Page 17 of 1001 Dark Nights: Bundle Forty-Seven

“Sariel, think about this.” I knew reasoning with him would do nothing, but I couldn’t stop myself. This was Eva. My Eva. I’d had her by my side since my creation. She was the reason the darkness wasn’t so dark. Why I was always pulled back into the light. Without her, what was I?

“And there it is…” Sariel nodded. “She makes you weak. She makes you second-guess your decisions. Not that it matters. One of you must die for this serious lapse in judgment, and Eva is right. The fault lies with her. And I need you to lead the immortals. Therefore…” He held out the feather to me. “A life is taken.”

“Cassius,” Eva whispered, tears filling her eyes. “I love you.”

Sariel sucked in a breath.

Now, he knew.

I’d failed him twice.

Because I loved her back.

“Eva, I will always love you,” I whispered, taking the feather from Sariel and holding it over her head.

Sariel’s anger was tangible. “Cassius, you are their king. She pays for your sin…kill her.”

“I can’t.” My body was empty,soempty.

Eva locked eyes with me. “Cassius, promise me you’ll check in on John. Promise.”

At death’s grasp, and still she worried about the boy.

I didn’t understand that type of love. Maybe I’d never really loved, her after all. Had I?

“I promise.” My voice shook as I pressed the tip of the feather to the base of her neck. It slid through her skin, and she slumped against my arms as immortality left her body.

Right before my very eyes, my dear friend, my love, aged. She aged so horribly her tight skin became wrinkled and paper-thin. It lost all the glow of youth, and her hair turned ten different shades of gray before finally falling out of her head. The bones in her body were brittle, the muscles detaching from their correct positions. And as she took her last breath, I saw what it would be like to be human, to love a human and watch them die.

The pain was unimaginable.

Her frail hand reached up and caressed my face with the lightest of touches. “Cassius…you will always be more light than dark.”

She died.

In my arms.

“For her sacrifice,” Sariel whispered, “the twelve children will live.”

I didn’t see Sariel again for five hundred years.

Later, when I finally did, I was already too far gone. I’d lost the mother of humanity.

I’d lost her.

And I’d set loose a monster, all because I loved her, and she’d asked—nay, begged—me.

I’d also cursed someone I knew I would most likely meet in my future, a person who would not survive it, at least according to my visions, weak as they were.

“But they won’t.” I shook my head and looked up at Sariel, the Archangel who’d birthed me by sleeping with a human, thus creating me as a Dark One—both Fallen and angelic. “Most will die before they reach sixteen. If they survive it, if they find each other, if I’m powerful enough to see it, then what? Do I kill them both?”

Sariel pulled a golden apple from his back and held it out in front of me. “Some futures are predestined. But, Cassius, we always have a choice. Take a bite.”

“No.” I hated him in that moment. “I won’t ever truly fall.”

“Says one who, by his choices, has already Fallen,” Sariel said sadly. “You’re the King of the Immortals. You roam the Earth with mixes of humanity from your mother in your blood. You question things, yet you want to rejoin the stars. What do you think happens when the first created is unleashed on this world? And what do you think happens when she finds a perfect match? What happens to the remaining gods who are allowed to roam? Chaos. Discord. Destruction. That will forever be on your head if you do not fix this. Maybe if they are raised with strong people, have principles, they will choose not to fall when the time comes… but to rise.”

“I’ll do it.”

---