Page 156 of Glow of the Everflame

The house vaporized, taking with it every material possession that had ever mattered to me. Drawings, journals, art, books, weapons—all the treasured objects our family had collected over this brief, happy lifetime together.

Gone.

Just like him.

Even the clothes on my back burned away, leaving me naked in the center of an inferno of unearthly power.

With my mother’s disappearance, there had been grief, but also hope, however distant and unrealistic, that she might return. But there was no returning fromthis.

No hope left at all.

I screamed until my throat was raw. I clawed at my chest, desperate to tear my own heart out to stop this unbearable pain. My power flared brighter, and I burned, and I burned, and I burned.

My body felt weightless in the worst kind of way, like being shoved off a cliff. I was plunging to my doom, caught in the agonizing anticipation of that final, painful end.

Shouting penetrated the haze of my grief. A woman’s voice, then a man’s, then inhuman snarls.

A moment later, two hands wrapped around me. An immediate feeling of safety told me instantly who it was.

He knelt beside me and gathered me into his arms. His clothes had burned to ash, though somehow, his skin was unscathed. I was too broken to question it. I laid my palm against the scar on his chest, then buried my face in his neck and wept as my magic consumed us both. With every tear that spilled from my cheek to his skin, he gripped me tighter, held me closer, laying tender kisses on my temple and hair.

He didn’t say a word, and I was grateful for it. I could not have born any false assurances, however well-intentioned, that everything would be fine.

Things wouldneverbe fine. Not ever again.

For hours, I sat in Luther’s arms, burning and sobbing, screaming as the excruciating pain of loss devoured me whole. I had the vague sensation of a well inside me slowly draining. My sorrow flooded out with my magic, leaving me hollow and certain I would never again feel whole.

Eventually, the sky turned dark, and my power faded to embers. Luther rocked me in silence, curled up at the center of a smoking crater. The heat faded from my skin, and the chilly night air set my body shivering. He rose, still cradling me in his arms.

“If you’re not ready to see Teller, I can take you to the lodge,” he offered softly, his voice coarse with emotion.

I shook my head as fresh tears pushed through my closed eyelids. “I have to tell him.”

He nodded and pressed a long kiss to the top of my head. I felt him climb onto Sorae’s back, then the breeze of the wind as she took flight.

I stared at the ground as we flew away. My beloved home was gone forever, replaced by a circle of black, a scar on the earth to mark the unhealable wound on my soul.

I had been crafted here. I was born a lump of molten metal, shaped by my mother, honed to a point by my father, engraved on the hilt by my brother. I had so foolishly believed the trials of the last few months had been the final firing that would harden me into a righteous sword of justice.

But that had only been the beginning. That had been the pounding of the blacksmith’s hammer, the grinding against the wheel until my edges were sharp and my aim was true.

This night—thiswas the fire that had forged me. And someday soon, when the burning glow of my grief cooled away, I would show my father’s killer, and all of Emarion, just how deeply my blade could cut.

ChapterThirty-One

Four days passed.

Teller and I holed up in my rooms, cycling between numbness and a grief so acute it felt lethal. Telling him our father had died was awful. Telling him how, and why, was infinitely worse.

Mortal lover.

Half-breed.

Rebel scum.

This was because of me and the Crown on my head. Because I had not lied, or kept silent, or played the game well enough to avoid making enemies.

Someone else murdered our father—but I had killed him.

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