn’t be the same hard, cold reality where Mydusia had stamped her oath over his back or else he’d be forced to kill me right now, his outline didn’t waver like it did in my mind. It was solid. Steady. Sharp.
“Coen,” I whispered.
Only one last figure separated us now: a conglomeration of glassy, colorful light shaped like a woman, whose eyes roved over the both of us with unbridled intrigue.
She emitted a piercing song in a language I’d never heard. But somehow, I understood it anyway, the words clawing into my heart.
One touch and you both shall die. One touch and you shall give each other new life, woven together forevermore.
The figure stepped back, ducking her head. I reached out a hand. Coen reached his out too, but my thorns were grasping at me from behind, and a cloud of pluming darkness lashed at him from his side.
And our fingers swiped at air.
Only one shared breath apart.
CHAPTER
55
COEN
Fate declared her answer, and all the colors crashed back into their stained-glass windows.
The point where Rayna’s world had collided with mine snapped apart again. Just as quickly as she had appeared before me, battling so beautifully, so fiercely, for a single graze of my hand, she was gone.
