Page 106 of Night of Death and Flowers

I can still save her.

Ari’s voice reaches me from the table. “I’ll come back. They promised. I know you don’t understand it now, but I am atoning for both our sins. I’ll make everything right…”

Her words are lost to my screams as the dagger is plunged into her chest. Confusion sweeps her features as she looks at Dephina, her lips parting as her brows crease for the last time.

“NO!”

Rage courses through me as I hammer against the shadows, every anguished scream lost to the adrenaline in my veins. Time stretches for an eternity, the world falling into slow motion as I watch blood spatters over them like a painting.

I blink, suddenly aware of my soul as I look through the eyes of my body, feeling detached from it. Nothing feels real. My lips part, and I’m not breathing.

This isn’t happening. It must be a nightmare. I need to wake up.

Dephina carves Arabella’s chest, the blade grinding against bone. They’re working on her as if she is some animal brought in for slaughter.

Ari’s fingers twitch over the side of the altar, and I’m aware of every tiny movement. It’s too late.

I don’t move, staying motionless, my mouth open.

Her name is faint in my mind, swallowed by another—dead.

My sister is dead. Everything goes silent for a soul-shattering moment.

Ari. My baby sister. No.

A blood-curdling scream leaves my mouth, the permanence of what they just did rolling into my mind. I’m so cold.

I clamp my eyes shut as if I may hold on to some semblance of the past before she was dead.

I lower my head as a howl erupts from the pits of my stomach, each breath held as I wail, unable to speak, to think.

She’s gone.

I choke on another, visceral, soul-crushing wail as the pressure of the grief crumbles everything inside of me. Desperation has me reaching out for something tangible to break, to shatter in my fingers. I don’t want to believe it, and when I look up through blurred eyes, I am forced to watch as they drop her red, still beating heart into the basket.

Bile rises in my throat, burning my tongue. Nausea bubbles in my stomach, sweat dripping from my forehead. Regret etches on Drake’s face, and I can’t wait to fucking kill him for this.

“Put it back,” I shout hoarsely, my voice not sounding like my own. “Her heart! She needs her heart.”

Insanity fingers my mind as Dephina places the heart on a separate, smaller altar, squeezing the chambers until blood coats the ancient stone. Dizziness consumes me as I watch her slather my sister’s heart, so roughly, as if it is nothing.

Hot anger envelopes my grief when I climb my gaze to my sister’s blood-drenched, heartless body.

The gods. They lied to her. Essentria lied to my sister. They never intended to bring her back. They can’t.

I barely notice Drake apologizing as I struggle to stay upright, under the weight of a pain that cannot be alleviated, but the elder’s shadows hold me in place.

I watch as Dephina squeezes her fingernails callously into Ari’s heart. Swirls of gold, blue, purple, green, and red rise from the altar in illusory swirls of smoke, cloaking the heart and blood. As it slowly fades, the ground erupts with a thunderous boom. My legs slide against the marble as a loud crack penetrates my ears.

When the smoke subsides, the heart and blood are gone. Consumed by the god’s magic.

“The ritual is complete,” Dephina states to no one in particular. “The gods are awakening.”

I glare at them, the pain is so deep that a part of me wants nothing more than to die, so I won’t have to feel it. But I won’t. I will sharpen my grief into a weapon against them. Including the gods. Especially them.

FORTY-ONE

Azkiel

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