The Astronomer was now glancing at the distant eastern gates, as if starting to wonder if he’d backed the wrong horse.
“Take it,” the Prime said to Ithan. He extended the sword again.
Ithan shook his head. “I didn’t come here to—”
“I offered to make you Alpha once, Ithan Holstrom. I now offer to make you Prime. Don’t walk away from it.”
Ithan didn’t reach for the sword. “I—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish his refusal.
One moment, he was staring at the sword. The next, Sabine had snatched it from her father’s hands.
She plunged it through the Prime’s ancient face.
The crowd exploded into screams and shouts. From the corner of his eye, Ithan saw Amelie dragging a struggling Perry away, out of range.
The Prime crumpled to the ground before Ithan, eyes unseeing, coated with blood. If a medwitch got here soon enough, maybe—
Sigrid moved.
Ithan couldn’t contain his cry of dismay as she leapt onto her grandfather’s body and pressed her mouth to his withered lips. She inhaled deeply.
Light flared up through the Prime’s mouth, illumining his hollowed cheeks, and then Sigrid was breathing it in, drinking it.
His soul, his firstlight—
She cocked her head back and swallowed that light, his essence. Her skin gleamed as the light passed down the column of her throat, inch by inch.
There was no coming back for the Prime.
Sabine cut off his head anyway. The Astronomer, slack-jawed and sprayed with blood, had stumbled back a step, gaping at Sigrid as she leveled her green stare on him, ravenous—
Ithan had only a heartbeat to pivot, to leap off the stairs before Sabine swung the bloodied sword at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the Prime, though. Off Sigrid, the Reaper he’d created who had eaten the old wolf’s soul, as hungry as a vampyr—
“Ithan!” Perry shouted, and he snapped to attention as Sabine launched for him again, sword arcing.
He leapt back, narrowly missing being gutted.
“This sword,” Sabine panted, brandishing it, “is mine. The title is mine.”
Ithan shifted, so fast even Sabine blinked.
Make your brother proud.
Sabine swung the sword as Ithan charged, a powerful blow that would cleave even his wolf’s skull in two.
Ithan leapt straight at the blade. His jaws closed around it.
Sabine’s eyes flared with shock as Ithan bit down, tasting metal.
And shattered the Fendyr sword between his teeth.
74
Most of the crowd had fled as soon as Sigrid had started feeding on the Prime’s soul. But Perry and Amelie, Gideon with them, remained near the trees, watching Sabine and Ithan.
Sabine stared down at the seven shards the Fendyr sword had broken into, then lifted her furious gaze to Ithan.
Ithan shifted back into his humanoid body with a near-instant flash. “It’s just a piece of steel,” he said, panting, the metallic tang of the blade lingering in his mouth. “All those years you obsessed over it, resented Danika for having it … It’s just a piece of metal.”
Sabine’s claws glinted. Her lips curled back from her fangs as she snarled.
But behind her, Sigrid was closing in on the Astronomer, who had fallen to the ground and was now crawling backward, hands up. The male pleaded, “Did I not treat you well, deliver you from the Under-King’s grasp—”
The Astronomer didn’t get the chance to plead his case. Sigrid, either from spite or lost to her hunger, left the old man no time to scream as she leapt upon him and fitted her mouth against his.
Even Sabine paused to watch as Sigrid plunged her clawed hand into his chest, ripping out his still-beating heart in the same moment that she inhaled deeply, and that glimmering light—the secondlight—of his soul rose up through his body, into their fused mouths—
Not Ithan’s problem. Not right now. He whipped his head back to Sabine, and let out a long, deep snarl of his own.
Sabine’s nose crinkled. “You are no Alpha, pup,” she growled, and lunged.
Ithan charged. A straight sprint into death’s awaiting claws.
Sabine leapt for him, and Ithan ducked low, sliding, grabbing the longest of the sword’s shards and lifting it high—
Blood rained down, and Sabine screamed as she hit the grass with a thud. Ithan sprang to his feet and whirled. Sabine crouched on the ground, a hand pressed to her gut. As if it’d keep the organs now spilling on the grass from tumbling out.
He had a dim awareness of Sigrid, behind him, swallowing down the Astronomer’s dying soul and dropping his limp corpse to the stones of the stairs.