Page 155 of Glow of the Everflame

“Yes,” I whispered in response to thevoice’s savage cry. “I will.”

I clutched the blade to my chest in a vow of retribution. A promise to my father—and to the dead man walking who had stolen this precious star from my sky.

Fight.

“You should go,” I murmured to Luther.

His hand gently stroked my back. “I’m not leaving you.”

Fight.

“Go, Luther,” I said, louder this time.

“No. I won’t let you be alone.”

My skin began to shimmer, then glow, then blaze a glittering white-hot. Dark shadows spilled from my palms and curled around me like a rolling fog, staining the blood on the ground until I knelt in a sea of ink. Deep in my soul, a churning ball of ice and heat doubled in size with every shuddering breath.

I was a bomb about to explode, ready to annihilate the world with the jagged shrapnel of my grief.

Fight.

“Go, Luther,” I gritted out. “I’m ordering you to leave.”

“I will not abandon you when you need me,” he growled.

“Sorae,take him.”

“No, Diem, wait—”

The doorway shattered into a cloud of dust and splintered wood. Sorae’s talons tore away at the walls until the front facade of the house was gone, exposed to the dusky glow of the twilight sky.

Luther yelled at her to stop, but my command was clear, and Sorae was loyal only to me. She snared Luther into her talons and shot into the sky.

“Protect them,” I said. Across the bond, I felt Sorae’s heart, bleeding for me, thump in answer:I will.

I took my father’s hand. The cold stiffness of death had already set in.

It was a gut-punch of awareness that I would never again feel the warmth of his hand on my arm or the scratch of his beard against my cheeks. I would never again experience the tender strength of his arms as he wrapped me into a hug.

He was gone.

My beloved, cherished father wasgone.

Because of me.

Fight.

Kill.

Destroy.

So I surrendered to my grief, and to thevoice.

And I detonated.

Raw, silvery power blasted around me in an expanding sphere that was at once hot and cold, dark and light, life and death. It hissed with a deafening hum of energy that sounded and feltancient.

It obliterated everything it touched. My father’s body—gone. The blood on the floor—simmered, then boiled, then evaporated. The Corbois medallion around my neck, the jeweled dagger in my hand, Brecke’s blade on my thigh—all of it melted away, dripping to the soil before charring into hunks of ash.

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