With the lanterns lit, the room didn’t look any less eerie. If anything, the flickering blue light made this place seem more unsettling. I took another walk around the circle, fingertips trailing over the half-wall before me—feeling for something, anything, that might guide me.
My gaze fell to the center of the room. The column. Now that looked important. It felt important, like it was calling to me.
I attempted to hoist myself over the first wall, only to immediately find myself knocked back to the ground, as if I’d just thrown myself against an invisible barrier.
Goddess damn it.
My ears were ringing now, though I wasn’t sure if it was from the impact or the magic, which suddenly seemed overwhelmingly thick.
I pushed myself up. My knees shook slightly. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the fall.
Alright, then. No climbing.
My teeth ground as my impatience rose. It was unnaturally silent down here. I couldn’t hear even the faintest echo of the world above. But I knew that Simon and Septimus’s armies must have been upon us by now.
Raihn was probably locked in battle with the man who had come so damned close to killing him.
I didn’t have time for this.
Fucking think.
I pressed my hands to the dividing wall, hard enough that the carvings dug into my skin. I closed my eyes. I let myself feel the sensations that I’d been trying to avoid—the magic that burrowed into all of my most shameful vulnerabilities.
Magic this powerful required an offering from those who used it. And Vincent had wanted to protect this place from any other soul but him. Anything of his that I’d used—the mirror, the pendant, even this door—I’d had to offer it something in return.
The one thing that had always been my greatest weakness.
I withdrew my blade and opened a wider cut across my palm, a fresh river of crimson flowing across pale, fragile skin.
Then I pressed my hand to the stone.
Red flowed through the carvings in the smooth black, filling the sigils. I drew in a gasp as they drank it down eagerly, like a vampire in bloodlust.
And the gasp became a strangled cry as the magic swelled in a sudden rush, sweeping me away.
68
RAIHN
Simon was looking right at those ruins.
It was like he knew. How? Maybe melding pieces of a god’s corpse into your flesh gave you some inexplicable awareness of other terrible magic. Maybe what Simon had made a part of himself now called wordlessly to its mate.
I couldn’t explain it, and I wouldn’t try. But when I got close enough to see that—the little turn of his head, the greedy glint of interest in his eyes—everything else fell away.
It was just like the wedding, when I’d seen Simon talking to Oraya and suddenly not a single other thing in the world mattered. My singular purpose became getting between him and that door.
I dove for him, and didn’t slow as we careened into each other like stars colliding in the night sky.
My sword was out, my hold on my magic loose, ready to unleash everything I had. And when Simon turned to me in that final moment, his blade lifting to meet mine, his own magic swelling, we were nearly evenly matched.
The burst of power—light and darkness, red and black, stars and night—obliterated us.
My ears popped. Every sound grew muffled and distant, as if underwater. My eyes, wide open through the whole thing, railed against the intensity of it, leaving the world in spotted outlines as the magic faded.
The two of us hurtled through the air, our courses thrown by the staggering force we’d just unleashed. In the background, several warriors plummeted to the ground, limp and broken-winged, unlucky enough to be caught in the indirect impact of our blows.
I didn’t have time to count how many were mine, and how many were his.
Didn’t have time to think about anything but Simon.
When he smiled at me through the onslaught of steel and magic, he looked just like Neculai. Just like the version of him that I’d seen in the Halfmoon trial, in the darkness before the battle began. The same version I saw in my nightmares, still, all these Goddess-damned years later.
Never again.
I moved on instinct now, meeting every blow, every dodge, relishing every time my blade struck flesh. I’d learned to communicate with my fighting strategies over the years, make each match a performance. Not tonight.
Tonight, I just fought to kill.
I twisted my body as Simon evaded one of my lunges, using his follow-through against him, spearing one of his wings.
It wasn’t the first time I’d hit him. But it was the first time I’d surprised him.
He lurched, and I smiled at the way he blinked in shock, like he didn’t fully believe I’d gotten him until he was dipping sideways in the air.