Page 164 of The Dragon and the Dove

He was no longer hers to save.

Lark’s jaw tightened as he looked over her head. ‘Make it quick. For her.’

Ransom stepped forward, but Nadia refused to move aside. She held on to Lark, sliding her hands into his hair. Grief spilled, stirring the magic in her soul.

Power danced between them.

His chest barrelled with new breath, the grey of his face deepening to sun-warmed skin, and freckles. His cheeks filled and then flushed. His eyes turned as green as the moss of Old Haven, and his hair sprouted into generous tufts of auburn curls. His teeth, half rotted, turned white, and his dimples returned.

It was only an illusion – a kiss of magic – but, oh, what a kiss it was.

His hand, still skewered by Caruso’s blade, began to bleed.

‘Ah,’ he said, closing his eyes.

‘I can’t keep you like this,’ she whispered. But she tried anyway. She poured out her magic, that endless font of bloom and life, into his withered body so that when death finally turned on him, it would meet him as Lark Delano, handsome and bright and vibrant with colour, and not as the Necromancer, grey and cruel and terrible, he had become.

She pressed her lips against his and tasted the warmth of before, when they would hold each other down in the catacombs, whispering of dreams that had come to nothing. Then she slid her dagger from her waistband and pressed it into his hand.

Without opening his eyes to meet the grief in hers, Lark drove it into his own heart.

His head dropped forward and she stepped back, watching his blood paint the cobbles between them. It lapped at Ransom’s boots.

His voice was as cold as his shadows. ‘I wanted to do it.’

‘No you didn’t,’ she said quietly.

That knife had been a kindness to all of them. To the kids they used to be.

The silence thickened. Even Caruso was quiet as he retrieved his sword.

Lark slumped to the floor. Kneeling in the pool of his blood, Nadia held his body until it turned cold, watching the last of the light leave his eyes, feeling the brush of his soul as it left his body.

Chapter 48 Ransom

Ransom was alone on the roof when his sister found him. It had been hours since they’d burned Lark’s body in a field outside the Hollows and trekked home together in strained silence.

Back at House Armand, Nadia had gone straight to her room and Caruso had gone straight to Val. Ransom had come to the roof to seethe. The Necromancer was dead, but the darkness inside Ransom was getting worse. It ached, this yawning need to kill and kill and kill again. To lose himself to the dragon.

A shiver wracked him. The beast in him was sharpening its teeth. More and more, he fantasized about giving into it, letting it devour everything in its path.

‘Don’t you dare jump! I’m too full of rhubarb crumble to knit your bones back together.’ Ransom turned at the sound of his sister’s voice.

Anouk, who had climbed up the fire escape, approached him in a careful crouch, as if he were a wild animal. ‘Easy, brother.’

His brows lowered. ‘Don’t talk to me like I’m a rabid dog.’

‘What are you then? Flying that dragon over the city like a lunatic?’ With her mouth pursed into a frown, she reminded him of their mother. Chiding but still soft. Mama had always been gentle with them as children. Perhaps to make up for their father, a man who moved through the world like a thunderstorm.

A man like you.

He turned back to the Hollows. ‘I came up here to be alone.’

‘Is your ruinous mood about the Necromancer? I thought you’d be happy Lark’s finally dead.’

‘This isn’t about Lark.’

‘Is it about Caruso? Are you angry he’s a saint?’