Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71403 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
My veins flash-froze. More unease swamped me. What did Jokull know that I didn’t? Why be so confident that he could exhaust Sebastian? I played along to placate him. “That’s a good strategy.” But I’d thought of it first.
The compliment puffed up his chest with pride. “Isn’t it? When he comes through that wall, he does not leave it. Not ever. I won’t be dying today. He will. And with his death, I’ll contain the rune. Afterward, if you are still alive, you may go or stay. Your choice.”
“No longer eager to be friends with him?” I asked, sipping the wine.
“One must sacrifice for dreams.” He turned to blow Harpa a kiss. “An eternity with her is the dream.”
“My future is already crammed,” she replied, brushing a piece of invisible lint from her shoulder. “No reason to pencil you in.”
I looked past them both, at the red roiling sea. And there he was. Sebastian. My heart slammed against my ribs.
Cloaked in seething shadow, white light bleeding out of the cracks of him, hammering the dome with blows that would’ve flattened a mountain. His face remained perfectly calm. His shirt was gone and his chest a wreck of runes and the handprint I had burned into him in his office. His eyes were flat, gray and empty.
Agony tore at me. He was ten feet away, on the other side of a wall, and I was sitting at a table with the man who had killed his parents, but the one I loved didn’t look at me even once. His gaze remained past me. Over my shoulder, locked on Jokull.
I didn’t have to wonder what thoughts rolled through his mind. He was measuring the dome’s failure point, the angle of his strikes, and the distribution of his own weight.
“He doesn’t see you at all, does he?” Jokull asked, so polite.
“Nein,” I said, not letting myself wallow in hurt. This was only temporary. Soon, I would punch through that stone with my love. Remind him how good we were together. But first. Jokull must be handled. “You don’t see me either. Not really.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t have let me come.
“Oh, I know you are strong.” The primordial toasted me. “I know you and Harpa and Sebastian believe you will, eventually, end me. That’s why he’s out there, beating on my house.”
“We will end you,” I said. “The rune wants to. I felt it.”
“Já.” He set down his glass. “It does. I felt it, too, and I have since accepted that it’s the only thing in all the realms that could oversee the deed.”
“But you aren’t afraid.” Not a question.
“Nei.” He picked up his knife, watching the candlelight run along the blade. “I will kill the man carrying it, ending him and inactivating the rune.”
I smiled, cold. “You will try.”
“The stone is nothing if it does not live in something,” he said, conversational, reasonable, a man explaining the tides to a child. “It replaced his heart. It is his heart. He’s gone, never to return.”
Nein. Nein, nein, nein. I refused to believe that. My Sebastian was in there.
Jokull leaned toward me, and now, at last, the pleasant expression peeled back, and I saw the monster that had been sitting at this table the whole time. “If you help me, rather than the husband who has spurned you and who is, for all intents and purposes, dead to you, I will reward you handsomely.”
I rolled my eyes to show him just how little weight I gave his promise.
He shrugged, reclined, and looked at the cage. “You were right, my dear.”
“I always am.” Harpa rolled back her shoulders, stretching. “She was never going to betray him. That is love, primmy. Pure, genuine love.”
Longing glazed his face, but I didn’t care. He’d forfeited his own happy ending a millennia ago.
The dome released a sudden shriek. A long, tearing, agonized note. A crack ran up the red wall from floor to ceiling and Jokull braced for battle. Freezing black water trickled into the dining room, and I surged to my feet.
A shadow slipped through the fissure, solidifying into Sebastian as it fell. He landed in the dining room, crouched as the sea streamed off him. White light spilled from his fists. As he straightened, he kept his sights locked on Jokull.
“Welcome,” the primordial said, rising slowly. “Finally, our last party guest has arrived.”
Sebastian said nothing. He just got to work, taking the room apart as he reached for his target, shadow-tentacles exploding from him, all glowing white like his hands. Those tentacles went through the table, the walls, the floor. Everywhere they touched, the manor broke.
A laughing Jokull produced whip-thin shadows with jagged edges; they ripped out of him in a hundred directions at once. Where they landed on my husband, they opened him to the bone. But Sebastian didn’t slow. Never made a sound. He just recalculated exactly as I’d watched him do in other battles and struck again.