Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91891 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91891 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
The Ember surged until my skin seemed to melt. It didn’t drink up my water but used it as fuel. Filling me. Still heating. Filling me further. Soon I would burst. Too much! Heating until the air around me screamed.
A scream tore free from me. Raw, feral, unrecognizable. The sound split the sky.
Golden armor materialized over me, made of water and words and love and spirit. Or so it seemed. My hands went steady in an instant, the rest of me terrifyingly calm.
I rose, fire coiling around me, grief forged into something sharp and lethal. They hadn’t crystallized. I didn’t know why. Yet. No matter.
They had taken my sister. They had taken my father. And now, finally, I would take their everything. Whatever the cost.
There was no easing into what happened next. Power detonated inside me. As much as I could handle. More than I could handle, even with all my new inner nooks and crannies. Water wings didn’t just bloom from my back. They erupted, tearing free in a violent spray of pain and ecstasy colliding as a single furious beat of air that launched me skyward.
The monstra noticed. They rushed to surround me, snarling and confident they could end me too. Jasher flew among them, as if tugged by an invisible force, just as I’d foreseen. Muscles strained as he fought to… break from their ranks?
Perhaps. But would he? I knew what was coming next.
My grief iced over, and I smiled at my audience. “Come,” I whispered, crooking my finger. “Try to kill me.”
They did. With fire, tooth, and claw. Child’s play. Golden armor flashed over me as I cut through the masses. The ease of my triumph surprised me. I glided through pockets of air, yanking out the water from in their blood. Bodies crystallizing as they dropped by the dozens.
I lost sight of the monstra as individuals. I simply saw tangled coils of light and shadow. But there was one coil—familiar—that avoided me. When I got close, it—he—backed off, never attacking. In fact, he seemed to toss the others my way, in offering.
Wait. Down there. What was that? My gaze zeroed on another coil, bigger than the others. Ian? He stood on trembling ground. Ground growing and growing, rising into a hill. A mountain. Oh, yes. Ian. Even through the haze, I knew him. That face. Jasher’s face, worn by something that had never been Jasher at all. The one who had unmade me, loop after loop. Who had turned the man I loved into a weapon and pointed him at my throat. Ian. Finally. Finally.
“Come,” he said in a mimicry of me, motioning me over. “Try to kill me.”
Oh yes. Ian. He ripped off his shirt to prove it.
I flew over him and verified the emerald tattoo. Real. This was real.
He grinned, and I moved. We clashed. He fought. Of course he did. His hands found my armor, my wings, anything to grip to try and slow me. I sensed the desperation in his strikes, the first honest thing I’d ever felt from him. He just wasn’t strong enough.
In the end, I cleaved his head from his body. The sound it made was not the thunderclap I’d imagined across hundreds of deaths. It was quiet. Final. Like a door closing. But that door didn’t latch. And I just felt…empty.
That made no sense. I’d done it. I’d killed Ian. So why wasn’t I bubbling over with my victory?
The quiet stretched. I hovered there, above what remained of him, waiting to feel something enormous. Triumph. Release. The lifting of a yoke I’d worn for longer than I could name.
What came instead was simpler. A small whisper. You’re not done yet.
I didn’t understand. As my wings faded, I slowly lowered to the ground. And there was Jasher. He landed beside me, unharmed.
“You didn’t kill me with the others,” he said, as stunned as I was.
“This makes no sense,” I muttered. “Ian is dead, the tie broken. But you’re alive.”
“Maybe the tie…isn’t broken? I still feel him.” He rubbed his chest and frowned. “I still feel others, too.”
I gnashed my molars. Had I killed another decoy? Just a better one?
The royal chickens pecked at the remains, with my Cluck Cluck among them. I’d deal with the Ian and Jasher surprises later. Now, I headed for the spot my father had fallen.
Cluck Cluck might have smiled as I passed her. “Bwok, bwok.”
I thought I translated it: Soon, soon.
There was more to her than I’d realized. Definitely. Another puzzle for later.
A jewel gleamed from Ahav’s ashes. Heart thudding, I bent down to discover what it was. My mother’s ring. The one I’d worn on my inaugural journey.
Tears wanted to well, but they never formed. Maybe they couldn’t. I closed my fingers around the jewelry. “Just one more thing I don’t understand,” I croaked to Ahav, though he couldn’t hear me. Not anymore.