Page 50 of Eclipse of Fate
Kait screams so loudly that the vibrations of it send chills down my spine and coat my skin. My magic buzzes and catches fire inside my body. I’m frozen where I stand in a blazing inferno of rage, pain, and disbelief. The group of Fae around me are all too frantic to notice my state. His eyes are wide and lock with mine—my breathing is uneven, and my lungs won’t fill with enough air. He coughs, and blood comes sputtering out with it.
Nothing else exists.
I see only him.
I’m shaking my head, refusing the sight that it is. My world is spinning, completely tilting on its axis, and I refuse it. This is impossible to have come this far. To have gone through all we have for it to end like this. Flashes of memories run through my mind. Each one is more painful than the last. My heart is shattering the pieces—crumbling to the ground like the petals of flowers blown by a storm.
I can’t breathe.
“I am yours to wield. Yours to command. My mate, my wife. My Queen.”His voice from the past echoes through my mind.“I’ll never leave you again.”But I’ve only just gotten himback. The fierce need to close the distance between our bodies is so intense I feel dizzy, but I can’t move. My feet are solid against the ground. Fused to the soil, as strong as the roots of the oldest tree in all of Aldramani. How did things go so bad so fast? This can’t be happening! I scream the words in my head.
“You will protect each other.”The memory of Trent’s words weakens any strength I have left in my body. I watch helplessly as his life force streams from the wound. A black arrowhead protruding from the heart that owns my own. His arms extend, reaching for me, and I reach back. My blood runs cold when I feel the warmth of his with my trembling hands. Lacing my fingers with his and as if in slow motion, we drop to our knees. Both of us are too weak to stand any longer. His face is ashen and the sadness that fills his eyes has to match my own as our world falls apart and then I feel it…
As our knees hit the ground, Dax’s body slumps, and there is a shift in the air around me. As though my heartbreak is a palpable entity standing before us. I look up past Dax’s shoulder and find a man I don’t recognize standing behind him, and when he bows his head and moves to place a hand on my wrist… to pull it away from Dax. The way my magic reacts, I know that this has to be someone beyond the veil here to carry his soul away.
I’m stuck at an impasse with reality. I can’t let go and accept this, and I can’t challenge fate. When the stranger’s fingers curl around my wrist, I look down at them—as if I stare longer—they might disappear. That this will all go away, but my magic is a frenzy of unspent energy and everything around us fails to exist. When I look back up, I blink, and it’s all gone. Everything but the fingers curled around my shaking wrist.
The roaring in my ears is deafening. The nothingness around me blurs into the faces of those I came here with. I hear none of their voices, even though I see their mouths moving. I’m submerged in pure white, hot anguish, and all I can still see is the endless flow of red blood staining everything. I feel his hand take hold of my wrist—
“Raelle?” Dax’s voice makes me open my eyes. I look down and see his fingers wrapped around my wrist, and my gaze snaps back up to him, to his chest. Finally seeing the Fae that surrounds me. I shake my head, dispelling the horrifying energy that held me in its clutches. “Are you ok?” He asks as he lifts my chin to meet his eyes, a warm hazel green flick back and forth between mine.
The ground isn’t shaking, but my knees are weak. The scent of smoke and decay isn’t assaulting my nostrils. There is no blood staining his chest or my hands. There are no bodies strewn about… the cottages… they are whole.
A woman steps out of her quaint cottage, shaking out a rug before draping it over a laundry line and waving at us with a wide smile on her face. My hand comes up as I wave back slowly. Confused. Too stunned to say anything at all. Repeatedly, I blink,trying to clear my head and understand what just happened. My lips part as I try to bring words from them, but nothing comes out.
“Raelle?” Dax says my name again, and this time I shake my head. A frown pulls brows together.
“I—I thought it was all—in ruin.” My whole world just failed to exist. It felt so real. I don’t understand. My voice sounds so distant that even I barely hear what I’m saying. The look on Alaric’s face morphs when he puts together what I said.
“Raelle, did you just have a vision?” He asks with concern, crinkling his eyes. Dax looks from him to me, and he cups my cheek with his rough palm. He searches my eyes as though the answer is there, even if I won’t speak the words. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I can say. I felt like I was living through all of it. I felt as though it were my death. I was watching as my heart was painfully ripped to pieces right in front of me. Normally, I can tell that a vision is happening. There is a ripple in time. Magic blurring the edges of my vision.
This was so crisp.
Clear.
Real.
“The people here need to leave,” I whisper. When no one moves, I speak louder. “The people here… they need to leave! Now. We need to evacuate the town. Send them on the road to Loema or Ravendene. Put them on boats; have them fly; whichever they choose, they need to gonowfor refuge. I don’t care what they choose or how they get there, but they need to leave.” I can’t tell them why. I can’t alter fate so blatantly without repercussions. Not when I have no idea of what it could affect. Panic rises in me so high it is almost painful. My heart feels like the fluttering wingsof a small forest bird, in a flight for its life from a great predator, and in a way, I suppose it is.
I turn to face Dax fully, so he can see the panic in my eyes. “We need to save them, Dax. NOW.” He doesn't need to know the double meaning of my words. I need to save him too. There is not a world I could live in without him in it. Just as he once told me. I know it to be true for myself, having thought I lost him once and then living through what I just did... I would do anything I had to do to save his life or anyone in the family that is now ours.
This group of Fae is my unkindness, chosen by me and by fate. I will not sacrifice any of their lives if I have a way to save them at my fingertips. Fate is giving me a chance. A chance I didn’t have for my parents or brother, and hell if I’m going to let it slip away from me. Like hell will I letthis manslip away from this life.
I ball my hands in his leathers and pull him into me, taking his lips in mine, in a passion-filled kiss that is so brief it hurts to pull apart from, but I have to. We have to move now.
He wastes no time, ordering Kait and Alaric to storm the town. Going door to door, we leave no inhabitants untouched. The vibrations in my chest never leave, and the warning from my magic buzzes like a never-ending torrent of a fierce waterfall within me. If anything, it intensifies the longer we are in this town. I feel as though, at any second, everything can come crashing down around us.
When the last of the townspeople are loading into the last of the carriages and fading into the distance on their way to another territory, I feel like my lungs can fully expand. Almost.
Chapter forty-two
My body is growingmore and more needy for the dark magic that Thames feeds it, but the time between is becoming desperately longer. She has been extending the days between giving me the magic and the amount she feeds into my veins, though, and I can go a solid three days with no symptoms now. Whereas before, on the third day, I was near death without the dark power surging through me.
She came in this morning, giving me my dose of the wretched poison I unknowingly asked for. She knew exactly what she was doing. All the while, my father has been the one pulling the strings, and I was the idiot on the other end, dancing along to each and every fucking whim he put in front of me.
I’ve never hated anyone more in my fucking life than I do him in this moment. Now knowing that I was so fucking brainwashed… that I couldn’t see that I was defending such a worthless piece of shit probably marks me as one of the sorriest assholes alive. My brother’s words from a memory-laced dream echo back to me,“Don’t thank me, Cano. Make me a promise. One day, show the world that there is more to the Croix line than just a bunch of ruthless assholes. It’s too late for the rest of us, but you have your whole life ahead of you. I see the heart you have.”I didn’t live up to his request for most of my life, and I will fucking regret that for the rest of it.
I lay stretched out on the piece of shit bed in the drafty room I’ve been given. Staring up at the cracked gray stone ceiling. The sun filters in through the one window, just barely lighting the room, even though I know it’s only mid-day. The overcast sky has been constant for the last week or more. Not that I get to see much of the sky. The only part of it I can see is muddled by the trees that surround the heart of the clearing the castle sits on. On the other side—you can only see the Creale Sea for miles.
