Page 107 of Fae Reckoning

I didn’t examine it. Talisa was a coiling, slinking, streaming blob of scarlet, hovering a foot off the floor. At its center, dark lines, much like the black veins that had woven beneath Ramana’s skin, undulated like writhing worms. Red flashed intermittently around them in jagged lines like lightning.

The person part of me was freshly horrified. The power that thrummed inside me only rose to the newly defined challenge.

Ignoring the twinges in my calf, I gathered myself and stood, pushing the power gathered within me toward her. It heeded my command, rolling forward in a wave as powerful as a tsunami.

In a wall of magic, we collided, my magic against hers. Hers held then pushed back. I shoved. Sheshoved. A whooshing as of the ocean or my pulse or the overwhelming madness of so much power, I had no idea what, thumped in my ears, through my head. I sensed Einar and the she-dragon both speaking to me. I wanted desperately to receive their guidance.

But I could access only myself, the land, its energy, and the eternal balance of life and death, of light and darkness, beating unrelentingly, mercilessly, within me.

Squinting against the blinding brilliance of our battling magic, I urged my power to smack hers down. It pushed through my skin out toward her, gaining some. But it wasn’t enough.

Oh fuck. It wasn’t enough!

All the life force and essences she’d stolen and taken into herself fed the darkness to which she’d given herself. It had grown large and strong and ravenous. It wanted only more. It wouldn’t give up its host.

As that darkness—her darkness—rammed me so hard I nearly faltered, it was suddenly there.

Not anit.

Him.

Rush.

My mate.

The bond between us that was ancient, eternal magic, that had chosen me as its steward.

My mate possessed so much light that it spilled out onto his skin in the looping lines of his tattoos. He’d been chosen for me by whatever force created our essences in the Etherlands, making them a perfect match.

If defeating the darkness was my destiny, then so it must also be his.

I tugged on Rush’s magic. Eagerly, it flowed into me, as if Rush himself had been waiting for me to seek it. He gave and it poured forth so abundantly I feared he might not be saving any for himself.

And yet I took it. I channeled it and forced it into the blood queen. I pushed and shoved and pulsed and crammed the light into her fucking body—the vessel that sought to contain so much darkness she dragged down an entire realm with it. I pulled all I could—forcing every bit of it into her. She might have screamed, long and prolonged; I didn’t really know. All I could sense anymore was the power—so much power. I was barely more than a vehicle, pushing, pushing, and fucking pushing…

Light into the darkness.

And then again.

And again.

And fucking again.

Until.

Finally.

The roar that drummed against me like a brutal surf … released me from its tumbling grip. The pounding in my head quieted slowly, then faded, replaced by the cries and grunts of people and creatures fighting to the death.

I could feel my body trembling like a leaf clinging to the tip of a branch, weathering the storm of a millennium. I dropped to the floor—from only a coupleof feet up but pain shot up my leg. I felt it, but not much, for my sight had landed upon the blood queen.

Or whatever she now was.

The blood had vanished, as had the red glow, as if they’d never existed at all. Where the monstrous queen of blood and darkness and brutality had once stood, teeth and claws baring her for the monster she was, lay a female—bare, skin clean and pale, and shaking as hard as I was.

Her crown slid along her shiny dark hair.

It toppled from her head.

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