Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
A groan escaped her as she tried one last futile time to make her power listen to her. The bond could sever. It could. But she had hit a tipping point.
One second earlier, she’d had control of her magic, the triskel, the tree, and Faerie. And now it was past her.
The tornado careened in ever-tightening circles, blasting people backward and propelling Druids and friends alike across the tile floor. Only those at the direct center were exempt from the torrent. Those nearest her.
The bond was no longer visible. She couldn’t even pluck at the thing. She couldn’t even feel it.
Just the magic.
The burning. Like an unending blast of fire on her skin and through her body. The cascade of pain hit her where nothing had before. It started with her fingertips. Her skin burned like the paper of a cigarette, crawling up the inside of her arm and tracing the lines of her veins, heading toward her heart.
She had taken too much. She had fallen into the eternal pit that she had never thought she could hit. Burnout. She was in burnout. And it was going to kill her if she didn’t stop.
No, she tried to say, but the word got stuck in her throat.
She pushed at the magic, pushed against the Faerie realm that was taking her over. The mischievous trick it was playing on her asking for too much power. It receded but only briefly. Just enough for Lorcan to come back into her mind.
“Give it to me, love,” he pleaded. “I can take it.”
The bond that she had worked so hard to break, that had gone utterly numb from her pain, was there once more. A small glimmer of a promise of salvation. She latched onto it as the only thing she could still feel in the world other than this endless pain, and she offered him some of this infinite power.
Lorcan grunted against the brunt of it. She could sense him drop to a knee as he braced himself against the wave of energy. But the Oak and Holly Kings couldn’t die. That was what he had said. Not with the god magic thrumming through them and their story still unfinished.
So he took the magic, and he took some more. It still burned. It still traveled up her arms to her heart. But for a second, her vision cleared. She saw the carnage that she had created all around her.
Gen and Ethan fixed to the spot, huddled from the vortex. Laz and Schwartz blown away in the breeze, collapsed farther away on the floor. Niamh bracing Lorcan as a robin should. And Graves…was missing.
She had enough magic to sense that Graves wasn’t in her vision, but instead, he was behind her. He moved into the maelstrom she had created.
And he was moving toward Faerie.
But that made no sense.
Faerie was not a place for warlocks. Fae were the natural enemies of a warlock. They could drain their magic. They could kill him. It had been her first lesson in learning her heritage that Graves might have seen her as an enemy. That he had only kept her alive for her usefulness.
It hadn’t been true, of course. He had fallen in love, as she had, and that had changed everything. It still changed everything.
A terror like she had never known ripped through her as Graves took another step toward the door.
“Graves,” she vocalized.
“Focus on me,” Lorcan begged. “Send me more, little songbird. Send me more.”
But she couldn’t focus. Not on Lorcan’s pleading or his gentle tongue. She could see nothing but Graves’s determined pacing toward the tree. One step away. A half step away.
Then he reached through the door of Faerie, letting the waves of magic coming for her crash into him instead. It lashed him like a scourge to his skin. But he kept moving, his hand landing on the door handle.
With one giant heave, Graves pulled the door closed. He stumbled to one knee before making a choked sound and falling forward, the raven at the ash door.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Kierse plummeted like a falling star from the sky, landing in a bruised heap on the hard tile floor. Her already painful wrist cracked underneath her in the fall. The magic still thrummed so poignantly through her veins that she had to rebreak the damn thing before it healed over too quickly. With a shocked cry, she set it in the correct place.
The world was silent as she looked up from her magic rush. The tornado had stopped, and the inside of the bank was more like a war zone than the incredible restoration work. The roots vanished from Gen and Ethan’s feet, and they huddled together in a disconcerted panic. Lorcan and Niamh looked at her with glazed, fearful eyes. Lorcan’s full of unadulterated desire as well.
And still the bond was there.