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)
Kierse moved faster than she had ever moved in her life. One moment, she was by the doors, and the next, she raised the spear over her head, placing herself between two primordial beings.
She met the bone-jarring clang of the sword as Lorcan brought it down to end the fight. It clashed against her spear, but the full force of the ending wasn’t in the magical artifacts. It was the power of the Oak King in his victory.
Magic pulsed out of him in an explosion of white light that pierced Kierse straight through the heart. She gasped as the magic enveloped her senses before blasting out of her and reverberating through the brownstone and out into the world beyond.
What was left of Kierse exploded with it.
Chapter Sixty-Two
God magic.
That was what was coating her body. An unbelievable, all-consuming fire of god magic.
Her Fae heritage was desperately trying to keep up. An impossible task, and still her absorption powers were working overtime. But there was no way she could absorb the amount of energy that had just been unleashed on her. She’d hardly been able to contain wish powder. Even with her new abilities, whatever they might be, it wasn’t possible to absorb the full might of the Oak King in his ascendance into power.
Like the click of a vault opening, she felt the moment her powers were overwhelmed. Felt the second that she was pushed over the edge and cast into a fire of molten magic. She was being burned alive at the stake. Every nerve ending, every sense, every fragment of her being erupted with pain, and then there were only her guttural screams as it tore through.
“No,” Graves and Lorcan cried at the same time.
She could hear the shrieks from her friends, but they were drowned out by her own screaming.
“That wasn’t meant for you,” Lorcan gasped.
“You did this,” Graves accused Lorcan.
Then, he wrenched the sword free of his body with a grunt and cast the black blade aside. He heaved his torn body off of the hardwood floors, blood leaking out of his injury as he came for Kierse.
“You can fight this, Wren,” he told her as he gripped her by the shoulders. “You can fight it. You can win. Just . . . just give it to me. It was meant for me.”
But she could do or say nothing. There was only the pain. Only the searing, endless pain.
She had trained her magic well enough to make a ward, to absorb magic, and to go into slow motion. None of that could help her here. She’d absorbed too much. She couldn’t even find slo-mo if she wanted to. Not while her body was fried from the inside out.
If she was capable of releasing her powers into someone else, she had no idea how.
“Please, Wren,” Graves said, his voice breaking. “Please. You have to try. You have to try to give me the power that was meant for me. It was my undoing, not yours.”
Tears leaked from her cheeks, but she couldn’t even tell him no. She couldn’t even try.
“You don’t die until the day after Christmas, remember?” His voice was hoarse. His hands moved up her arms to cup her face. She stared into her favorite pair of gray eyes. “You can’t. You can’t go early. You have to herald spring.”
Kierse dug deep. She fought back against an overpowering tide of magic and pain to the center of herself. The spark that held all of her magic. It was just a flicker, barely an ember. And then she stoked it. Tried to force herself to do something she had never done before. To shift the full might of the Oak King into its intended target.
A tendril of magic shifted. It flicked off of her and curled into a loop before their eyes.
“Yes,” Graves said. “Yes, give that to me. You can do this. Try again.”
Tears poured down her face, and she shook violently.
She would try. Another bit of light escaped her body. She pushed it forward, tried to propel it out of her. It touched the front of Graves’s suit and singed into him. He grunted as if the barest flick of pain was his undoing.
“Good,” he said.
She couldn’t keep going. She just . . . couldn’t.
“Again,” he commanded.
And this time, he brought his lips down on hers. A kiss that for the barest trace of a moment made the pain cease. Made the entire world disappear. Her magic was so overwhelmed that Graves could easily read her, though she didn’t know what he would find other than the fire coursing through her.
But then something happened. A memory moved into her mind.
Not her memory. Graves’s.
She was looking through his eyes as he traipsed through a field of wildflowers. Bright yellows, dark blues, and vivid purples were on display all around him. And tucked away against the moor was a lake so large and green as to look an endless sea. He carried a book under his arm as he made his way to the shore. The sun shone on his face and hands. His wrists were bare. No tattoo. No scars. No markings at all. This was the man before he became the monster.