by Bella Jacobs
Or stopping.
Two skeletons break through the fire, glowing horns aimed at Wren’s heart, and my thoughts race a thousand miles a minute, quickly evaluating the situation. Dust is battling the other dragon in the sky overhead, Kite is in grizzly form, barely holding his own against another wave of zombies, Creedence isn’t fit to fight, and my gun won’t do shit to stop a skeleton.
My brain zips through the facts to the obvious conclusion. There’s only one chance, so I take it.
Pulling away from Cree, I rip out of my human form in a series of agonizing jerks, letting out the creature prowling beneath my skin, begging him not to hurt her.
But to help her. To protect her at any cost.
It’s been seven years—seven long, caged, miserable years—and my wolf is pissed. I hold onto my human brain long enough to feel the wolf’s rage, burning through my nerve endings and clutching at my jaw, and then I’m gone, sucked beneath the waves as the monster takes control.
Chapter 38
Wren
Luke’s wolf is as beautiful as he is—ebony with a single patch of gray on the shoulder—and every bit as dangerous. He tears into the skeletons bearing down on me, scattering bones in every direction.
One hits me in the temple, sending a flash of pain through my head, but it’s not enough to put me out. I’m made of tougher stuff, but I’m not sure about the women behind me.
As Luke continues to savage the charred remains of the unicorns I’ve burned, I shout to Thisby and Delilah. “Run! Back through the harem.” I jab a finger toward the door. Aside from a dragon corpse, they’ve got a clear shot if they go now.
With one last glance my way, one filled with compassion and a faith I’m not sure I deserve, Thisby dashes away, dodging bones and jumping the dragon’s neck before disappearing inside. Several other women follow her, but not Delilah.
She shakes her head as she reaches beneath her robe. “I’m still his. I’m not free.” Before I can promise to get her to Millicent, even if I have to shift into dragon form to do it, she draws a knife from under her clothes, points the tip at her chest and falls forward, burying it in her own heart.
“No!” I run to her, falling to my knees beside her and rolling her gently onto her back. But it’s no use. I’m too late. The knife is buried all the way to the hilt, and her chest is already covered in blood.
“Remember, you’re stronger than he is,” she says, her voice tight and her breath hitching. “Your dream. Make it…” The light goes out of her eyes before she can finish, adding another soul to the list of casualties of Atlas’s reign of devastation.
A ragged sob bursts from my throat, and I rise to my feet, ready to burn every last one of Atlas’s pets to ash, but there are too many of them. They’re everywhere now, swarming in through both sides of the greenhouse, trampling the plants and the fallen bodies of the wives not lucky enough to gain their freedom before the attack.
Luke is keeping them at bay—for now—and so is Kite, but if either of them falls, Creedence is finished. Dust is too busy with the dragons to do anything but try to keep the rest of us from being set on fire.
It’s already too much, and Atlas and the fairy archers haven’t even gotten to the party yet. This isn’t my dream, it’s my nightmare, and I have no idea how to make it anything else.
Make it…
Create it…
So far, I haven’t been creating anything. I’ve been reacting to Atlas’s creations, dealing with the obstacles he’s thrown in my path.
But what if…
Glancing down at my hands, I draw harder on our mate bond than ever before, pulling their energies into me, through me, as I imagine my fingertips turning into beads of water and dropping from the end of my hand. I visualize it the same way I visualize a shift into another form, but I’m still shocked—and a little disturbed—when it happens, when pieces of my skin and bone plop onto the ground to tremble at my feet, waiting to be told what to do next.
Breath rushing out, I glance up, spotting the biggest group of zombie-corns. They’re swarming around Kite, who’s batting them away with powerful swings of his arms, but it’s only a matter of time before he’s overrun. Trusting my intuition, I will the tiny pieces of myself forward, dreaming them into something born to fight the darkness.
A beat later, silver unicorns with wide, feathered wings burst into life, spiraling into being from the pieces of myself I’ve sent out to protect us.
“Get down!” I shout. Kite ducks with only a second to spare, and my creations leap over him, driving their glittering horns into the throats of the first lines of enemies. The zombie-corns disintegrate on contact with their stronger, healthier counterparts, rot and green fluid spilling from their wounds.
Heart lifting, I will my beauties onward and set about dreaming new allies into life. I dream up an ice dragon with white scales and blue fire that freezes on contact and send it soaring into the sky to help Dust with the dragons. Then I set to work on smaller, sleeker allies, putting the finishing touches on a dozen black jaguars, designed to blend into the night, and willing them through the jagged glass to deal with the torches moving onto the wide balcony beyond the greenhouse.
A few fiery arrows make their way in through the shattered ceiling, but it isn’t long before screams rip through the night and the arrows stop.
I pause, breathing hard in the sudden stillness, drunk on the shift of fortune and wondering what I should make next. A glance down at my hands reveals my fingertips have replenished themselves again, the way they did after the Pegasus and the dragon. And I don’t feel the slightest bit depleted. If I had to, I could shift into any one of my forms without needing to call any of those pieces of myself back home.
“Is everyone okay?” I spin to check on the others to find myself…alone.
Dread dumping into my chest, I keep turning, searching the ground and the sky and every place in between. “Dust? Creedence?” A horrible suspicion blooms in my head, but I push it away, praying for an answer as I call, “Kite! Luke!”
But they’re gone.
No, not gone…
I glance down at my hands, fingers wavering as my eyes swim with tears. I pulled too hard and now…they’re here. With me, but not in the way they were before.
I look up to see my ice dragon flying away toward the lake. But my winged unicorns are still here, standing shoulder to shoulder behind me as my dark and deadly cats creep back into the greenhouse through the holes in the glass, returning from their mission accomplished.
And they are all beautiful and strong, fierce and merciful, but none of them are my mates.
I look into their eyes and see love, but I also see…myself. I’m the force animating these creatures, and when I draw them back into me, I will still be all that’s left.
I swallow hard, fighting the wave of misery and regret rising inside of me.
This is what Delilah and Thisby meant. This…
This horrible, wonderful, irreversible thing.
“They’re a part of you now,” a soft, sad voice says from the other side of the greenhouse.
It’s him.
Atlas.
Chapter 39
Wren
Tears streaming down my cheeks, I look up to see a tired old man standing slumped amidst the wreckage. Behind him, smoke rises from a stand of palm trees that caught a blast of dragon fire. Green sludge covers the ground at his feet, and his beard—once more pepper than salt—has gone completely white.
“How does it feel?” He shuffles forward, squinting in the first pale light of morning streaming in from behind me.
It’s too early for the sun to rise, at least in the human realm, but this is about more than the cycle of day and night. This is about life and death, disintegration and rebirth. Ending and beginning.
But how can I begin like this?
Without them?
“I could never merge with them, my mates,” Atlas continues, his voice thin and strained. He lifts a trembling
hand, blocking the sun from his eyes. “It’s…beautiful.”
I blink, more tears falling, dripping onto the ground. One of the jaguars appears at my side, lapping the drops away from the stones with a pink tongue before rolling onto his back, gazing up at me with golden eyes that remind me of Cree’s.
But they aren’t Cree’s; they’re a mirror into my own heart, where each of the men I loved left his mark. If I squint hard enough, I can see reflections, beautiful memories dancing in that golden gaze. I sense that, someday, that will be enough.
But today is not that day.
Today, the weight of what I’ve lost is too heavy. I want to fall to my knees beside my cat, call the rest of my creatures to me, and blanket myself in their warmth. I want to hold them close and cry until I’m unconscious, until I fall deep enough asleep to hide from the truth, at least for a little while.
Instead, I crouch down, scratching the jaguar’s silky scruff for a moment before I rise again, step over the purring cat, and start toward Atlas.
“But I had a good run.” He smiles as he watches me approach, his now-hollow cheeks stretching to bare what’s left of his teeth. “No, not good. But it’s all right. It’s not too late for you to make things better.”
It seems like it’s so often the way of things—that the wicked only see their folly, the cruel joke they’ve played on the world and themselves, when it’s too late to make any difference. Unexpectedly, I sense that Atlas will find peace on the other side, where all things—the light and the dark, the good and the evil, the beautiful and the monstrous—converge to swirl in the primordial soup until the time comes to find physical form once more.
For a moment, it gives me pause.
After all he’s done, after all the evil and the misery he’s visited upon the innocent, he deserves punishment and suffering. Peace is too good for him.
It’s too good for all of us. But that doesn’t matter. Peace is still destined to be ours. It’s the universal gift of grace. We can refuse or postpone it, but eventually we get to go home, to be safe, to be whole.
And it’s not my place or my mission to be an instrument of suffering. Atlas is broken, his kingdom is mine, and he can do no more harm to the world or anything in it.
I’ve won, and the time for fighting and death is over.
I gaze down my nose at the shrunken old man before me, so frail now that it’s hard to imagine that he was ever a serious threat, let alone the most fearsome creature the world has ever known.
In the end, defeating him was almost ridiculously easy.
And impossibly hard.
“I don’t care where you go,” I say, voice soft. “But you will leave this realm immediately, take any living allies with you, and never come back.”
His eyes shine. “Too late for that. But please… Forgive me?” He reaches for me.
I step back before his fingers can brush my arm.
There’s room in my heart for acceptance, but not forgiveness.
Not now, maybe not ever.
“Leave,” I rasp. “Now. Before I change my mind about throwing you in the pit with the spores.”
Atlas shrinks even more at the threat, his withered old bones trembling. And then, with one final sigh, he crumbles, turning to dust at my feet, the powdery remains mixing with the zombie glop to make a sludge that gleams toxic green in the morning sun.
Chapter 40
Wren
Leaving my creatures behind in the greenhouse, I step out through a pane of shattered glass to watch the sun finish rising over the mountains.
Atlas is dead, and starting from this glowing, glittering moment, the Fata Morgana throne belongs to a decent being who will do everything in her power to reverse the damage he inflicted upon our world and its people.
But I’m too shattered to relish our victory.
The cost was too great.
Once upon a time not so long ago, winning felt like the most important thing in the world.
But now…
I hang my head, lips peeling away from my teeth as my shoulders begin to shake, but I don’t make a sound. I swallow it down, letting my sobs get sucked into the black hole, too, until it feels like my chest is caving in, my heart liquefying under the horrible pressure.
How am I going to go on without them?
How can I sit on that throne and do good when the best parts of me are gone? And yes, they are still woven into my soul, so inextricable from my being that I will never walk a step without them with me in spirit.
But I don’t want them with me in spirit. I want their smiles and their voices and their laughter. I want their hands and their kisses and their bodies close in the night. I want to reach out and know that there are always arms to hold me and loved ones for me to hold.
I want the babies Creedence and I saw.
But those babies are another casualty left bleeding on the field of battle. They aren’t lying on the ground beside Delilah and the other women who didn’t make it out in time, but they might as well be. I can see them, each sweet face, those cherub cheeks, those eyes that will never open, already closed forever.
My heart twists sickly in my chest, and suddenly, I understand how a monster like Atlas could be made.
Nothing matters to me the way it mattered before. Even thoughts of my parents and sister—still alive and needing me to give them a world worth living in—do little to turn my thoughts from the darkness. And those innocent people who, just hours ago, I was so willing to make sacrifices to save?
Fuck the innocent people.
They aren’t Kite, Dust, Luke, and Creedence. They aren’t the men I loved, the men I lost. The men I destroyed without even realizing what I was doing.
Now I’ll never see them again. They’re gone without even the chance to say goodbye…
I can’t stand it. Can’t stand myself. Can’t bear this reality where I am here and they are gone, all because I was arrogant enough to think I could have salvation without sacrifice.
I lift my face to the sun, but inside, I stand at the edge of a black, sucking void, staring into its dark heart. It would be so easy to tumble in, to let go and fall into the emptiness where everything is cold and numb.
Frozen hearts don’t beat, but they don’t break, either. They don’t tear themselves apart, rip themselves down the center in unbearable agony.
If I were really a hero, I wouldn’t so much as consider it. But I’m no hero.
I’m a girl playing dress-up, who forgot her feathers were glued on with wax and flew too close to the sun.
A wolf howls from the near distance, its call wild and raw, but I don’t hurry back inside or will my creations into the forest to rid my kingdom of any Kin Born stupid enough to linger in the woods.
Let the Kin Born find me and kill me.
Or maybe I’ll kill them, instead. Kill all of them, everything and everyone that threatens my safety. Anyone I feel like killing. Just because. Because I can. Because there’s no one powerful enough to stop me. Because I’m now the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the block.
Does it matter whether I choose peace or chaos? Love or hate?
The numbness is within easy reach now. I could draw it around my shoulders, and never have to feel anything like this again.
But when I close my eyes, I don’t see the void. I see Kite’s eyes, the kindest, most understanding eyes in the entire world. Dust’s hands—little Dust and grown-up Dust—both of them so generous and selflessly devoted. Luke’s arms, strong and capable and ready to pick me up whenever I fall, no matter how many times I hit the ground. And finally, Cree’s smile, that happy-in-spite-of-all-the-sad-he’d-seen smile that I recognize now as the act of courage and defiance it always was.
Creedence had seen the world end in a thousand different horrible ways, but he still reached out and grabbed joy with both hands. He still loved and laughed and made stupid jokes because that was his gift as much as the power of sight. He never let go of hope or laughter, and he never let go of me
, not even at the bitter end.
And if a man that strong and beautiful and wise thought I was worthy of his devotion, who the hell am I to prove him wrong? To prove any of them wrong?
Smearing the tears from my cheeks with the backs of my hands, I pull in a deep breath, roll my shoulders back, and turn my back on the void. Forever.
I turn to face the forest, still gloomy with early morning shadows and shrouded by the mist rising off the lake. Summoning the flame always smoldering inside my bones, I lift my hands overhead, shooting fire into the air in a long, steady stream as I call out in a voice loud enough to carry across the water, “Atlas is dead. Leave now or die with him. There is no place for the Kin Born in this realm.”
The only answer is a single, anguished howl. It sounds like the same wolf who cried out before, but closer now, nearly to the base of the hill below the castle.
It has a unique call, so raw in its suffering and rage that it sounds almost human.
But of course, it isn’t. The Kin Born forfeited their humanity when they decided to wipe out thousands of people for the sin of being different than they are. I’m sick of killing, my stomach knotted and churning at the thought of more violence, but if I have to kill the only Kin Born wolf stupid enough to stay and fight me, I will.
And then…
And then, I’ll go back to the vampires. Tell them that we won and that I want my sister back. And if Scarlett is still alive, she’ll help me figure out how to best honor the memories of all the people we’ve lost.
Gathering the flame shooting from my raised palms into a ball of fire, I stalk closer to the edge of the wide patio, arriving at the marble barrier surrounding it as the wolf calls again, so close it lifts the hairs on the back of my neck.
After everything I’ve been through in the past week, all the battles and betrayals, and the besting of a monster almost no one believed I could destroy, a single wolf shouldn’t scare me. But this one does. He sounds so lost and angry, so desperate and in pain that it’s going to hurt to kill him.