Page 123 of Fae Reckoning

I had to close my eyes again, but this time I didn’t lose sight of what we were doing. We were saving our world. Giving it everything we had, even our own shadows. They were being absorbed by the light.

Everything was bowing to its power.

My tattoos felt as if they might leap from my very skin, so brightly they shone. I could no longer discern any differences among Elowyn’s lights. She was bright all over. She was every star in the night sky and she was also the moon. She was the sun itself. She was the very beat of my heart, constant, everywhere, willing me along.

I kissed her and she kissed me until I had no notion of how much time was passing.

I kissed her and gripped her body to mine—there was no me without her.

And I still kissed my mate, the beloved of my heart, after a hoarse cry tunneled into the ball of light she and I were, crowing, “Victory is ours! The darkness has fallen!”

My chest excruciatingly tight, our kiss softened. Slowly, ever so slowly, our light receded. And when all the evidence of it that remained was a luminescence that coated our bodies, and my tattoos differentiated themselves into vines like those that had dragged the monsters into the mirrors’ depths, I stilled my lips, then rested my forehead against hers.

Our breathing was heavy, coming in choppy pants. I clutched her all the harder as I spun in place.

The mirrors were back to reflecting our many diverse images—all uniformly stunned and haggard despite our varied differences.

Bodies of all kinds littered the floor, which was more broken than solid. Some fallen fae still clung to life. Others had long abandoned it.

The dragons turned their long necks toward Elowyn, pointing their big eyes at her. I flinched, but she only smiled at them, nodding silently. It was then I realized they were speaking with her beyond what I could hear.

“Everyone needs to back away from the…” She sighed in exhaustion. “The mirrors. Tell them.”

I did. Her head sagged to my shoulder. I dropped a soft kiss on her cheek.

My love, she’d given even more than I had. She’d been the one chosen by the land, and so she’d been the one to channel the magic of the Mirror World itself into our joint light. She’d been the real powerhouse.

She drooped against me as the dragons lined up in front of the mirrors, spread equidistantly apart. They sucked in long, deep breaths and unleashed their fiery breaths, dissolving any surviving spells, sealing any remnants of darkness into the mirrors.

Igniting any parts that might be left of my brothers to flame, then ember, then ash.

As their fires petered out then stopped,another victory cry rose up. This one was repeated and chorused until I slid to my knees where I stood, cradling Elowyn in my lap.

Our victory was here at last.

And it was unbearably bitter.

38.BROTHERS NEVER ABANDON EACH OTHER

ELOWYN

I sank against Rush’s chest, allowing the heat of the bathtub’s water to soothe my aching body. A healer had attended to the puncture wound in my calf; everything else was scrapes and bruises. The healer could have also erased those—a course he’d insisted on. As the new queen of the fae, I had to be strong and ready to lead them, he’d boldly insisted. He was right, of course. But innumerable fae had teetered on the narrow edge between life and death, and there were only so many healers to tend to them all.

The Hall of Mirrors hadn’t been the only battlefield. Bodies littered many other rooms and their connecting hallways throughout the palace, and beyond its walls, the forces that had come in our support had suffered high casualties. When Rush and I had retired to the rooms originally assigned to me, the bodies of the dead were being dragged out from even the tunnels hidden behind the walls. It would takehours to check the plethora of rooms and take proper stock of our losses—and of Talisa’s dead too, who after all were fae as much as the rest of us, just those who’d succumbed to her wicked machinations.

After our arrival at court at daybreak, while we’d fought, news of our attack—our grand, final stand—had continued to spread. Fae of all sorts had arrived to join us in vanquishing the darkness, and even now, with dawn about to shine on a new day, more still trickled in to assist. Where Talisa had endeavored to pit everyone against each other, in the short hours since her death a new sense of camaraderie and kinship was bonding those who would otherwise be strangers.

“You’re rubbing your chest again,” Rush said softly, close to my ear.

Since Ryder and Hiroshi had vanished into the mirrors, everything he did was either soft and morose, or hard and furious.

Rush’s thighs wrapped around mine, his fingertips absently tracing circles along my arms, much as he’d done when I’d returned so unexpectedly from the Sorumbra to compete in the Nuptialis Probatio—before Talisa had stopped bothering to keep to rules of her own making.

I allowed my hand to slide from the swell of my breasts to rest on his bent knee.

“Is it your … Kiss of Death scar?” he asked.

Even now, after all we’d been through together, he winced whenever he referred to the evidence thatwould never leave me of when he’d stabbed me through the heart to save me.

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