“What honor would there be in killing a person who is already down?” Cruz’s head was bent toward his mother’s prostrate form. “I will give you a ten-second head start.”
My heart thudded. He was going to fight her. What if he missed? What if Lyoh—
“Silas, shift,” Ace ordered.
The large man growled as black smoke cloaked his human form, as his web of bones reassembled, as his muscles swelled, as his skin blackened. Hunters, Unseelies, and lucionaga moved out of his way. He roared and stretched out his fibrous wings. They were broader than Lyoh’s had been. All of him was larger than she’d been.
“You have five minutes, Cruz,” Ace said. “And if you haven’t finished her off by then, Silas will fly.”
Cruz nodded just as the hunters lifted all the chains at once. Lyoh scrambled backward, mud squishing beneath her lacerated body, head swinging left and right.
“Ten…nine…” Cruz started counting.
“You think you’ve made the world better, don’t you?” she snarled at us. “I welcome death, for I have no desire to live in a world where order and laws have been banished. Your system will fail.”
“…eight…seven…” Cruz continued.
“You say you want to rule differently, Ace, but if you make a show of my death, how does that set you apart from your father?”
“I would take to the sky, Lyoh.” Ace’s voice was pleasant, but sharp, like spikes covered in silk. “Unless you’d rather die in a cupola. That could also be arranged.”
I cringed at the word.
“…six…five…”
“You soil the Wood name.”
“Do I?” Ace grinned. “Yet I am the last male carrying the name not mixed into the soil.”
“…four…three…”
Even though she was no longer a dragon, she chuffed and pushed off the ground, rocketing toward the copse of calimbors.
“…two…” On one, Cruz was airborne.
My neck cracked as I followed his ascent.
Lyoh spun as her son approached. Waited. Dust glittered in her hands.
“You didn’t confiscate her dust!” I yelled at Gregor.
He side-eyed Ace. “Cruz wanted a fair fight.”
I turned my attention back to the two soaring faeries.
A body swung from Lyoh’s hands. The head bent at a terrible angle. A scream rose out of me as I scanned the crowd.
Who’d she taken?
Who’d she killed?
Ace brushed a hand over my cold cheek. “It’s an illusion, Cat.”
Cruz froze in midair as he faced the swinging body. Even though they were high up, I swore I could detect a smile curling over Lyoh’s lips.
Whose body had she fashioned with her dust?
The answer came to me as violently as the current that had traversed Cruz’s body in the glades. Jacobiah. It had to be Cruz’s father. The body crumbled, and her dust changed form. It became a sword. She flew toward her still stunned son. I felt Ace stand taller next to me, felt his spine straighten, felt a jolt go through his bones.
“Move,” I whispered underneath my breath. Move.
Cruz wasn’t moving.
Why wasn’t he moving?
“Cruz!” I yelled.
My scream must’ve awakened him from his stupor, because he flung his body sideways and dropped several feet just as Lyoh’s blade pierced the piece of air in which he’d been hovering. I watched his hands, waiting for him to gather his dust.
“Why isn’t he shaping a weapon?” My voice was blistered with worry.
“I don’t know.” Ace’s gaze clung to his friend’s bobbing figure.
What was he doing up there? Talking?
Fuck their five-minute rule. If Cruz didn’t fight, he wouldn’t last a human minute up there.
A chill went through me.
Was that his plan? To sacrifice himself to get Lily back inside? He knew Ace or Silas would finish off Lyoh, whatever happened to him.
The second the theory hit my mind, it took unshakable roots.
I whipped my face around the crowd. I needed a weapon. Or could I send my dust that high up? I didn’t have the luxury of time to experiment. The quiver strapped to Magena’s back held a bow and arrows. I lurched toward the huntress and filched her bow and a single arrow.
She let out a little gasp that broke people from the spell of the terrible show overhead. I raced toward the nearest calimbor and raced up the spirals. I climbed so fast, the stairs blurred underneath my feet. Splinters pierced my bare soles. Instead of slowing me, the pain propelled me forward.
Mother and son moved, dipped, twirled, rose higher. When their voices became clear, I stopped, positioned the bow, and nocked the arrow.
Maybe I should’ve taken more than one, but I doubted I’d get more than one shot.
Lyoh and Cruz hadn’t noticed me in their faceoff. His hands were still bare of dust, while hers gripped her gleaming sword that seemed to have grown longer, sharper.
I closed one eye, pulled my arm back.
My muscles sang as the string strained.
I shut out the world.
Inhaled a breath.
And then I waited.
My shaking fingers stilled.
My eyesight narrowed to a single point.
I should’ve taken Lily up on her idea of training on moving targets. It would’ve come in handy.
A dark smile curved my lips as I raised the bow a fraction of an inch higher.
I let the arrow fly.
67
The Last Bargain
My arrow soared through the silent, violet air, its tip gleaming in the starlight.
Cruz blinked at it. Then at me.
Sensing her son’s faltering attention, Lyoh shoved her sword toward his chest.
Before it could breach Cruz’s skin, my arrow met its mark.
The sword melted into shimmery ribbons as the iron arrow tip speared Lyoh’s back, right between those sharp shoulder blades that had once transformed into monstrous wings.
She fell.
Fell.
Fell.
And then she hit solid ground so hard that a body made of anything but fire would’ve shattered.
“I’m not letting you die. Not today. Not tomorrow,” I yelled at Cruz.
He didn’t answer, but he understood.
“I didn’t dip the arrow in my blood. But help me God, skies, and Great Spirits, if you don’t finish her off right now, I will.”
“You still owe me a gajoï.”
“I’m not letting her live.”
“That’s not what I was going to claim…”
I sucked in a breath. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare ask me to kill you or to stand by you while you take your own life.”
He was now so close I could see his pupils throb. “Lily won’t be able to come back if—”
I took a step back from the wooden handrail. “She still has three months. We’ll find a way.”
Cruz pinned a silent, sullen gaze on me.
Below us, the crowd had shifted and were circling Lyoh’s prostrate body. Ace’s face was turned upward. He didn’t take to the skies, but I felt him ready to spring.
“Fine.” Cruz’s word had me lifting my head back up. “But if you don’t find a solution, know that I will end my life. With or without your help.”
Cruz flew me back down.
Only then did I realize how high I’d climbed. How quickly I’d moved. Ley had once told me I would have to make a choice between my two natures on a Blue Moon, but she’d lied.
I needn’t choose.
I was both.
I felt it in the marrow of my spine that I was as much Unseelie as I was Daneelie. I felt it like I now felt the blistering pain on the bottom of my feet. I didn’t have to look down to know they were as bloodied as my arm.
Once we landed, Cruz walked toward his mother.
The rowan wood arrow had skewered her chest. Smoke whooshed from the wound.<
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I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
My feet. My poor feet.
“May the skies damn you, Catori Wood,” she hissed.
Her curse startled me less than the name she’d given me: Catori Wood.
An arm wrapped around my waist. “Don’t worry, our skies cannot hear her anymore.” Ace kissed my temple.
“That’s not—” I didn’t finish my sentence.
As understanding dawned on him, his irises churned. He didn’t say anything. Just studied my face. Studied what the name did to me.
When I winced, hurt thinned his lips.
“My feet,” I whispered.
He crouched and made me show him my shredded soles. He shook his head, then scooped me into his arms.
“Thank you.” I leaned my cheek against his chest and sighed a thousand sighs rolled into one.
His arms tightened around me.
In silence, we all watched Cruz kneel next to his mother. “I will never forget you, mother. Never forget the way you tormented so many innocents. Never forget how you murdered my father. Never forget how you abandoned me with Borgo because I was too much of a hindrance. I will never forget how I tried so desperately to make you take notice of me, to make you proud. I am sorry that I was such a disappointment.”
Lyoh’s eyes were on the skies above and her lips immobile. If she was listening to her son, she didn’t let it show. Maybe she was in too much pain to hear him.
“I don’t know what happened to make you so cruel, but I hope that if there is an afterlife, you will get to start over and become a better person.” Ribbons of dust danced over Cruz’s palm. He shaped them into a long strip of silken fabric.
Her recessed eyes finally rolled up to her son’s puckered brow, and my heartbeat slowed.
Would he have the courage to end her life?
Was it cruel to let him do it alone?
Cruz wadded the dust-made fabric into a ball, pried Lyoh’s mouth open, and delicately stuffed it inside.
Her eyelashes fluttered higher, and then, slowly, they closed over the windows to her murky soul.
Silence enveloped the forest, buffeted the moss, the branches, the leaves.
It seemed like it took hours for her fire to burn out. Perhaps it only took minutes. Time was strange in Neverra.
A small rumble escaped Cruz when the breeze began combing away her grayed body, whisking her away, layer after layer. He unfurled his hunched body, and head lowered, he walked away, his dust reeling back into his closed fist.
I watched him recede across the dark land, torn between letting him grieve on his own and going to him.
But how could I go to him when I couldn’t even walk?
Ace called Negongwa. The ancient hunter came to us.
Ace nodded to my arm. “My fire cannot heal her wounds. Maybe your blood will work?”
Negongwa smiled, then pulled an arrow from his quiver and sliced his palm with the iron tip. As he pressed his hand against my tattered soles, his creased face, Ace’s solid arms, the forest of giant trees, the hushed conversations, my broken body…they all vanished into a soundless, lightless chasm.
68
The Impostor
I came to as violently as a child ripped from her mother’s womb, as brutally as a person awakening from a nightmare.
Had last night been a nightmare?
I crushed the bedsheets between my fingers as I lurched off the bed, stumbling on legs that felt as flimsy as a newborn foal’s. Surprisingly, they carried me to the enormous curved pane of glass that leaked sunlight over Ace’s apartment.
My feet didn’t hurt. I lifted them and stared at the unblemished skin.
Had I imagined last night?
I pressed my palms to the window and gazed out over Neverra. The land looked different without the mist—greener, browner, bluer. I sought out the ruined palace, but found no trace of it. The faeries must’ve burned it away during the night. A large square moved.
The floating garden.
The desire to destroy it thumped against my breastbone, but I’d destroyed enough last night. “Why didn’t you fall like the castle?” I whispered to it.
“Because its soil is made of ground volitor fronds,” said a deep voice.
I spun.
Ace soared off the glass guardrail and sank through the air toward me. He was clean and golden and…happy. A smile glinted off his teeth, blinding like the sunlight now warming my back.
“Last night…” I licked my lips. “It was real?”
His smile grew, jeweled his eyes. “It was.” He approached on noiseless footsteps, then slid a hand beneath my loose hair that felt smooth and clean, that smelled of musk and lavender. Someone had washed me. I lowered my gaze to my forearm, remembering the blood that had dripped from it.
My breath snagged, and I flung my gaze back up to Ace’s, whose smile turned a little crooked, or maybe it was the world that was turning crooked, tipping like it had last night.
Ace rubbed the new whorls of ink decorating my forearm. The skin felt tender even though the little slices had been healed.
“How—”
“How did we patch you up, or how did you get the new tattoo?”
“Both.”
He traced the shifting navy dust with the tip of his forefinger. “Negongwa spread his blood over your cuts. As to how you got the new tattoo…” He dragged in a heavy breath. “Remember when you were clinging to my cage?” His eyes darkened, shifting from aquamarine to cobalt. “A lucionaga attacked you with his dust, and you captured it.”
The memory jolted through me like an electrical current.
“He’s dead. Silas caught him after”—he swallowed hard—“after he knocked you off.”
Ace was still tracing my new tattoo, and his gentle touch dotted my skin. I removed my arm from his reach and nursed it against me.
He cocked his head to the side, but didn’t try to bridge the distance I’d put between our bodies.
“I’m still mad about the cage,” I said.
“I know.”
“Don’t ever do that to me again. Ever. I have so many other sources of anger inside of me that making me fear for your life was cruel.”
“Sweetheart. Please forgive me. Forgive me.” He cupped my trembling jaw and fit his mouth to mine. Perhaps it was to ease the tremble, or perhaps it was to reassure me, or perhaps it was just to kiss me.
My heart and mind were a mess of emotions, but I kissed him back, my fingers crushing the fabric of his black tunic.
After a long moment, I pulled away, and we breathed each other’s ragged breaths in silence.
Ace watched me like a hawk as Veroli returned with my jeans and a long-sleeved black top. She’d tried to make me wear a dress, but I refused the unsubstantial bands of fabric. I wanted something solid and simple.
A cloth for mourning. Not a cloth for rejoicing.
Besides, I was returning to Rowan today. I needed human clothes, not a fancy gown.
“I still don’t see why you can’t wear a dress. You are the—”
Ace’s hard gaze stopped Veroli midsentence.
“What am I?”
Ace’s jaw worked. Nerves ticked. Finally, he said, “The savior.”
“People died because of me,” I deadpanned. “I am a killer, but I am no savior.”
Veroli gasped. But not Ace. His mouth stayed perfectly still. As still as his gaze.
After she’d tied my hair in a low ponytail and supplied me with my sneakers, she left to find Gregor.
“He wore white last night.” It wasn’t a question.
“He did.”
“He was on our side?”
“He’s the one who called all the lucionaga away from the portals right after the Cauldron bound us. That’s how the hunters managed to get in.”
“With the pages from the book?”
He nodded.
“We’re really married?”
Another nod.
“And you’re the king?”
He tipped his head in assent.
“What about your mother?”
“She’s alive but she abdicated. Left us in charge.”
I lowered my gaze to the rippling expanse beyond the window. Us… “I can’t be queen.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m…I’m…”
“You’re what?”
I whipped my gaze toward him. “Because I’m human.”
The corners of his stiff lips finally budged. “And here I thought I’d married a girl who was half Daneelie and half Unseelie.”
“And half human.”
“I’m no math whiz, but I do believe that’s one too many halves.” His smile had broadened.
I tossed my hands in the air. “Oh. You know what I mean.”
“No.” He grew serious. “I don’t think I do know what you mean.”
“Ace, look at me. I’m not queen material.”
“I’m looking at you, like I looked at you last night, like I plan on looking at you for the rest of my life. Never has a woman deserved to be queen more than you, Catori Wood.”
The tips of my ears flushed bright as he stepped closer, gripped the back of my head, and angled my face toward his.
“I feel like an impostor.” My chest swelled with heartbeats. “Our marriage was a ruse. It wasn’t real.”
Emotion lanced behind his luminous irises. “It was real.”
“I’m twenty, Ace. I can’t be married at twenty. How will I explain it to my father?”
“Were you planning on going home and pretending none of this happened?”
My breath caught in my throat, which felt suddenly as tight as a wire.
He spun my rigid body toward the window and gestured below. “These people rely on you now. They are your people.” He banded his arms around my stomach. “Neverra needs you. I need you.”
69
A New Order
Gregor and Silas arrived soon after.
As Ace met with the new draca in the loft to discuss something, Gregor joined me by the window. He pressed his hand over my skin, and I jolted from the searing heat.
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