“We can’t,” Kieran said, the tendons in his neck standing out in stark relief. “You can’t. You can’t do this.”
I stopped. Everything stopped. The faint trembling under my feet. The wolven, who halted in their tracks. I stared at the one before me. “I can’t?”
He stretched his neck, his chest rising and falling. “No, you can’t.”
My head tilted. “You think you can stop me?”
A dry laugh rattled his body. “Fuck, no. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try. Because I can’t let you do this.” He edged closer, foolishly brave. Foolishly loyal. Because he wasn’t just a wolven. My fingers curled inward as I forced myself to focus on Kieran, on what he was saying. On what he meant to me. Advisor. Friend. More in the past weeks. “I know you’re in pain. That you hurt and are angry. You’re afraid for Cas—”
The silver-tinged shadows pulsed around me. Cas. He loved it when I called him Cas. Had said only those he trusted most called him that. That it reminded him that he was a person. I shuddered, the back of my throat burning with the rage, the guilt, and the agony.
Kieran was within reach now, mere inches from the swirling mass of power radiating from me. Tension had gathered in him, tightening the lines of his face. “You want to make her pay for what she did. I do, too. We all do. But if you do this—if you go anywhere like this—people will die. Innocents you want to help. People Cas wants to protect.”
Fiery anguish twisted my chest. Cas. Who was protecting him? No one. A tremor coursed through me, hitting the ground. The pines shook harder. “I don’t care.”
“Bullshit. You care. Cas cares,” he said, and I flinched. Not at the sound of the name but at the truth. “That’s what both of you have been trying to avoid. That’s why we have plans. But if you do this? Those you don’t kill will be terrified of you—of all of us. If they even saw you like this now, they would never see you as anything else.”
I glanced down at the whirling shadows and the light dancing over my skin. In my skin. The next breath I took was too tight. “She hurt him.”
“I know. Gods, I know, Poppy. But there will never be peace if you do this,” he rasped, his lips pressing back against his teeth. “Even if you destroy the Blood Crown and end the Rite, you will become what mortals and Atlantians fear, and you will never forgive yourself.”
I felt no fear from him as he lifted his hands, piercing the thrumming aura of power around me without hesitation. What bloomed in the back of my throat, easing the burn building there, was soft and sweet. The eather slipped over his hands and crawled up his forearms as his palms pressed against my cheeks—against the ragged scar along my left one.
His hands…they trembled. “What you’re feeling is you, but what you want to do isn’t. It’s her. It’s something the Blood Queen would do. It’s something she’d want you to do. But you are not her.”
I wasn’t anything like her.
I wasn’t cruel or abusive. I didn’t take pleasure in others’ pain. I didn’t lash out in anger…
Actually, I did tend to lash out with sharp objects when angry, but I wasn’t spiteful. I wouldn’t have done what she had, taking all the pain and hurt she felt after the loss of Malec and their son, all that hatred toward the former Queen of Atlantia, and turning it on not just Eloana’s sons but also an entire kingdom—an entire realm.
And that would be exactly what I’d be doing. I’d leave nothing but haunting graveyards behind. And I wouldn’t be like my mother.
I would be something far worse.
Kieran’s hands shook. His entire body rattled as if the ground were shaking, but it was him.
Concern rose, beating back the brutal tide of emotions. “W-why are you shaking? Am I hurting you?”
“No. It’s the…it’s the notam,” he bit out. “It’s making me want to shift. I’m fighting it.”
My gaze searched the taut lines of his face. “Why is it making you want to do that?”
A strained chuckle left him. “Do you think that’s an important question right now?” He gave me a short shake of his head. “Because I can protect you better in that form. And, yes, I know you don’t need our protection, but the notam recognizes the kind of emotion you feel as a—a call of alarm. I…I don’t think I can fight it much longer.”
My attention darted over his shoulder to where I saw the forms of many wolven among the weeds. There was no way all of them could’ve already been in their wolven forms. They had been compelled to do that.