Before I made it to the shadow bitch who I hated more viscerally than any other creature on this earth, my gaze fell on a body laying at the top of a hill beyond the raging battle, something instinctual within me drawing me towards it and making everything inside me seize up.
No.
The very foundations of my being were rocked as I staggered my way towards him, panic binding my limbs as I fell down at his side and grief choked all air away from me as I touched his face.
“Darius,” I rasped, his skin icily cold and the sun steel knife in his chest so fucking deep there was probably nothing left of his heart at all. His eyes were shut, his features still, but even in death he didn’t look restful.
Pain splintered through my body like a dagger cutting into my flesh again and again.
“I’m so sorry,” I groaned, falling over him and hugging him to my chest, feeling I’d failed him.
I should have been here, I should have stopped this from happening.
I held him while screams still cried out around me as Lavinia worked to hunt down the last of the rebels and I knew death could sweep over me at any moment, but I had to steal this time with my brother, some part of me still praying he could come back. But I knew deep down that his soul was gone. Stolen away beyond the Veil. I could feel the emptiness of his body and it shattered a piece of my heart that belonged solely to him.
“Please wake up,” I begged, unable to bear the weight of this loss. He was more than my best friend, he was one of the only good things I’d had in my life for so many years. We’d fought a hundred fights together and it seemed impossible to lose him now after all we’d been through.
I released a groan of despair as I forced myself to let go of him, laying him back down in the mud.
“I’ll come back,” I promised through a razor sharp lump in my throat. “I’ll give you a proper burial, I swear it.”
I lifted my head, barely able to make myself stand as I set my gaze on Lavinia across the snow upon her tower of shadows, chasing down a group of rebels with her twisted power. My hands shook and the freezing air cut deep into my bones as I drew my sword, casting a final look back at Darius and finding my heart so full of vengeance that I could think of nothing else. For him, for Blue.
My grief turned to the most bitter kind of rage I had ever tasted and suddenly I was moving, running with the speed of my Order towards the witch who had caused us so much pain. Who had bound my mate to her with a curse that had could have destroyed her tonight, who had trapped my sister’s soul within her and made her suffer for so many years.
With an almighty swing of my sword, I sliced through the shadows which held Lavinia aloft and she tumbled toward me with a screech of fright.
But of course, she caught herself before she hit the ground, hovering just a foot above it on a platform of shadow. I charged forward, the weight of grief and anger in my heart so heavy that it nearly drowned me as I aimed to kill her. She gasped as she lurched backwards to avoid the swipe of my blade and I swung it again with a yell of hate, using the speed of my Order to slash and cut, but she moved like the wind to avoid me.
My blade slammed into the flesh of her neck at last and she screamed as her head was nearly severed clean off. But as she rose up on another swirl of shadows to avoid my next strike, her dark power wound around her throat to heal the wound which didn’t ooze even a drop of blood.
This monster was empty, no heart lived within her, no organs there to make her even close to living. She was made of rot and death, and so long as the shadows poured unendingly into her body, maybe she could not be killed. But I’d damn well fucking try.
“You feisty little hellion,” she growled, lowering down before me once more and my fangs snapped out as I dove forward again, determined to make her scream if nothing else.
I tried to drive my sword into her chest with a shout of despair and anger erupting from my lungs, but she flicked her fingers and wrapped me in her dark power, wrenching the sword from my grip as if I was made of nothing but paper. And I guessed that was what I was, just a paper man, ripped and cut apart by the stars. I was forged by them, and they would crumple me in their fist the moment they were done with me. Perhaps Lavinia would be the one to do it for them.
“Well, well, well,” she purred, rising up above me while her shadows coiled around me like a python, binding my arms to my sides. “I wondered when I’d be seeing you again tonight.” She smiled wickedly and I bared my fangs at her, struggling uselessly against her hold.
“Tell me how to break the curse,” I commanded and she smiled, floating closer to me and sliding a finger under my chin to make me look up at her sharply.