“Gabriele,” he said. “My name is Gabriele.”
She raised her hand to find his. “But I haven’t won.”
He smiled. “You will.” He grabbed her hand, and his jaw clenched over a scream of pain.
“No,” she said, trying to get free of his grip as she realized what he was doing, but Dante wouldn’t let go. Hot tears blurred her vision as life drained from his face.
He was giving his gift to her.
She couldn’t get free, and she couldn’t stop it from flowing to her. Trying to fight it would only waste the gift he gave so freely.
Something twisted in the place where her power originated, the shift from taking a gift to magnifying. She knew it well by now, but she’d only felt it with the Fontes’ power, never with his.
She sobbed as her pain blinked out, and a new power, greater than anything she’d experienced before, burst free.
Dante was saving her, so she could save them.
The world vanished in a flash, followed by such a complete absence of sound she thought her eardrums had burst.
A dome of light expanded, obliterating scarabeo as it engulfed them, but leaving people untouched. The ghiotte’s power of healing and self-protection bloomed outward and banished the darkness.
Alessa stared up, through the ring of Fontes and guards, their weapons raised against foes who were vanishing into nothingness.
Where light met dark, both blinked out, and the bubble began to look like lace.
“Do you see it?” she whispered to him. “Do you see what you did?”
Enduring light, shone through a divine window, burned the demons to ashes.
Dante’s gift had saved them all.
“Dante?” She looked back at him, took his face between her hands.
His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see.
He’d never see anything again.
Fifty-Three
La speranza è l’ultima a morire.
Hope is the last thing to die.
Alessa’s anguished cry was lost to the clamor of battle.
She still touched Dante’s skin, but the space between them was as wide as the ocean. His eyelashes didn’t flutter, even when a dead scarabeo crashed against the peak, spattering them with gore.
Alessa shook with violent tremors, but distant voices urged her on, hands pulling her up with bruising grips. They wouldn’t let her mourn, wouldn’t let her be.
The army was still fighting. Her friends were still fighting.
She wasn’t alone.
She couldn’t give up.
Letting go was the hardest thing she’d ever done, but the battle wasn’t over.
Her friends were all around, infusing her with love and sympathy as well as their magic.
Kaleb dragged himself to his feet. At some point, a scarabeo claw had caught him in the face, leaving a brutal gash down his forehead and through one eye, but he was alive, even with half his face a bloody ruin. Squinting through his good eye, he extended his hand to her. Kamaria clenched the other, so tightly it hurt, but Alessa held on to the pain.
Pain was real. Pain meant she was alive. They were alive. The Fortezza was full of people, including her family and thousands of others, alive.
The impenetrable wall of claws and wings that had blocked out the sky before was only scattered scarabeo now. Angry monsters crazed with desperation as they sensed their impending failure. The scarabeo would lose, one way or another, but Alessa could stop them from taking more lives. She could stop more from getting to the city, where people cowered behind dented metal shutters as the walls shook and scarabeo gnawed at their doors.
Alessa built a fortress around the heartbroken girl wailing inside her and turned to the sky.
Instinct guided her fight. Two hands, two more. Alessa moved among her team of Fontes, gathering and hoarding their power to use as many gifts as possible with every surge.
The scream of anguish she couldn’t release was channeled into a weapon, and her power became a crescendo of fury and grief that burst free in a typhoon of lightning and fire and ice. Even the ocean responded, heaving into towering waves that swallowed scarabeo and dragged them to the depths.
Bit by bit, the sky cleared. Sound returned.
A hand released hers. Another. Kaleb dropped and rolled to his back, chest heaving.
Groans and cries of pain mingled with shouts of victory. Alessa went limp, hollow and wrung out, as their gifts faded away.
She sank to the ground and draped herself over Dante’s body, shielding him in death as she hadn’t in life. Her hands roamed his neck, searching for a pulse, the faintest breath, any sign of life, but nothing. No flutter against her fingertips, no brush of breath against her palm. Nothing.