Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 145721 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145721 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“Look out!” Gen cried.
Aisling had gotten back up and held a gun level with them.
“Get down!” Kierse shouted.
But Niall threw himself between Kierse and Aisling just as she pulled the trigger. Niall gasped, choking on his pain. Kierse’s eyes flared wide. He’d just saved her.
“Not the . . . wisp,” Niall said to Aisling.
Aisling gasped in horror, dropping her weapon and holding her hands up. “I didn’t think . . .” Then she fell to her knees. “Niall.”
But Niall was already gone.
The sounds of swords clashing brought them back to reality. She couldn’t do anything about the Druid who had died for her. Not while her friends were still in danger.
“We need to get out of here,” Kierse said.
“The window,” Ethan suggested, glancing backward.
“It’s too far of a drop for you two. You’d break something,” she said, knowing full well that she had been prepared for the same thing only weeks earlier. But Ethan and Gen weren’t even as strong as her. “We need to get past them to the stairs.”
The historic fight raged before her, and all that mattered in her world was escaping.
Kierse squeezed Gen’s fingers, and Ethan took Gen’s other hand. A trio. A unit. As they always had been.
“Together,” Ethan said.
“Together,” Gen repeated.
Kierse knew the library like the back of her hand. She had spent countless hours between training sessions reading in the privacy of its shelves. And the fastest exit was straight through the battle. The worst exit was the window with its impossible drop. They needed another out.
“This way,” she said and then dragged them from the sword fight. The two beings were no longer cognizant of the world around them.
She maneuvered through the stacks. In the process, she found Anne cowering in a corner.
“You too, kitty,” Gen said, then scooped the cat up in her arms.
Kierse gaped at her. Of course Anne Boleyn loved Gen.
They hustled around the next bend of shelves and came out on the other side of the fight. But the battle raged nearby with no end in sight. It wouldn’t be easy to get past them, not for her friends, but there wasn’t another option. Not a real one.
She had to get the doors open and then get the fuck out of there with her two friends and a tempestuous black cat. Fuck.
“Once I get the doors open, you run faster than you ever have in your entire life,” she told them. “Let me deal with Graves and Lorcan if they come near. Understand?”
Her friends nodded, terror on their faces.
Then she pushed herself to max speed. Her limbs barely processed what was happening as she raced for the door. Everything slowed, and for a moment she could almost see the finer points of the battle. Graves and Lorcan were so much more tonight. With the solstice and the full moon and the approaching witching hour, the stars were aligning for this fight.
It was strange to see them haloed in the golden glow of their magic. The Oak King and the Holly King. A summer god facing off with a winter god. Dark facing Light.
Though she had no idea which was which. There was no good guy in all of this. Graves had said that from the start. There were only the consequences of their actions. It didn’t matter their intentions when the outcome was the same.
Both liars and monsters and murderers.
Both capable of love and laughter and life.
No heroes.
No villains.
Just people blessed and cursed with magic.
As she was.
But there had to be a winner.
And the second before she pulled out of slow motion, she saw the tide shift. She wrenched the library door open the same moment that Lorcan moved. He pushed aside the tip of the Sword of Truth and pierced the black sword into Graves’s shoulder.
Kierse gasped as the weapon clattered out of Graves’s fighting hand. It hit the library floor with an otherworldly loudness as Graves was forced onto his back. Lorcan bent down and picked up his prize. He held aloft in his hand the sword that made him the self-proclaimed winner. The Oak King. The bringer of light. He claimed his victory as he always had at the end of the fight on the winter solstice.
Graves wasn’t focused on his opponent any longer. Lorcan had disappeared for him when he met Kierse’s gaze. She was furious with him. He had lied and schemed and hidden the truth from her. And yet, in that look, she knew that he hadn’t faked his affection. That at the end of this battle, his eyes were only for her. A depthless longing and affection lay in those storm-cloud irises.
“Kierse,” Ethan cried, reaching for her. “Come on.”
“We have to go,” Gen said as she clutched a terrified cat to her chest.
But as Lorcan raised the second sword toward Graves, Kierse knew she couldn’t let it end like this. She simply couldn’t imagine a world, her world, without Graves in it. No matter what he’d done or what he’d withheld from her. No matter what she felt right now.