Page 164 of A Promise of Peridot

---

Until I could see below me the gray wyvern with bloodred eyes dive past and extend one scaled palm open, waiting to catch me as I fell.

No—

Not to catch me—

His claw, sharper than any dagger, than any blade, positioned directly under my tumbling body.

Toimpaleme—

I thrashed at the air, shooting my power out to call the still-falling sword toward me.

Tears ripped at my face with the effort.

Reaching for it. For anything, pleaseanything—

I heard Kane’s roar. Not a plea but a howl of pure agony. Of devastation. Of loss. Of boundless, unending sorrow—

The last thing I felt was searing pain as Lazarus’s open, outstretched claw pierced through my stomach with a wetsquelch.

47

kane

The bones of my kneecaps crunched against the hard, dry wood below.

I couldn’t move.

I simply knelt on the edge of the platform, roaring.Roaringuntil my throat bled.

She was just hanging there... Limp, broken, impaled on a single jagged claw—suspended in air, speared through the center like a bowed ribbon. Elegant somehow, as if dipped in a seductive waltz by Death himself.

Dead.

She was dead.

Like the snuffing of a candle that plunges an entire room into pitch-blackness. And with it, the extinguishing of my soul.

I retched onto the knotted wood beneath me.

Over and over and over.

No,please, no—

I shook, panting while my mind went hollow—save for thedeafening blare of her final words:“Live, for me...”Her words and the thrumming of my heart. My wrecked, annihilated,decimatedheart.

And the crushing emptiness—

When everything in my gut had been purged onto the ground beneath me and I was panting on my hands and knees like a rabid animal, my eyes blurred with tears, my teeth gnashing, I forced myself to stand.

But Lazarus was gone from the sky.

Claws landed behind me and I braced myself with steadying, brisk breaths for whatever mercenary of his had come to kill me, too.

Please,I thought.Kill me.

I want to be with her.

Please.

---