Page 78 of The Kraken Bride

“Oh, I know you are strong.” The primordial toasted me. “I know you and Harpa and Sebastian believe you will, eventually, end me. That’s why he’s out there, beating on my house.”

“We will end you,” I said. “The rune wants to. I felt it.”

“Já.” He set down his glass. “It does. I felt it, too, and I have since accepted that it’s the only thing in all the realms that could oversee the deed.”

“But you aren’t afraid.” Not a question.

“Nei.” He picked up his knife, watching the candlelight run along the blade. “I will kill the man carrying it, ending him and inactivating the rune.”

I smiled, cold. “You will try.”

“The stone is nothing if it does not live in something,” he said, conversational, reasonable, a man explaining the tides to a child. “It replaced his heart. It is his heart. He’s gone, never to return.”

Nein. Nein, nein, nein. I refused to believe that. My Sebastian was in there.

Jokull leaned toward me, and now, at last, the pleasant expression peeled back, and I saw the monster that had been sitting at this table the whole time. “If you help me, rather than the husband who has spurned you and who is, for all intents and purposes, dead to you, I will reward you handsomely.”

I rolled my eyes to show him just how little weight I gave his promise.

He shrugged, reclined, and looked at the cage. “You were right, my dear.”

“I always am.” Harpa rolled back her shoulders, stretching. “She was never going to betray him. That is love, primmy. Pure, genuine love.”

Longing glazed his face, but I didn’t care. He’d forfeited his own happy ending a millennia ago.

The dome released a sudden shriek. A long, tearing, agonized note. A crack ran up the red wall from floor to ceiling and Jokull braced for battle. Freezing black water trickled into the dining room, and I surged to my feet.

A shadow slipped through the fissure, solidifying into Sebastian as it fell. He landed in the dining room, crouched as the sea streamed off him. White light spilled from his fists. As he straightened, he kept his sights locked on Jokull.

“Welcome,” the primordial said, rising slowly. “Finally, our last party guest has arrived.”

Sebastian said nothing. He just got to work, taking the room apart as he reached for his target, shadow-tentacles exploding from him, all glowing white like his hands. Those tentacles went through the table, the walls, the floor. Everywhere they touched, the manor broke.

A laughing Jokull produced whip-thin shadows with jagged edges; they ripped out of him in a hundred directions at once. Where they landed on my husband, they opened him to the bone. But Sebastian didn’t slow. Never made a sound. He just recalculated exactly as I’d watched him do in other battles and struck again.

My dragon rose howling. I dropped low, slipped beneath Jokull’s guard and unleashed a torrent of fire hot enough to melt everything it touched.

Argh! Skin bubbling, bones melting, while the primordial simply rebuilt himself as fast as I destroyed him, continuing to fight Sebastian without a pause in his strikes.

Jokull’s shadow-whip caught me across the ribs and threw me the length of the hall into the sideboard.

“That looks like it hurt,” Harpa said from the cage. “I’d come out and help, but it’s not my time to shine yet.”

I ignored the pain. Ignored her and climbed back to my feet.

I went left when the shadow came again, my broken ribs grinding. The manor kept coming down around us. A slab from the ceiling crashed where I’d been only seconds ago.

Sebastian drove Jokull toward the east wall, away from me. But did he do it because of me, or because the east wall was better ground? Guess we’d find out. Ignoring every burst of pain, I hurled myself back into the fray.

Jokull fixed on me as if Sebastian wasn’t even in the room. Before I landed my second strike, a black arc of shadow came down on my chest with the whole weight of the primordial behind it. No time to slip free. A tentacle shot down my throat, snuffing out my fire, filling my lungs with water.

I fought, I fought so hard. But nothing helped. My lungs screamed for air. My dragon clawed at my mind. My vision dulled, and realization sparked. Dying?

At least Jokull would die with me. Despite my haze, I could see Sebastian had a clean strike. With Jokull focused on me, another watery shadow already forming, preparing the blow that would end me, his flank remained open. There was no better time for Sebastian to act. Saving my life wasn’t the objective, after all. But…

“Save her!” Harpa shouted. Jokull glared at her, his grip loosening.

“Come back to me,” I called to him as blessed oxygen filled my lungs. But Jokull squeezed again. Harder this time.