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A tickle in her periphery…
Lunara spared a final glance across the room, where Sokar was standing just outside the doorway in a pocket of shadow, hands fisted at his sides while he stared and stared at his nephews. Until he locked burning eyes on her.
“How long have you lived here, Sokar?”
“Long enough that many I love no longer remember me.”
Oh, they remembered. She lost count of how many times Brand and Magnus looked towards that corridor. How often they pretended to need the washroom, only to turn in the wrong direction and head for the room where they first saw him instead. Sokar eluded them all the while, keeping his secrets. Kala refused to say a word. And he clearly regretted it.
Lunara nodded. If all went well, she’d bring them back.
She stepped into Brand, wrapping her arms around to bury the dagger beneath his auburn hair so Okthana wouldn’t see it, and tucked her face into the crook of his neck.
He nuzzled against her. “Ready?”
Everyone murmured their agreement, Pet licking her shoulder.
“I love you, Brand,” she whispered, refusing to have her own regrets, and pulled them into the ether.
The chaos of the battle was instant, as if they’d never left.
Putrid. Choking. Animalistic shrieks churned with the clang of talon and steel, the squelch of splitting flesh, Brand’s power pouring into the land as the others broke away.
Lunara locked right onto Okthana speeding towards them, the ground shaking beneath her feet as all the tension leached away.
Shitting stars, it fucking worked.
No way Lunara was going to squander it by hesitating.
Pretending to feed, she waited for the moment Okthana would have to manifest herself just enough to grab Brand and pull him into her shadows.
Just one chance. One—
Okthana’s clawed hands preceded her sharp visage, her torso emerging, and Lunara leapt through the mist already slashing. Blood sprayed as she carved the blade across Okthana’s middle, lunged again, and buried it to the hilt in the soft spot below her breastbone.
A searing in her palm. A burst of light. A quake rippling out behind it.
They hit the ground in a tangle of limbs, the murder of Okthana’s infinite crows swirling like a cyclone around them, frantic. Pecking and clawing at Lunara’s skin and hair and clothes. Cawing their fury. Pummeling into her only to retreat with wails that did not belong on the beaks of birds.
Still, no matter how they tried, they couldn’t find purchase. Couldn’t carry their mistress away or take control of Lunara.
She backhanded Okthana for good measure and wrapped a fist around her throat, pinning her to the dirt as she twisted the dagger deeper. Eyes like ice bored into hers, Okthana fuming and dumbfounded at once, her brow furrowing, blood gurgling from her ruby lips.
Lunara flashed a bitter grin. All that so she could turn around and fucking heal her.
“Caught you,” she taunted, and unleashed Illamiata.
The shadows in the chasm had been a snake. Night had been a dragon. Okthana’s darkness was something she didn’t have a name for.
Their screams flowed together and the air went iridescent, then molten, her power burrowing in through pore and orifice to chase the toxic malice flowing through Okthana’s veins. That hatred—so deep it put Lunara’s old well to shame—woke the ancient chorus, the voices of the Sisters exploding from within her at pitches unheard of.
They laid waste to Okthana’s power, to the filth infecting her, and Lunara paid the price for its healing. Squeezing. Crushing. Obliterating. No amount of moonlight was enough to counter the damage. The devastation.
Okthana’s stain of black and blue and ash bled away. Alabaster horns rose from snow-white waves. A violet gaze wept in a field of freckled, olive skin. That ruby sneer turned into soft and blushing petals.
Lunara had no flesh to sunder, no bones to snap, by the time it was done. Her mind fragmented, cutting itself away from the anguish of her mutilated body and carrying her away to somewhere else entirely.
As she crumpled to the earth, lightning splintered across the sky…and stayed there. The opaline fracture rippled with light, like waves lapping at the Montrealm’s shores, and Lunara was tempted to join the celestial dance there. To close her eyes and…
