Page 8 of The Illuminated
I flinched when a hand grasped my shoulder. Turning quickly, my power flared. It was Lucius and his silly little golden crown, and I was surprised to find that after recent events I was barely even fazed by his presence now.
“I assume all ofthatwas your handywork?” he said, his features gleaming with amusement.
“I needed to blow off some steam,” I said. “If we are beinghonestwith each other…”
Lucius laughed. “As you’re now permitted, though I do require that you clean up your messes.” Excitement swam in his intense eyes, and he looked at me like he was just seeing me for the first time. “You wear power so well. I hadn’t seen it before when I thought you were a carefully constructed weapon. It was wrong of me to hold you back from it for so long.”
Was that… an apology? I was about to respond when Daelon appeared behind him, his eyes in a confused panic that didn’t match his strong, collected stance. He crossed his arms.
“Is everything alright?” he asked, and though outwardly he was asking Lucius, I knew he was really asking me.
I just couldn’t look at him. Not right now. I didn’t want him to bring me back down off my untouchable storm cloud, so I leaned into Lucius’s opportunity, biting back all of my instincts and charting a different course.
“Let’s go clean it up then,” I said quickly, effectively ignoring Daelon and piquing the King’s interest.
Lucius shrugged a shoulder, hesitating only a moment before offering his hand. “We’ll be back,” he said to Daelon without even glancing his way.
Áine? What—
And we were gone in a warp of time and space, arriving in the serenity of the garden. I winced at the floral, springtime scents, the memories of Nathaniel plunging a blade into my gut rising to the surface. I could still feel the wound like a phantom pain.
“What is it?” Lucius asked. He actually seemed genuinely interested, which caught me off guard. I wouldn’t have necessarily labeled the emotionconcern, though.
“Nothing.” I shoved all thought of Nathaniel away. A part of me—a bigger part than I felt comfortable admitting—was very glad he was in Lucius’s underworld below us, being tortured in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine.
“Glass is everywhere,” Lucius said. “Watch your step.”
I quirked a brow. “We have super healing, remember?” I said, a hesitant smile taking place.
“Right,” he said, pausing. “Still.” He looked away suddenly, his mercurial demeanor shifting. He was somehow both impossible to read in some ways and frighteningly transparent in others. And after his mother’s words, I just couldn’t stop wondering who the true Lucius really was.
He was right, though—below my strappy sandals was the crunch of glass, the shards glimmering under the light of the falling orange sun. It was strangely beautiful, this minefield of magickal destruction. Lucius appeared to have the same thought, his eyes sparkling just like the fragments beneath our feet.
“What caused this lovely outburst, little witch? Do I trouble you so?”
“I know this is hard to believe, but not everything is about you,my King.”
“Careful,” he whispered like he was answering an errant child, wagging his finger. “At least I can rule out a secret lover’s quarrel, as Daelon was with me.” Beneath his joking tone, I could nearly sense a kind of probing. I hoped I was just imagining it.
I leaned into my power, and I was thankful that Lucius took my lead rather than questioning me further. We both raised up our hands. A competing intensity bloomed in the air, the natural and unnatural coming together like the cold and warm weather pattern that births a tornado. It was strange, these two sources of endless, opposing magick bursting forth to fill the gardens. While other witches needed ritual, invocation, innate gifts, and magickal aid to perform advanced magick, Lucius and I merely needed our will. In some ways, I was just as unnatural as Lucius was, only here to keep the universe in balance.
Why then was I being called to die? It just had to be some kind of misinterpretation. Somehow, Amos and I had missed something or taken a step off the path. Or maybe Lucius was right, and I was deluded after all. A fluke, a weak attempt at revenge, or something else entirely. But these doubts were fleeting, unable to root themselves fully when the power of all natural cycles, of life and death, fire and water, the phases of the moon and the pull of the tide, every love and loss of every human and witch, each action taken and spell cast—not when all of these mysteries and facets of the realms and our cosmos could be channeled, beckoned forth by me and the power I’d been gifted.
Daelon was right that moment I’d let him into this ocean of magick on the Beach of the Nameless and Formless. This was divine.
I watched with wonder as glass began to rise into the air, and I concentrated on leaning into the frequencies of mending, structure, and form. These currents guided me as I lifted the shards with Lucius, and soon the glass was backtracking like a video set on rewind. Curious servants and nobility hung out at a safe distance behind the openings as the pieces began to take back their original shapes, fusing together and becoming windows once more.
It was so mesmerizing and cathartic, watching my will of pure creation manifest before us—before all of us. And while I would never admit it aloud, it did make me feel rather godlike. I was humbled, however, by the fact that my temper tantrum was the cause of the destruction in the first place.
I’m not meant to die, I repeated over and over again like a cancerous intrusive thought, willing it to be true.
Lucius’s shoulder brushed mine. “Feeling any better?”
“Not yet,” I said, surprising myself. This was the longest stretch of time Lucius and I had ever interacted and not been at each other’s throats. There was something very, very wrong with that. But I was done analyzing a single thing for the time being. No thoughts. Just action. Just power. And somehow, I was nowhere near running out of steam.
“If you’re not having fun, then I’m not doing my job. Join me,” Lucius said, his eyes darkening in a way that made me feel suddenly very aware of who I was dealing with.
I let him take my hand, and though his energy was as repulsive to me as always, I could still taste in its depths the excitement, the rawness, and the unmistakable charge of being so unfathomablyalive.His power was like a drug—a horrible poison that hollowed its victims from the inside out—and yet craved nonetheless, all for those brief moments between the hit and the comedown when it shattered reality in the most breathtaking, hedonistic of ways. Energy reading gave me just a taste, but I still vividly remembered when he’d shared with me his power’s pure form. It felt like a strike of lightning through my every nerve. I was invincible, untouchable… up until the whole puking up black goo and ash part of the night.
