“You will lose everything,” Solmir snarled in the voices of the Kings.
And hadn’t she already? She couldn’t return to her life on the surface. She’d already proven herself a vicious queen; didn’t Valleyda deserve more than someone who would twist the political power granted them by nothing but their birth to her own ends? Red was safe with her Wolf, but untouchable, unknowable. And Raffe…
She’d already let Raffe go.
So what was left for her? Nothing but this. Making sure the Kings died and stayed dead. Making sure those who’d been wounded by the life she’d led had a place to heal.
She’d been willing to doom the world for her sister. Was this so different?
“Not if I give it up first,” Neve murmured.
And she leaned down and kissed him.
His fangs stung her lips. His clawed hands came up to her waist, and she couldn’t tell whether it was to throw her off or bring her closer, but she kissed him through it, a real kiss, one that held everything Solmir didn’t let her say and everything she didn’t know how to, one that held everything they’d never have time to figure out.
She felt them flow into her. The Kings’ souls felt like rancid oil poured down her throat, a sickness she could feel herself catching. Slithering voices laughing in her head, foreign things shackling around her heart.
It hurt. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Still, she pressed her mouth to Solmir’s until she felt all that darkness, every scrap of monstrous soul that didn’t belong to him empty out and enter her instead.
Then the only soul Solmir had was his own. Small and withered, maybe, but dearly fought for. Not enough to hold up against the evil of the Five Kings, not yet. But someday it would be.
And now he’d have the chance.
It was the last coherent thought Neve had.
Ringing and shouting and laughing, a clanging storm of terrible sound that she couldn’t escape inside her skull. Neve screamed and clamped her thorn-wreathed hands over her ears, barely conscious of Solmir scrambling out from beneath her, Solmir’s hands on her shoulders.
“Neve!” He screamed it in her face, trying to be heard over the awful din of the Kings in her head and the falling Sanctum, the world collapsing around them. “Neve, you can’t do this, you have to give them back—”
“No!” It came from her and it came from all the souls trapped inside her, five different refusals that made him stumble backward.
Neve pressed her eyes shut. She couldn’t hear herself speak, only knew the words came from her mouth because she could feel it move. “It has to be me. If they have you, they’ll take the world. I can hold them.”
Can you? Valchior’s smooth voice asked in her head. It felt like a worm making its way along the inside of her skull, a sliding invasion she couldn’t grab hold of. Or will you be just as terrible as he would be, only craftier about it?
There was a satisfaction to the words, something pleased. She tried not to listen, but it was impossible to drown out her own thoughts. Neve reached up and yanked the pulsing key out of her hair with clawed hands. Strands tangled around the thorns growing from her wrists and spangled out from the key like rays of a black sun.
The tendrils of shadow in the white bark had grown; they covered almost the whole of the key now, and they glowed, a strange not-light that hurt to look at. Solmir tried to grab it from her, but she held up a hand and thorns wrapped around him, held him back.
Walking was difficult with all the Kings in her head, like their souls threw her off-balance. But Neve did it anyway, following instinct and the pull of the key to the hole in the floor the Dragon’s falling skull had made, the seething dark it uncovered.
You think your sister will be able to kill you?
Valchior. It made her stop, her steps stuttering on the shaking ground.
You tried to save her, she tried to save you. He sounded so pleased, so content. It made the tiny parts of her mind that were still her own recoil, dread a freezing stone in the pit of her stomach. It doesn’t matter how terrible you are. Matched love, Neverah. All she wants is you alive.
The Kings clamored in her skull, so much horror packed into her frame, all the magic of the Shadowlands. The tendrils of it that curled up from the breaking floor flowed into her without her trying, her gravity enough to bring it in. A woman made a monster, made a home for shadows.
But she had a job to do. She’d chosen to stay here so it wouldn’t be left undone. This was her atonement, and she had to see it through.
Neve took the cold key in her hand, its pulse now rabbit-rhythm, a match for her own. She dropped it into the hole in the floor, into all that hissing dark that made the firmament of the Shadowlands.