One who looks very much like Lady Isobel.
It’s his face that stalls me in the midst of the noise-plagued atmosphere. As if it could shock the very hunger from me because this man is old and frail, yet beautiful in his perfection. A man whose eyes are the blackest onyx and grossly aged by the atrocities they’ve seen and caused. Aged by the hundreds of lives the monstrous spirit he traded his soul to has devoured.
From out of nowhere the dawning comes and squelches within my chest. He is as much a slave to the animal he’s become as Eogan’s body was.
I drop my hand. The vortex in my blood writhes even while I force it down. Because for whatever reason, I cannot kill this man.
“Nym, what are you doing?” Myles yells beside me. “Keep going—you’ve almost got him. Take him down! I command you to take him down now!”
I try to shake Myles’s hand off and step back, but the next thing I know, Draewulf’s eyes flinch and turn repulsed. As if he knows what I’m thinking and cannot bear it. Cannot bear the mercy, the pity for him that is welling up inside me. And I have no idea where it’s coming from—this grief for a man who has taken lives simply because he forgot how to live his own.
I’m shaking so hard, trying to clamp down this vortex in me as I lift a finger toward Draewulf. But this time it’s in empathy.
And Myles is still gripping my arm and screaming.
“You have power but you can choose differently how to use it,” I whisper, with a glance up to where I know Kel is sitting in the captains’ quarters.
And this time I mean it. We both know I mean it. “There’s always a choice.”
Draewulf’s lips curl up and his eyes narrow.
“Please choose differently,” I say, and for the slightest second my voice cracks.
Before he can react further, his head jerks back and twists and suddenly there’s a ghoulish cry coming from it that sounds like the very pit of hulls. Myles’s hand slips free of me.
Draewulf’s yell is followed by a ripping sound, and I swear the fabric of reality, of who we are, rips apart as simultaneously Eogan’s body becomes transparent, like a ghost, and Draewulf’s wolfish form seems to solidify inside of it.
I back up.
He roars and throws himself at me.
I lunge away just as his body hits mine, and there’s a loud crack as if the sky just shattered.
What in—?
I grab out to him, but he slips away and stands. And I’m left blinking, shaking my head because I’m suddenly aware Eogan’s physical body is beside me, half covering me, bloody and dead. And Draewulf is alive and uncurling in front of me to his full height.
I gasp.
The sounds of war and death fade from my hearing. Everything fades but the sneer plastered across his countenance as he looks strange. Ethereal. A wisp of a spirit with a man’s legs and body, but a wolf’s face and claws. And the gloating expression promising that he will never choose differently. Because he made his choice long before I was ever born.
I swallow and pick up the blade from where it fell when Myles dropped it. But just as I push Eogan’s body off me and lunge forward to stab the spirit, Draewulf wavers and floats out of reach. He’s materializing. His voice, his bones, his skin, his fur. And I can hear him muttering, as if calling himself into full existence, from the wisp that was wrapped inside Eogan’s body to the full, solid wolf I’ve seen once before. In a battle much like this.
A sob breaks out. It takes me a second to realize it’s from my own throat. I brush away the tears suddenly streaming from my eyes and attempt to reject the fact that Eogan’s body is lying next to me.
I can’t look at him. At whatever pieces of skin and bone are left from Draewulf shredding through his body. Just like he shredded through Breck’s. Just like he’s shredded a final time through my soul.
Focus on the enemy, Nym. Before the last remnants of what I am become utterly undone.
CHAPTER 39
ANOTHER CRACK RUPTURES ACROSS THE SKY.
It’s followed by a crack inside me. I can feel it. Hear it. As if someone’s poured heat over my muscles and bones, and that icy metal Draewulf sealed them over with when he cut out my Elemental powers a week ago in my room at Faelen’s Castle has just warped.
It curls me in half.
I hit my knees as another shudder rocks through me and suddenly that heat is flowing, and the metal and ice are melting to mix in with a fluttering in my veins. What in—?
The fluttering reaches my chest and forces me to drop the knife just as Lady Isobel’s voice screams, “We have the king!” over the noise of the Bron soldiers fighting wraiths near me. “Take him to my father!”
Draewulf whips his wolfish head toward her at the same moment his fur-covered body becomes solid. The same moment a sensation as familiar as the breath in my lungs surges through my own bones and arms, and all the way to my fingertips. Like a song weaving beneath my skin.
It’s a melody I never thought I’d hear again.