Page 57 of The Cruel Dawn
Lively’s amber glow brightens, and she pants, unable to breathe.
“Why would Supreme allow this realm to suffer?” Danar Rrivae asks. “Where’s the mercy in such torture?”
I close my eyes and grip the dagger’s handle with both hands.Lively is right there, I remind myself, even as Danar speaks to my pain.
“You hesitate to do what you know isright,” he says in that voice of heated ice. “Why?”
“You don’t understand,” I whisper.
“Idon’t understand?” he shouts, and now his eyes turn blood red. “You think I want to roam from realm to realm searching for my family? They’re out there, crying for me. I can’t—Iwon’t—stop, and if, in my search, I can free others while taking what has been taken from me, why shouldn’t I do that? There are beings who need help, who want better. Am I so wrong to restore hope and make them whole?”
Jamart’s face twists, and his amber glow… He’s dying, ohfuck, he’s dying.
“Stop, please,” I say, reaching my hands out to them, my heart in my throat.
“Do you want to save them?” Danar asks, icy.
“More than anything,” I cry out, tears in my eyes.
“How far will you go to save them?”
I start running to Jamart and Lively, but they roll away from me. I don’t stop running, though, even as my muscles cramp beneath my armor.
“What will you give to save them?” the traitor asks.
Beads of sweat roll down my face and sting my eyes and the cuts on my chin.
“What will you give up, Kaivara?” he asks again.
I keep running, reaching out but never catching up.
“I will let these two live,” he says, “and three others of your choosing if you surrender Vallendor. Five lives saved for the five lives your father took from me—”
I turn, veering away from Jamart and Lively with a shout, and take a giant leap toward the traitor, my dagger ready.
Tempest sinks into a space that should be Danar Rrivae’s ribcage. Yet nothing is solid there—no bones, no muscle, just a sucking, icy void.
I wince at the cold, but I lunge again, aiming this time at his neck.
No skin. Just space.
His eyes burn with that haunting scarlet heat, and he hurls fire at me from his hands.
I swat each ball away with gusts of wind.
He grabs my hand that holds the dagger and squeezes it.
I scream—his touch feels like fire and ice, burning and freezing. Light that isn’t mine glows from the inside of my arm. I smell heat that isn’t fire—no, this smells of earth and sky, and it rushes up my arm to my shoulder.
Danar Rrivae grips Jamart’s neck until the man’s head separates from his body. Then he lights Lively on fire.
I scream, “No!” over and over again, and I lob my own fireballs at him, one after the other. But in my anger, in my pain, every one misses that fucker, who now rolls away from me on that cloud, farther and farther away.
He doesn’t even leave Jamart and Lively behind for me to bury.
Alone—even the minulles have abandoned me—I sink to the ground in tears, and—
Pop!
