Page 94 of Heat of the Everflame

A strong arm slid beneath me and lifted me from the ground. Another hand brushed across my chest—and stopped.

Stopped on the gleaming hilt of a dagger, rising from the center of my chest.

Two blue-grey eyes moved into my vision. They were sad, so very sad, but filled with the most breathtaking sea of twinkling sparks and inky depths. The evening sky and the daylight, colliding together into a cloud of broken, glittering shards.

I wanted to tell those eyes something. Something important. But when I tried to speak, a coppery tang flooded my throat.

“It should have been me,” he said roughly. “I should have told you.” He pulled me into his body, hunching over me.

“Magic,” I managed to gasp out.

He looked at me, confused, distraught. Not understanding. Rain soaked through his long, dark hair, matting it to his blood-flecked olive skin.

“You idiots,” the King snarled in the background. “I said to killhim, not her.”

A weighty presence spread across my body, squeezing me, holding me, caressing me, consuming me. It was immensely strong, its fierce grip impossible to fight. It dragged me in and held me close, refusing to let me go.

“Now I have a mess to clean up,” the King grumbled. “I don’t need Sophos sniffing around looking for her body to run their tests on.”

“M-magic,” I stammered again. My eyelids drooped. The strange sensation was warm, inviting. It felt safe. It felt likehome. I wanted so badly to stop fighting and surrender to it forever.

Luther laid me out on the sand and yanked a scarf from around his shoulders, hurriedly folding it into a square. With quivering hands and tortured eyes, he pulled the blade free, and hot liquid spilled across my chest. He covered the wound with the fabric, leaning his weight into it.

“Firm pressure, right?” he asked, his eyes frantically searching mine. “But not too much?”

I wanted to nod, but there was something else I needed to say. Something so crucial, so vitally urgent, even more important than my own life.

A chill swept across my skin, and the orange glow around us disappeared. The King had dropped his wall of flames.

He sighed loudly. “We’ll kill them both and incinerate the bodies with dragonfyre. If anyone asks, they were never in our realm, understood?”

Luther’s eyes darted up, then back at me. He took my hands and placed them over the makeshift bandage. “Keep holding it,” he ordered.

He brushed the hair away from my face, his touch lingering on my skin a moment longer. Then I watched as the cold mask of the Prince fell over his features. His focus shifted to the Ignios guards and his fist tightened, his mouth forming a harsh line.

He reached for his weapon and stood.

The powerful presence engulfing my body pulled away—just slightly.

“Luther,” I breathed. “Your magic.”

A deep rumble of thunder rolled over the sea.

Slowly, so slowly, his face turned back to me. Our eyes locked, his widening slightly in understanding. His scimitar tumbled to the ground at his side. His nostrils flared, and his chest expanded in a long, shuddering inhale.

And then Luther Corboisunleashed.

Light and shadow ignited across the beach in a dazzling explosion of fury and magic. I rolled my head away at the blinding force of it, only to see glowing whips snake over the sand and impale the Ignios guards. Pale blue fissures webbed across their skin, seeming to tear them apart from within, and the air grew thick with the smell of burnt flesh.

Dark vines laced with thorns curled up their legs and tightened until bone crunched and blood oozed from a hundredpunctures. Their agonized screams turned garbled as shadowy tendrils punched through their guts and emerged writhing from their mouths.

I looked away, unable to watch the slaughter continue. I didn’t judge Luther for what he’d done, but I could take no pleasure in it, either.

On the other side of the beach, the King stared in blank horror as my Prince massacred his guards with vicious, bloody ease.

His gryvern, however, was watchingme. Still staring in that penetrating way, its reptilian eyes still pulsing with some profound feeling I couldn’t yet place.

There was so much anger trapped within the beast. A vast, lava-filled cavern of rage bubbled under its ancient skin like a volcano churning against a ceiling of rock. As the Ignios guards’ shrieks fell silent, I wondered with a tremble what might happen if the Igniosgryvernever unleashed.

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