Chapter 45
Zane stumbled through the corridors towards the portal chamber. Every hallway seemed miles long. His body was out of his control, changing from dragon to bear to human so fast he kept falling, crawling on his hands and knees, trying to walk on two legs as a bear.
His bones broke and rebroke, shooting white-hot darts of pain through him every time he tried to take a step.
But he had to keep going. He had to get to Blaze in time.
His mind was filled with visions: Blaze lying hurt, dying from magic or a blade or the fiery breath of a dragon. In each one, he almost made it in time, failing at the last moment to save her, to protect her.
He couldn’t fail again. She was his heart, his most precious treasure.
Saving her was the only option.
He managed to hold his dragon form for a minute or two, dragging himself through the hallways. But he was too big for the hallway to the portal chamber, and Changing to human cost him almost a full minute. He had bear paws and a bear head, but he was running down the hall, and the doorway to the portal chamber was open. He didn’t need the palm scan.
The portal was closed, and he lunged for the lever. He couldn’t hold his shape; he went full-on bear again and now he was too big for the portal. He slapped the viewing panel with his huge paw while he focused on turning human.
He couldn’t, he almost turned dragon instead, growing and squeezing against the walls of the room. Agony. Agony. He had to be small. He had to be soft and human and small and vulnerable.
For her. For Blaze.
Blaze faced down the man in front of her. He’d been chasing her for so long, and she’d been running. Now, finally, they were face to face.
And she was strong. The idol had helped her remember all the things she’d learned, all the prices she’d paid.
Dark spells. Dark powers, lying dormant inside her for this moment.
“Silas,” she said. “You found me. Took you long enough.”
He took a step forward, spreading his arms. “You always knew it was going to end like this. You betrayed me, and you have to pay. Now, give me the idol.”
Blaze laughed at him. The darkness rose up inside her, and she crackled with power. Once more, they were children, playing in the forest, pitting their powers against each other. “Come and take it—if you can.”
He stepped forward again, circling, watching her carefully for telltale signs of which spells she would use against him.
He tried a quick summoning spell—the same one she’d used to grab the idol away from him. She countered it with a gesture.
“Really?” she said. “I was always better at that one than you.”
“You were never better than me. I taught you everything you know. I was preparing you to be my consort, and then your mother betrayed everything I’d worked for.”
He circled the other way, drawing ever closer to where she stood.
“You betrayed me,” Blaze said. Lightning flashed out of Silas’s hands in response. Blaze swept hers apart, deflecting it aside. It bounced off a stalagmite, leaving a scorch mark and the smell of ozone.
She went on, “You betrayed our coven.”
The chamber had stopped rumbling. Everything was quiet, except the sound of their footsteps and their breathing. It was as if Vyrkos was waiting for the outcome of this battle.
As if the whole mountain was waiting.
“You killed my parents,” Blaze continued relentlessly. “You destroyed everyone I cared about. You and… this.” She gestured at everything around them. “And for what?”
“Power, of course.” Silas was inching closer, his eyes on the idol in her hands. The fog had disappeared, seeping inside her, into her bones and her pores and her cells.
Filling her with darkness.
Filling her with power.
“But what’s it good for?” she asked. “What does it do, except destroy?”
“You don’t understand. You never understood.”
She stood there in the cavern, surrounded by more power than she could fathom. Power that had never been used for anything bright or good. Only to dominate and twist and destroy, turning in on itself, existing only to serve itself, never to help or heal or give.
Despite the darkness welling up inside her, she looked at Silas with clear eyes. His ruined, twisted face looked back at her.
He had been so handsome, once. The coven’s golden boy who could do no wrong.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe mistakes and pain and consequences were the only things that bred compassion. “What happened to you, Silas?” she asked. “I looked up to you. I worshiped you. That power you wanted so badly has twisted you beyond recognition, inside and out.”
“This is your fault,” Silas hissed. “Do you know what you did to me, when you took the idol? The pain you caused? Every day it was away from me was a torment. You did that to me. You did this to me.”
He pointed to his scarred, twisted face.
Had she done that? Had she condemned him to ten years of torture?
Or had holding on to the idol’s power done that?
“I tried to save you,” she said. “I thought if I took the idol away, your real nature would reassert itself. That you’d be free.”
He laughed. He was walking back the other way, still wary, but the arc of his circle was getting smaller and smaller. She was at the wall, near the brass star, and she had nowhere to go.
“I was always free,” he said. “And this is my nature.”
“No.” She refused to believe it. “You cared about me.” All those years of playing together, of teaching and learning. He had to have cared.
“Caring is for the weak.” He moved ever nearer, watching her eyes, watching the idol. “You were weak like your mother.”
“My mother was stronger than you could ever imagine. She saved me.” Blaze stared into his demon-red eyes. “And now I’m going to save everyone else.”
Silas sneered, “You can’t stand against me. I know your true name. I can use it to make you do anything I want. I can make you strip naked and dance for me. I can make you kill that dragon you’ve been whoring it up with.”
He moved closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I can rip your soul from your body and consign it to eternal torment. Nothing but pain and agony for eternity.”
He threw his arms open, his black robe spreading like the wings of a dark angel. His voice rolled out through the cavern. “Ariella Rowan, I know your True Name, the name that rules your inner self. Moonshadow of the Silver Raven coven, I call your name. Kneel before me…”
And Blaze began to laugh.
Silas stopped, shocked.
“I stopped being Ariella Rowan a long time ago,” she said. “I am no longer Moonshadow. In pain and in darkness, I cut my ties with the Silver Raven coven and remade myself.”
She took a step forward.
“You no longer know my True Name. But I know yours.”
It had been confided to her by a seventeen-year-old boy, when she was only eleven. When he’d taken her to the ravine and his flying spell had failed. She’d saved him, used that link to his inner self to lend him the power to heal himself, and traded the knowledge of her name for his.
And he’d bonded to the idol with his true name.
Blaze raised her arms. This moment had been barreling down on her for ten years, no matter how far she’d tried to run, how well she’d tried to hide.
She’d always known it would come to this, even if it ended her. And it would.
“Silas Turner, I call you by your True Name, Sunstar of the Silver Raven coven. With it, I sever all ties you’ve made with your soul and your spirit. I tear you from this magic talisman.”
She could almost feel the cosmic rip as Silas was torn away from his connection with the idol. Silas dropped to his knees, his back arching in pain.
“I tear you from Corwyn the Sorcerer. I tear you from Vyrkos, Lord of the Draken…”
“NOOOO!” Silas screamed. The idol screamed with him, and became burning hot in her hands. The air trembled as Vyrkos roared in his tomb, and the cavern shook with a force that nearly brought her to her knees. Cracks covered the floor, and the Draken Lord’s great eye opened all the way.
Through the viewer, Zane watched in horror as Blaze put her dark magic into motion, tearing Silas’s very soul from its anchors.
This was what she had been talking about, in his lair. This spell was what she’d sacrificed to learn, the one she was ashamed she even knew.
It was the darkest of dark magics, to seize another’s soul and tear it from its moorings.
She was ripping all of Silas’s soul connections apart. But it was worse than Thorne had feared. It wasn’t just that the Draken Lord was waking. His and Corwyn’s hold on Silas was too powerful, and too deep.
To finish this against all the resistance aimed against her, Blaze was going to have to rip his soul from his body.
It was the worst sin any sorcerer could commit—and the backlash would be mortal. At best, Vyrkos would rise up and absorb the magic, binding her to him for eternity. At worst, destruction of Silas’s soul would rebound and destroy hers, and consign her to a Hell from which there was no return.
He couldn’t let that happen.
With an agonized howl, Zane forced himself into his human body, and threw himself through the portal.