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)
“I pledge a geas on the stone,” Kierse said audibly this time for everyone to hear. “If Lorcan will bring Graves back to life with the power of the stone, then I will pledge to go with Lorcan and…”
The last words stuck in her throat like cotton balls. She couldn’t say them. She couldn’t mean them. With no out and a promise that could only be broken in death. It was too much.
But this was her troth. And the geas would be sealed with it.
“…and forget my relationship with Graves.”
The stone vibrated under her hand. And she felt the magic wind up her wrist and almost pull her toward it. As if sucking something of her into the stone to bind what was promised upon it.
“Your geas is spoken upon the sacred stone. Once the fallen is returned to you, the geas will be sealed with a kiss.”
Lorcan’s eyes widened as if he, too, had heard the stone’s voice in his mind. All of her friends must have heard it. Gen and Ethan clung to each other as if it couldn’t be true. Niamh looked forlorn between them.
It was done. Now all Lorcan had to do was what he had pledged, and it would take hold of her. She jerked her hand free of the stone and clutched her chest where the bond was.
She’d done it. She’d done it.
It still seemed impossible. And yet it was happening.
The stone was vibrating, and magic radiated from the seemingly innocuous rock toward Lorcan, flooding him through with the power of his godhood. It was tenfold what Kierse had held when she’d touched Faerie. She didn’t know how it was possible for him to hold it all. Lorcan had always had so much more magic than her, but this was power to break the world. The Oak King at his absolute height.
Lorcan stared down at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. “Holy gods,” he breathed.
He glowed a faint, shimmery iridescence. The magic roiled through him as it did on the solstice at the height of his power.
The connection between him and Graves that let him bring him back to this world was the other reason he could hold it.
“Quickly,” Niamh said. “It’ll turn on you if you don’t use it.”
Lorcan met her gaze and smiled. “My robin.”
Niamh scowled. “No one will forgive you for this.”
“For saving him?”
“I will,” Kierse said, her eyes still on Graves’s unmoving body. “Anything to bring him back.”
And then Lorcan unleashed his magic. The flow of time slowed as it cascaded from his hands down into the empty vessel of Graves’s body. For a shimmering second, Kierse could see the connection between them. Not a bond in the way she had been used to imagining a bond—the golden string that latched her to Lorcan.
Instead, it was a pathway down a long, open bridge. Bright summer sunshine flush with blooms on one side and a snowy winterscape with an icy river on the other. The bridge they both walked down throughout the seasons.
This was the source of their seasonal magic. The link of the Oak and Holly Kings that let them control the turning of the tides. The meeting point when their magic collided at each solstice. The longest and shortest days of the year becoming the junction point for their endless battle. A story for the ages that neither could fully escape.
And as quickly as it came, the bridge dissolved into nothing. The great working magic the stone had given Lorcan was gone. He dropped to one knee in much the way Graves had when he had first taken the brunt of the Faerie world magic. Only he looked up at the still-unmoving body.
Kierse took a hesitant step forward. “Did it work?”
But Graves didn’t move. She trembled from head to toe all over again. The fear of his passing had redoubled in the wake of the thought that…maybe Lorcan couldn’t do it. Their very last chance and maybe…it wasn’t even possible.
“Graves?” she said.
A moan came from the body on the ground. A word came from his beautiful lips. “Wren?”
Chapter Sixty-Six
“Graves,” she gasped, throwing herself onto the floor.
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned as she fell on him. “Easy there.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” But then she was crying, burying her head into his suit coat and sobbing at the top of her lungs. She couldn’t even get air in as she hyperventilated.
“Hey now,” Graves said, putting a hand into her hair. “I’m fine. It wasn’t that bad.”
She kept crying. How could she tell him that he had been gone? That the magic had killed him? That she had saved him?
“There, there. That’s enough.” He opened his eyes, and she could see the light back in them. The storm clouds that had cleared so they looked almost blue in the light. Tears streaked her cheeks, and he brought one of his beautiful hands up to her face to brush the tears from them. “This is a lot, Wren,” he said with an almost laugh. “You were the one we were worried about.”