I didn’t know if I believed in true love, but in that moment I believed in love that defied death.
I forgive you . . .
My mouth opened and I took a wheezing breath, sound and then warmth rushing back in a tidal wave. It was overwhelming and confusing, especially when I had no control over my pinned-down limbs; I might well have been a newborn child for what I could do. All I knew was that I couldn’t die, because Fallon had to live.
Amid the confusion, I tried to focus on the magic pouring into me, sending it where it needed to go. It was like trying to meditate in a Category 5 storm.
“Move!” roared Edmund all of a sudden, and I could hear the stomps of hundreds of backpedaling feet and the drone of the crowd growing quieter.
“Her heart rate is rising,” somebody barked. “She’s coming back to us.”
“Lords of Earth,” I heard Fallon breathe, still right beside my ear. The awe in his voice was punctured by a sob, and with a tremendous effort I opened my eyes. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking straight through the gap in the Athan around me, staring at the trees.
Or what was left of the trees.
They looked like they had been scorched, the last autumn leaves burned to a crisp and drifting as fire balls to the ground. The grass wasn’t grass anymore, just a patch of arid ground that I realized was hot. The crowd had moved right back, beyond the heat.
I was doing that. I was draining the plants of their energy, taking strength enough to open my eyes and talk. But nature didn’t work like people. Nature didn’t just die. Nature wanted its energy back.
“I don’t want to die,” I whispered as my eyes fluttered closed and I slumped back into the prince. The magic I had drawn was draining just as fast, and there was nothing I could do to shut the floodgates. It was an ebb and flow out of my control.
The flow from the Sage around me was getting weaker. My heart was slowing and there were black spots at the edge of my vision. But my body’s search for replenishment didn’t stop. Some sense, alien and new, slithered across and through the ground, hungrily tunneling past the dry earth to a new source of life.
I sucked on it greedily. It was wonderful, I was drowning in it there was so much, and my senses tuned back in again like a faulty radio. There was lots of noise now. Coughs, and splutters, and strange choking rasps.
“Autumn, stop! You’re taking it from the humans!”
What?! Another Herculean burst of effort, and I opened my eyes again, seeing rows upon rows of my human friends clutching at their throats and gurgling; some had even passed out. What can I do? How do I stop it?! I looked around pleadingly, heart beating very fast now, panicked inside.
“Just trust us, Autumn. Trust us to keep you going,” Edmund said, appearing in my limited line of vision. I felt soft strokes on my arm on his side. “You don’t need their energy. Let go and trust us.”
I closed my eyes again, from choice rather than need this time, and went back to meditating in the storm. Trust. It was the one thing I struggled with. I could bring a person back to life, but I couldn’t trust them. The Athenea had kept things from me, lied to me, kept up a pretense all this time, knowing what I was but not telling me. Nathan had been good to me, a friend even, but now he was my loathed enemy. Even Valerie lacked integrity. I had saved her and now she was begging apology for things she couldn’t possibly be sorry for because she couldn’t understand how they affected me . . .
But Edmund was almost kin, and he had kept my secret about killing the Extermino. He couldn’t have told anybody about my outburst on the veranda that day, either. Fallon had promised to look after me, and here he was, draining his own life to be with me. They had tricked, omitted, lied, and sidestepped their way through their time with me . . . but it had been to keep the most devastating secret of all from me.
If I can’t trust them, then who can I trust?
I let go, as easily as I had let go of my life for Valerie. My energy level dropped and I was briefly tempted to reach out again, but didn’t. I let myself rest in their life-saving cradle, slowly beginning to register the pain starting in my temples. There were teardrops falling where it hurt, and I wished I could squeeze Fallon’s hand. I wished I could tell him it would all be all right, even though it might not be.
“Fallon, you need to let go of her now,” a new voice said. I recognized it. It was Prince Lorent!
In my suspended, trusting state I panicked and the pain in my head got worse. Why are they letting go? Are they giving up on me? But then new hands rested on me and the old ones fell away, but Fallon’s never did.
“Fallon, let her go. If you don’t, she’ll kill you.”
“Fal, c’mon. We’ve got her. Fal . . .”
That was Alfie, and I could hear Lisbeth, too, and other voices . . . people from Burrator.
There was a new and very powerful surge of energy, fresh energy, but I didn’t feel any more alive. My head just hurt and it was filling with images, images of an anemic-looking brunette, tall but not very tall, with a pinched bridge of the nose, which set her eyes deep into their sockets, where shadows and tiredness collected. She was attractive rather than stunning, pretty but not beautiful. You could miss her face in a crowd. As it happens, I couldn’t. She was Violet Lee.
And I felt utterly stupid as the epiphany struck. She was the second Dark Heroine.
“Fallon, don’t make me order you.”
Epiphany turned to empathy. Poor girl. After everything she has been through, she’s going to be hit by this?!
The pain in my head was a whimper short of excruciating. I wanted to reach up and pound my temples, press down on them to relieve the pressure, but I couldn’t move my limbs. All I could do was scream, and it didn’t come out as a scream. It came out as, “Violet!”
“Miarba! I think she’s having a vision!”
“For Ll’iriad’s sake, what else can fate throw at us?!”
I’m having a vision? I wanted to shout, to shriek for them to make it stop, but it wasn’t happening. All that tumbled from my lips was her name, over and over.
“She’s giving it all away. Do something!”
“Do what?!”
“Calm down, all of you. I need you to hold her still while I perform a spell.” It was Prince Lorent’s voice, and he sounded determined.
“A spell that needs a knife? Uncle, what the fuck are you doing?!” I heard Fallon snarl.
“Blood magic. This will put her into a coma. It’s a living hell, but we have no choice. She’s having a vision. She’s going to reveal who Violet is. We can’t let that happen! We don’t have a choice!”
In my head, I screamed and screamed and screamed in horror. Out of my mouth spilled secrets. I had no control over my body and I was about to be silenced. I had no idea if I would ever wake up again.
I felt the blood drop onto my skin, and the slice of a blade onto my wrist. Alien words were muttered, and I fell off the cliff into hell.
It was a tiny slip of paper, no bigger than a postcard. Thick, heavy, expensive paper. Plain. They weren’t exactly going to leave a calling card.
“You must write it. They may recognize my handwriting. I send flowers to funerals and such.”
He took up a fountain pen and breathed down the nib. It was cold in Iceland, even with a roaring fire at the room’s center, and the ink turned to sludge.
“Write . . . write . . . ‘Michael Lee struck bargain with hunters for Carmen’s death. Lee girl knows. Pierre will confirm.’ Short and to the point is better. Our fanged friend isn’t famed for his patience.”
He scribbled out the dictated message.
“And you’re sure this Lee girl is the second Heroine? If she is killed by the vampires, we could have an international incident on our hands. We might lose our allies in the slayers and rogues, too. They’re trying to get her safely back to her father, after all.”
He watched his mentor stare out the window, back turned to him, and in the silence he could almost hear the
cogs of his incredible brain turning. The man was a bona fide genius, there was no denying it.
“As ever, Nathaniel, your grasp of the situation is impressive.” The sarcasm dripped off the man’s tongue like the water that trickled down the edge of the icicles outside the window. “All that is simply collateral damage. That alliance was forged before I had visions of this Lee girl becoming second Heroine. No matter. It has given us valuable information about her father’s role in Carmen’s death. In any case, if she dies as a human, there will be a war. If we stop the Prophecy of the Heroines, there will be a war! It’s terribly convenient.”
He picked the note up and carried it to the window, clasping it tight in his hand. He didn’t offer it over. “Completely sure?”
The man threw his head back and laughed, a sound that so often filled the dining hall and private parties his mentor threw. He was a man of belly-shaking laughter, of jokes and pranks, of pleasant company, especially the female kind. It was hard for a young man not to be drawn to him.
“I am chri’dom, descendent of Contanal. I am the greatest seer alive, and my visions are never wrong. The duchess of England is herself having visions of Violet Lee. And what’s more,” he snatched the paper out of the other man’s hands, “I want this little necromancer of a Heroine dead before she figures her powers out.” He waved his hand over the paper, and it disappeared, on its way to seal Violet Lee’s death. chri’dom used the free hand to pick up his glass of brandy, poured by Nathan himself—there were no servants in Contanalsdóttir. “Happy Ad Infinitum!”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Fallon
Three days and three nights we sat in silent vigil at the duchess’s bedside. There were always two people attending her, constantly making skin-to-skin contact and feeding her magic like a blood drip. She never once stirred, propped up with her back against three layers of soft feather pillows, cream nightgown stitched up to her neck and hair splayed across the white linen. She looked like an angel. A dead one.
But her heartbeat was strong and steady. Sometimes it sped up a little, and my uncle hypothesized that she must be experiencing her visions in those moments. Occasionally she broke into a sweat. After the first day, staff came in and sponge-bathed her while Lisbeth and my aunt continued the vigil. The first time I went reluctantly from my makeshift bed of pillows and comforter on the floor, afraid to leave her in case those were her last minutes; afraid to leave in case she awoke and I wasn’t there.
Eaglen came, late on the first night, and the entire household, even many of the servants, gathered in Autumn’s bedroom and stood like mourners viewing a body. Only perhaps Edmund had known her as long as the aged vampire, and when Eaglen entered the dimly lit room, his cracked lips parted and he let out a soft “Oh,” and stroked her forehead as lovingly as the surrogate grandfather he had supposedly been to her.
It was a scene that best described my own emotions. Helpless and pitiful and speechless.
It was Eaglen who had seen her coming, Eaglen who had warned us the June before that she was a Heroine, and it was with increasing urgency over the summer that he pressed us to act on his visions. Now we knew why, I supposed. The Second Heroine had entered his presence, but Eaglen was too old and wise to meddle with fate, or so he claimed, and so hadn’t warned us about Violet Lee. Watching him with Autumn, so tender and earnest, I became more and more certain he had only told us about her because he cared for her so much.
We filled him in on what little he didn’t already know, and in return pleaded with him to return when she awoke . . . his insight into Violet Lee’s time with the vampires would be invaluable in planning our next move.
I thought about all of that as I sat at her bedside, taking my turn in feeding her my magic. It was the morning of the third day of her coma, and I shared the duty with Edmund. He had brought a book with him to read, something heavy from the Man Booker shortlist, according to the label on the front, but he kept setting it down every few pages.
“Not any good?” I eventually said after he repeated the action for the fourth time. I attempted to set my tone at friendly conversation, but missed it by a panic attack and a sob.
He shook his head and half-raised a shoulder. “It’s brilliant. I just can’t . . . concentrate.” He sounded at a loss for words.
I hummed in acknowledgment. I didn’t much feel like sparing him words. It was crazy, because he had told me about his connection to her, but I didn’t feel as though his concern was righteous. He was almost as bad as I was. He rarely left her sitting room—I had found him crashed out on one of the couches, late one night—and spoke only to the servants to ask for food, or to his sister, Alya, who seemed to be the only one able to coax him outside. The night before, I had heard her saying something to my aunt about “Edmund’s guilt.”
He should feel guilty! said a nasty little voice in the corner of my mind. He failed to keep her safe! He should have been guarding against the Extermino! He should be dismissed!
But I didn’t listen to the nasty voice, because I knew it was jealousy that was creating it. Something in the way he had handled her back at the beach, after she swore, had stirred something very deep and lasting in me. I could still see his arm wrapped around her, clamping her in place not an inch above her breasts. The way he had whispered into her ear like he was kissing it, and the way her back had arched in response, pushing her backside into his groin . . . the primal way she let go of her emotionless façade and seethed and spat at him, her eyes burning red from anger . . .
I wanted her that way.
“She wanted to die,” Edmund eventually murmured. “I watched a child try to kill herself in front of my eyes. That does something to a person. It kills something inside them.”
“It killed me,” I said simply. “I would have died with her.”
“Don’t say that,” he snapped, looking up at me and away from her for the first time. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do,” I retorted, meeting his gaze steadily. “I know that I love her enough that a life without her isn’t worth living.”
To my surprise, he laughed. “You have a lot to learn about women, Your Highness. When you’ve been forced to sleep on the couch, denied sex for weeks, and ordered around by an irritated member of the fairer sex, then you’ll know whether you love her enough or not. Come back to me when you’ve had your first argument; you’ll soon change your tune.”
I scowled at him and felt my blood run hot. I would not be mocked by staff, friend or not. “I love her!”
He leaned back into his chair. “I know, and I can think of no man worthier of her. Just don’t approach the relationship with rose-tinted glasses on. It won’t do anybody any favors.”
I flinched at the unexpected praise. “Yes, well . . .”
I went back to staring at her. I love you. More than petty domestic idiocy can destroy. I squeezed her hand. More than Edmund thinks. I don’t care if we’re young—
Her hand squeezed back. I nearly jumped away in shock and Edmund’s head shot up.
“Her hand squeezed!” I squeezed it harder. Sure enough, the pressure on mine increased.
I think Edmund must have done the same, because he got up and kicked his chair flying, rolling her eyelids back. “Yes. Yes, I think she’s coming around,” he concluded in a determined whisper. At that moment, two of the medics that had been staying in to take care of her appeared in the room and began fussing over her, doing all sorts of tests.
“Let go of her,” one of them suddenly snapped, talking to me and Edmund. My eyes widened in horror. So did Edmund’s, and together, never tearing our gazes off the doctor, we both unfurled her fingers from our own.
My hand hovered an inch above her skin, just in case, as the medic pressed a stethoscope to her chest—they weren’t using electronic monitori
ng equipment, because every time they tried, the magic we were pumping her with sent it haywire. He waited for what seemed like an eternity.
“Her heartbeat is strong, as strong as it was. She’s had enough donation for some time, I think. But the spell is only just wearing off. Now we wait for consciousness.”
I tried reaching out with my mind to tell my family, but they were all blocked off. Edmund solved the problem by bounding off to the door and shouting down the corridor.
“Lords of Earth, keep the noise down. I’ve got a headache.”
The voice behind me was rasping and strained, but I would recognize it anywhere. I dived for it and found my face surrounded by golden coils, limp and dirty but still shining. Slowly, arms wrapped around me, too.
“I’m sorry,” said the same little strained voice. I just shook my head into the pillow before I was yanked back by my shirt.
“Let her drink, Fallon,” Edmund said, and she was passed a glass of water, which she downed in one gulp.
“How am I alive?” she asked, taking another glass of water and doing exactly the same.
“We continually fed you magic. Like a blood drip,” the medic said proudly. “Never in my entire career have I experienced any condition such as yours. It took a lot of improvisation.”
There was a determined set to her eyes I had never seen before. She looked straight ahead and straightened herself on the pillows, working her way back so she was totally upright.
“Well done,” she offered, as my family began to pour in, like she was praising a child. “We haven’t got time for pleasantries,” she continued in a tone damn near an order as some of the staff started to drop into bows. “I’ve been to hell and back, and hell is the future. It doesn’t look good.”
My uncle didn’t betray any of his relief. “Send for Eaglen. While we wait, you can eat. Then you will tell us.”
“He sent the note. It was the day after Ad Infinitum. There was a clock with the date on the mantel. I had that dream a few times, before it changed. She was reading a letter, about being tied as a Heroine, and then it changed again, and she had a knife at her throat and the vamperic king threatening to kill her. But it always stopped when Prince Kaspar Varn turned away and left her for dead. I had those three visions over and over, without ever knowing if she dies or not. It was hell.”