Page 159 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
The fiends screeched as they battled the remains of my flames – the crash and boom of feral magic feasting. Stored down here too long. The surviving hunters barked their commands. The room shook again with another horrific boom from somewhere above, water spilling down the walls as stone crashed around us. Dust filling the air, the flames my blade had left making smoke curl and catch in my throat.
BOOM!
I fell to my knees with the might of it. Trying to shield my head from the falling chips of stone. Only for blue aether to fill the room. A crackling storm of witch power. Making those fiends and hunters scramble in the darkness.
I sobbed with relief. Gideon.
‘What the bloody fuck have you done now?’ came the enraged voice of Gideon from between the bookcases. In disarray, as if he’d run the whole way here. Sodden and covered in dust. His blonde hair dark and stuck to his face.
I ignored him, ignored the roaring of Montagor and his hunters as the aether made the magic in the room erupt. Booms made my ears ring as the stone beneath quaked. Too unstable.
‘Emrys,’ I panted, crawling. Slipping in my own blood until I was beside him. Pressing my hand against the wound desperately.
‘Emrys,’ Gideon snapped, but I heard his voice break. Saw the panic as he dropped to the other side of Emrys, saw the tremble of his hands as he tried to help me stop the blood.
How he froze when he realised what it was. The strange sheen to the forsaken metal buried there.
‘Tauria,’ Emrys panted so weakly. His fingers curling into my hair to hold me closer. An unfocused nature to the darkness in his eyes.
Too weak. His breaths too laboured. Too much blood spilled on the stone between us.
He wouldn’t leave me. Not like this. I looked around desperately, expecting Thean and Alma as the room shook again. Distant screams from above, as if the house was collapsing. That couldn’t be us.
It had to be something else.
It was coming down on top of us.
We had to move. We had to leave.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
Alma. Where was Alma?
‘Kat. You need to cauterize the wound.’ Gideon tore off his jacket, bundling it and forcing it against the wound around the blade shard still buried there.
‘I-I can’t.’ The words broke between my lips. ‘He took my flame.’
The agony in my thigh. How cold my blade was in my grasp. All the flame spent.
When those blue eyes met mine, there was nothing but desolate hopeless pain. Too much of Emrys’s blood coating my hands.
Breath too heavy in my lungs.
No.
In an instant my mother turned to ash in my memories. The echo of my screaming filling my ears. The cold, bloody and bruised flesh of Alma beneath my small hands. Slipping from me.
No. Not Emrys. He promised.
He promised.
Did you think you could keep him, Tauria?That voice mocked once again.
The ground trembled, runes appearing to slip between the stone. Illuminating a circle around us.
‘Emrys! Stop!’ Gideon demanded.
Only the dark summoning of those runes didn’t feel familiar. The wishing stone around my throat was so still. Too quiet. The same runes Emrys had summoned in that village when he’d lost control.
