Page 209 of Blood Feast

“Cassia?” he called, coughing.

“Get out of here!” she bellowed over the roar of the flames.

He followed her voice toward the Mage King’s fire and made out her silhouette before the roaring flames. She threw a blanket over the hounds. They were alive.

Lio picked up the other side of the blanket. “The stairs are still clear. This way.”

Bright tears streaming from her eyes, and her anger snapped at him. “I told you to stay outside where it’s safe.”

“Stop asking me to break our vows!”

The fire overflowed the hearth. They levitated out of reach as the rug caught. The chairs were next. They passed over the table, where flames turned their research to ashes.

“No, no, no.” Lio fixed on the magic emanating from his scroll case and summoned it to him. He caught the hot metal with his cloak and wrapped it close against his chest.

They fled the tower and sank to the cold, damp ground of the bailey. Lio dropped everything he held to run his hands over Cassia’s head and shoulders and arms. “Are you all right?”

She nodded and turned to pull the blanket off the hounds. Knight was wheezing, but he sat up, licking her with anxious whines. Lio rested a hand on Dame’s side. Still unconscious, but she was breathing.

Magic swelled inside the tower, a terrible pressure on Lio’s senses. He threw himself over Cassia, covering as much of her and the dogs as he could. A boom split his ears, and the ground shook as heat blasted across his back.

The everything was silent. They lifted their heads and looked back at the ruin where the tower had stood.

Lio held Cassia tightly. She was shaking.

Then she scrambled out of his arms, fists at her sides, and faced the rubble. Black roses sprang up at her feet, then withered.

“I’m so sorry.” In the wake of the explosion, his words sounded too quiet to his ears. Too insufficient for what she had just lost.

All that magic. All that knowledge. Gone before they’d had a chance to understand it.

He dragged himself to his feet. “Miranda did this.”

Cassia wouldn’t look at him. “Lyros is gone, isn’t he?”

Lio hung his head. “I couldn’t change his mind.”

“And Mak?”

Lio looked away for a moment, then back at her. “He went to destroy the rest of the weapons.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. Eternal braziers and the Collector’s laughter haunted her thoughts. “All of this is my fault.”

He took a step closer. “Cassia, what happened to you in the temple?”

Shame and despair welled out of her. Such feelings had no place in his proud, beautiful Grace. He couldn’t bear this.

The next time he held Miranda’s mind in his hands, he would kill her.

“What did she do to you?” he demanded.

“It wasn’t Miranda.” Cassia’s voice was toneless. “It was me.”

“What?” His ears were still healing from the explosion, his mind still scoured by Miranda’s attack. He must have misunderstood.

Cassia finally turned to face him. “I tried to gain the temple’s recognition, as I did with the tower…but I failed.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Like the experiments we tried here that put the spell patterns under strain.”

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