by E E Everly
You’re going to have to kill them. How else will we get away?
“Nice try, Vaughan, bringing Father in,” Yasbail said. “Your plan won’t work. Our barrier is sound, fortified with demon magic.”
Demon magic? Are there demons?
“Don’t underestimate Father,” Dad said. Meuric had stopped adding men to the group of about twenty now, and he joined in the barrier deconstruction.
I didn’t see a single hole.
Yasbail sneered, seeming overly confident, and shot energy from her palms toward Dad. In the same instant, as if their attacks were coordinated, no doubt through the twin soul thing, Rhosyn blurred forward and pulled Bronwen away from us.
Whoa! How’d she move so fast?
A shield from Dad came up just late enough to absorb the attack but not fast enough to save Bronwen. She was way ahead of Rhosyn’s next attack though and lashed out with a blinding span of light that broke Rhosyn’s grip. My mother fell back, scraping across the rough rock but quickly rolled to her feet. The blood on her arms and legs didn’t faze her.
Meanwhile, Dad and his sister had begun a duel. Rays of light and columns of blackness shot back and forth. Between their fire and the light attacking the dome, blinding fireworks surrounded me. Dad blocked with one arm and fired with another. He slid under an attack as it came at him. Yasbail dove over a fireball aimed for her midsection.
The space was tight under the forty-foot-in-diameter dome. The only place with some protection was the edge of the entrance to Uffern, where the lip of the blocked prison could provide cover. I tried hauling Cystenian forward, but his right leg dragged behind us. “What did they do to you?”
“It’s broken,” he gasped as he gripped his pant leg and pulled his leg along.
“Can’t you heal faster?” I hated that I was impatient with him, but we had to get out of the way. Dad was directing most of the fire away from us. It’s not as if Yasbail and Rhosyn wanted us dead. They needed Cystenian and I to exchange lights, but the last blast had been too close, grazing my ear.
“Look out!” Bronwen tripped as a discharge from Yasbail toward Dad bounced off the dome and hit Bronwen’s shin. She went down, and the shot she had been trying to block slammed into Cystenian and bowled us over.
My chin landed on a jagged rock as I slid against Cystenian. His shoulder took most of our crash. He cried out as his body tightened with pain. Little glistening shards were embedded in my palm where I caught myself, but I didn’t have time to pick them out.
Yasbail whirled away from Dad and grabbed me by the hair. She yanked me to my feet, halting the fight.
Dad’s chest heaved as he held his aim on Yasbail. He was streaked with blood. Fighting on a volcanic mountain was more painful than I could imagine. Meuric and his men had not stopped their efforts, and to my excitement, I saw flecks in the barrier. It was working, but not soon enough.
A gasp drew my attention, but I couldn’t turn my head much due to Yasbail’s death grip. From what I could tell, Rhosyn was holding a dagger to Bronwen’s throat.
When had that happened?
“That was fun.” Yasbail inhaled deeply. She seemed disgustingly exhilarated by the conflict. “Vaughan darling, you know I’m stronger than you. I always have been.”
Cystenian pushed to his knees at my feet. “Anerah… we have to do this.”
Anerah. He said my name.
“You don’t have enough strength to make the bond,” Dad said as he edged closer. He was about twelve feet from us.
Rhosyn jerked Bronwen and pressed the dagger tip to her throat.
Dad stopped and trained a hand in Rhosyn’s direction. He couldn’t fight both of them. We were stuck in a triangle, no one wanting to make the first move. Dad alone, Rhosyn holding Bronwen, and Yasbail yanking on me, with Cystenian at our feet.
Come on, Meuric!
“Anerah, sweetheart,” Rhosyn said. “Only one person has to die today. Don’t make Bronwen a casualty as well.”
“Hurry,” Yas said. “His light’s fading. He’s losing strength. Anerah, your light will heal Cystenian. You will both be completely healed when your light combines.”
I tried to keep Yasbail from ripping my hair out, but my chin was warm and burning and dripping with blood. My hand automatically swiped at it. The cut was gaping. With horror, I pressed my hand to it, staunching the blood flow.
“Bron,” Cystenian scraped forward, every single movement cutting his body open. “You’re so bright.” He crawled like a man dying of thirst toward her. His battered body must crave healing. It craved light. He was instinctively and deliriously going to the brightest source, his sister. “How… did you become… so bright?”
How had she become so luminous? I saw it now. Back from my training, I had studied her light and recognized its essence. It was different. The color deeper. Something had changed inside her.
Yasbail gave Cystenian a wide berth as he crawled toward Bron. Was Yasbail going to let him? What was everyone waiting for? All of us were bleeding. All eyes were on each other, scanning back and forth.
Nobody else moved until Yasbail broke the silence. “Cystenian’s injuries are extreme. Anerah”—she shoved me down beside him—“heal him.”
Cystenian gave up his slow progress and blindly pawed at my knee. He started to push himself over, so I helped him onto his back. He was going to give in, was he?
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said as I looked at Cystenian. He had to be in massive amounts of pain. His body was covered in blood. I couldn’t make out where one cut began and another ended.
Dad lifted his hands in surrender as he stepped closer. “I’ll help them.”
Yasbail lifted her arm offensively but said, “Go ahead. Coach her through it. You’d better hurry. He’s not doing too well.”
Rhosyn stayed away, keeping her dagger to Bronwen’s throat. Cystenian coughed, and blood stained his lips. The impact from his earlier hit must have caused internal bleeding.
“They don’t have to exchange light.” Bronwen squirmed as she spoke. “You can just heal Cystenian, Vaughan.”
Rhosyn drew her blade several inches across Bronwen’s clavicle. Bronwen screamed and stopped moving.
Dad dropped to his knees beside Cystenian. “Okay. Okay. Just stop, Rhosyn. Stop.”
I looked into Dad’s eyes as we knelt on either side of Cystenian.
“This is easy,” he said. “A bit uncomfortable, but easy.”
I nodded, too choked with tears and pain to open my mouth.
“Let me go, Anerah.” Cystenian’s eyes closed. “Let me go. Uffern can’t open, and I’m too far gone.”
Now he didn’t want to bond? Yasbail must have really messed with his head. “Nonsense.” I gingerly ran a finger along his cheek, too afraid that any more touch would hurt him. “Dad and I will fix you right up. Besides, Trysten needs you. I need you.”
“Trysten…” Cystenian mumbled.
Yasbail shoved her hand into my face, and her palm crackled with electricity. “Do it now.”
“All right. All right!” I couldn’t see what I was doing. I pawed at Cystenian’s chest as he groaned. “Dad, what do I do?”
He lifted my hand to my chest and placed it over my heart. “You have to envision yourself pulling your whole light out. The entire sphere.” Under different circumstances, I would say stall until Meuric gets through, but Cystenian is in bad shape. A bond will be the fastest way to heal him before he succumbs to his injuries.
Okay. So this was happening.
I swallowed as I turned my vision inward. I could see everything so clearly, just as the day Bronwen had coaxed me. My blue sun. I imagined my hand scooping my blue sun out of the hollow of my chest. At first the light wouldn’t give; it was firmly cemented in place. Then it loosened and tore away the more I pried. When the last fiber broke free, I gasped and curled in on myself as the light popped out of my chest and into my hand.
I panted, unable to draw a full breath. My head sw
am with dizziness. My darkness moved into the space in my heart-center, eager almost, as if it had been waiting for the light to leave.
Oh my gosh. I was all darkness! Without my light, I was cold, heavy, afraid.
I don’t want this! I don’t want to feel like this.
Dad?
I couldn’t hear him. Our bond was through our light, and my light was outside my chest.
My breath came in gasps.
Dad placed his hand on my shoulder. “It will be all right, Anerah. Hold on.”
I grimaced and nodded and shifted my focus, my panic, onto my swirling light. I needed something to ground me, something to erase the fear.
My orb was beautiful. Light in the palm of my hands. My light. I could appreciate its beauty even as the world around me, and in me, was falling apart.
I would get my light back after we bonded.
Just breathe.
“No,” Cystenian moaned.
Yasbail crouched lower. “Cystenian, we talked about this. Let Vaughan help you with your light.”
Dad nodded and placed Cystenian’s hand over his chest. “You’re going to pull, and I’ll help. You ultimately have to be the one to do it, but I can guide your light out.”
Cystenian’s head rolled side to side. Blood seeped from behind his head as sharp rocks cut him with each movement. “No. No.”
“Hold his head,” I cried out. “He’s hurting himself.”
Surprising me, Yasbail dropped to her knees and braced his head. Rhosyn let us know that this was no time for heroics by carving a curved line from Bronwen’s throat down her sternum. Bronwen shrieked so loud my hands supporting my light trembled.
Dad’s eyes held waves of sorrow as he met Bronwen’s. Tears rolled down her face.
Blood rolled down her chest.
As she whimpered softly, a heaviness in my chest grew. I gasped, unable to hold back my reaction. “Hurry.” The pain in my hollow chest from my lack of light was excruciating, but a blade carving up my chest would feel much worse.
Dad began pulling with his light, at least I assumed he was. I couldn’t sense anything with my light outside my chest.
A real fear took hold of me. What if my light never returned? Would I feel as if I was falling through a black hole for the rest of my life?
Please please please hurry, I chanted.
Yasbail was crooning softly. “Yes, lift with him. That’s right, Cystenian.” Her lips continued to move, but no words came out. Cystenian had ceased fighting her. He was pliant and calm in her embrace. Did she have some sort of hold on him? A bond? I would kill her if she’d bonded with him. “You have to be quick once his light emerges,” she said to me. “His body will fail him quickly.”
As Dad pulled Cystenian’s hands away to allow his light to emerge, a fire-colored sphere, mottled with gold, burst from Cystenian’s chest.
His exhalations rasped in his throat, shallow and frightening.
He was on his last few breaths.
I wasn’t sure what to do, but my light reached for Cystenian’s, so I slid my hand forward until our hands touched. Then instantly, before I could blink, our lights stretched toward each other and sucked together, as if a vacuum was drawing them up. Our two baseball-sized lights became one huge volleyball of swirling color.
Our two separate lights had become something completely new.
“No, Anerah.” Cystenian gasped, and his hands dropped slack to his sides. “We can’t…”
“Now!” Yasbail pushed me on top of Cystenian, smashing the ball of light between us.
Cystenian and I inhaled as if we were starved of air. Yasbail held me down. As half of the ball entered my chest and half entered Cystenian’s, my spiritual sight came back. I watched as our lights split and became two perfect orbs, equal and identical in form, color, and beauty.
We were now spiritually connected. I felt a oneness with Cystenian as if I had been awakened from a deep sleep. We had yet to connect mentally, and I felt that lack, but the wholeness from our spiritual connection enveloped me.
A heat blossomed in my center, streaked to my toes, and lifted into my scalp. I sensed the same thing happening in Cystenian. As our light swept through him—I had to call it our light, because it was one in purpose—his body healed with a ferocity. My inner sight watched his ripped flesh jump together and his broken leg mend.
A scream tore from Cystenian as the heat intensified, from the rapid healing of flesh searing together. The burning was not in the sense of causing injury, this I understood, because I felt it too.
As Cystenian’s body arched upward against mine, I jerked back as healing burned through me. My cuts sealed in mere seconds. The obsidian shards stuck in my body dropped onto Cystenian.
Then we were healed. It was done.
FIFTY
Cystenian and I were one. He was essentially my husband in the eyes of the emrys. I threw myself over his body, not willing to release him.
Yasbail hovered over Cystenian and me. All she had to do was kill one of us.
I cried as I pulled myself toward Cystenian’s face. I washed him in tears. His arms came around me, and he held me.
I could feel him. I felt his love. He truly loved me!
Which meant he remembered me.
He had his memories!
I buried my face in his neck, so happy we were alive and healed and together. This was as it should be. I felt so full. Never in my life had my heart felt so full.
And so full of dread.
I would not let him go. I would not let Yasbail have him. She would have to come through me.
“Why’d you do it?” Cystenian whispered in my ear. “Why’d you do it, Anerah?” His tears wet my cheek and mingled with our blood.
“I had to. I had to.”
I searched for his lips through my tears. He held my face as I finally found him and kissed him as my husband.
Our victory was sweet, and oh so bitter.
And tasted like blood.
Not exactly how I imagined our first kiss as a bonded couple.
“I won’t let them open the portal,” Cystenian whispered once our mouths separated.
“That’s enough, love birds,” Yasbail said. “I’m sorry, but we have to get on with it.”
I lifted my head. “Over my dead body.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that.” Yasbail jerked me up.
I screamed as I reached for Cystenian and she dragged me away. “Don’t hurt him!”
“I’m not going to hurt him.”
It was then that I realized she was dragging me to the seal. I thrashed in her arms and screeched.
Beyond her shoulder, I could see Dad kneeling next to Cystenian. As he pushed to his feet, Cystenian clasped a shard of obsidian as long as a dagger. Dad rose beside him.
Yasbail shoved me against the stone entrance. She whipped a gleaming blade from a sheath at her hip and raised the blade to my throat.
Rhosyn gasped. “Yas!”
Cystenian shouted, “Yasbail, stop!”
“Do you want to take her place, Cystenian?” Yasbail didn’t take her bloodthirsty eyes off me.
Beyond her, Meuric and his men had opened a hole the size of a head in the dome. When Meuric reached through the gap, Yasbail shoved my head back, making me cry out. “Don’t try it, Father. I’ll kill her before you hit me.”
They worked to make the hole larger. How much time did we have until they rushed in, and how would Meuric intervene with me in harm’s way?
Yasbail had us.
They had won.
Cystenian glared at Yasbail. “I won’t let you open the seal.” His eyes glowed with light as he stirred his inner power. I felt it all as if he were in me, as if we were one. What did he plan on doing?
“Cystenian, it’s okay,” I yelled, trying to be brave. Now that he was healed, I didn’t want him hurt. “Just go home. Take care of Trysten. She needs you.”
Cystenian squeezed the shard in his hand. “I see a way around t
his.” A dreadful feeling overtook me, saturated in sorrow. It was coming through our bond. “Anerah, Bronwen, forgive me.”
He whirled toward Dad and shoved the makeshift obsidian blade under Dad’s ribcage.
Dad gasped, taken by surprise, his eyes round. He could do nothing but bow over his attacker. Cystenian thrust the shard higher, twisting it into Dad’s chest.
An anguished wail tore from me, but it paled in comparison to the scream from Bronwen. She clutched her chest as her voice became a silent shriek of agony as if the blade had pierced her own heart.
I clawed at Yasbail, wanting to get to Dad, wanting to help him, but she held me back, the knife nicking my skin whenever I shifted. A warped smile distorted her face.
Cystenian did not release my father. He did not remove the weapon. Dad collapsed against Cystenian, and he lowered him onto the ground.
Dad’s chest did not move.
Bronwen was hysterical. Her face covered in tears and snot. Her words incomprehensible as she fought to be free from Rhosyn. Obviously shocked, Rhosyn let Bronwen go, and she rushed over to Dad.
“What did you do? What did you do?” Bronwen shrieked at Cystenian. She dove with her light, trying to heal Dad’s wound.
It had been fatal.
Dad held no more light.
I couldn’t understand why. I stared at Cystenian, horrified.
“It’s no use, Bron.” Cystenian touched her shoulder with a bloody hand, but she shoved him off. “He’s gone. I’m sorry. I had to do it.”
Why? Why did he have to kill my father?
Nothing made sense in my head. I was staring. I was seeing, but my brain wasn’t processing.
Had that really happened?
The man I loved had killed my father.
Cystenian’s body sagged. His shoulders slumped. His head hung. Did he regret his actions?
Anger sliced through me, twitching my muscles. My face burned hot. I struggled against Yasbail.
Then, without warning, Cystenian buckled, and I jolted—with alarm, with worry, with fear.
His knees gave out under him, and he dropped to all fours. Like a demon-possessed body, Cystenian’s back arched, and he twisted as if he were in torment. Sweat broke out across his bare skin. His mouth twisted in a tortured expression.