“I can’t.”
“I’m not stopping until you do.”
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.
“I can’t control it,” I blurted out, a hint of desperation cracking through, but there was no compassion in his eyes.
“Try harder, Diem. Focus.”
“Fuck off,” I rasped, my chest near bursting with the effort of holding back.
“Then tell me why you’re so angry.”
Red mist veiled my vision.
No—blood.
Innocent blood.
“Tell me,” he barked.
Fight.
Kill.
Destroy.
“You killed them,” I screamed. “You killed all those children!”
“What children?”
“The half-mortal children, you murderous bastard. Aemonn told me all about it. You’re the one who executed them. You’ve been slaughtering them for years.”
Luther’s face paled. His ethereal suit of armor flickered in place. “You have no idea what you speak of,” he said softly.
“Are you not Keeper of the Laws?”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s your job to carry out all executions.”
“Yes.”
“Do you deny it, then? Do you deny you killed them?”
“There is more to it than you—”
“Do you deny it?” I snarled.
His nostrils flared, but he said nothing.
“Do you deny it?”
“Yes, I deny it!” he thundered back.
He hurled a volley of light-made arrows at me, then another, then another. I ducked and spun to avoid them, flinching as one came a hair from slicing my cheek.
Luther was panting now, his chest shuddering with harsh, ragged breaths. “Is this really what you think of me—that I’m capable of that?” Though he seethed through clenched teeth, something in it sounded almost wounded. “Is that why you hate me so deeply?”
Despite the chilly air, the heat building inside me felt as if it might consume me whole. I wiped at the sweat dripping from my face. “I have so many reasons to hate you.”
“Do you?” he growled. “Or is it easier to blame your anger on me than look in the mirror and confront the truth?”
Fight.
Kill.
Destroy.
My vision went hazy, my body at once too hot and too cold. Burning and freezing, scalding and crystallizing, incinerating and shattering.
“Stop running away, Diem. Face what you are and what you’re meant to become.”
I groaned and squeezed my trembling palms to my temples. The voice was screeching with its cries to be unleashed, dragging its claws down my throat and smashing its fists against my brittle skull.
I couldn’t take it, couldn’t survive it.
“I thought you were fearless.” Luther’s lip curled back over his teeth. “So stop being such a coward.”
FIGHT.
KILL.
DESTROY.
I snapped.
One moment I was shaking, panting, and then—
I was levitating. Hovering in the air, cocooned by a glowing white sphere that crackled and hummed as my hair danced around my shoulders in a churning breeze. Spiked tendrils of pale blue light twirled from the orb’s surface, slinking across the floor and transforming the dungeon into a luminous jungle of gnarled, sharp-tipped vines.
A hazy black liquid dripped from each thorn, as if bleeding from within. It swirled and swelled, the floor awash with it—a lake of shadows, then a sea, its ominous tide cresting in waves and lapping at the walls.
Luther yielded a step as the inky darkness splashed against his legs. He shielded his eyes at my blinding glow, but my own eyes had perfect clarity as they narrowed on him.
And he was grinning. Grinning.
The sight of it undid me.
I was a dying star, exploding and imploding, consuming all I touched.
My piercing screams were echoed by the roar of my distant gryvern as a blast of pure energy ripped from my chest. Luther cast a shield in a dome around me, and my power blazed past it like a fire through parchment. Magic crashed against the dungeon walls, fissures splintering across the rattling stone ceiling.
Luther grunted with effort and crafted another shield around me, then another. The silvery flames that shot from my skin burned through each one with ease, dissolving into a mist that froze as it landed and coated the obsidian waves with a foam of glittering frost.
I lost all sense of self. My body was no longer one soul but thousands of them. They flowed like roots from the soil beneath the palace, snaking through the stone and burrowing under my skin. They pulsed in rhythm in my core, each one lending their power to my own.
One stood out in particular, a spirit brighter than all the others combined. Its face wavered in my vision, too hazy to see clearly except for one feature: two grey eyes, so much like my own, staring back at me. Their corners crinkled as if in a smile.
A smile of promise. A smile of fate.
It might have lasted only a second, or an hour, or a lifetime. When it ended, I was on my knees. A starry glow still shone from within, my veins coal-black under luminescent skin. The floor had cratered beneath me, and between the cracks, sprouts were visible through the rubble.
And then I heard laughing.
I looked up. Luther’s magic armor had vanished. His clothes hung in tattered shreds that smoked from where they’d been singed, the scar across his chest peeking through the ragged fabric. His bloody body was covered in a collage of cuts and burns, one eyebrow half-scorched from his face—but he was radiant. Practically giddy. His smile stretched from ear to ear, his eyes gleaming with delighted shock.
There was no more cold veneer—this was Luther unmasked, and he was boldly, unreservedly happy.
I barely recognized him.
“I knew you had it in there,” he breathed. He shook his head and laughed again, a full-body ripple of childlike wonder. “Blessed Kindred, you’re incredible—and that was just a hint of it. You’re going to be unstoppable. I have no idea how keeping all that in for this long didn’t burn you alive.”
I stared down at my open palms. The same hands I’d always had. And yet…
“Do you feel better?” Luther asked. When I didn’t answer, his smile faltered. “Did the release help?”
Yes.
And no.
He had been completely right. The explosion of power was a pressure valve for my anger. My mind was now clear, my heartbeat steady, my skin cool and refreshed. The voice was as silent as death.
But its crimson fog had lifted to reveal something I’d been hiding from for months—maybe since all the way back when I was a scared little girl having visions I didn’t understand.
I was Descended.
I had magic.
I was strong, and I was fast. I could heal.
And I would live for centuries. Millennia, maybe.
But my family wouldn’t. Henri and Maura, they wouldn’t.
I would get decades with them at best—if I was lucky. And they would be painful, heartbreaking decades where I stayed young while I watched the people I loved wrinkle and weaken and wither to dust.
I would grieve and bury them, one by one, in the cold soil. I would watch helplessly as everyone who ever knew them died, too, until it was only my head, my heart, that still carried their memory.
And then I would be alone. So completely, eternally alone.
And no magic in the world could prevent it.