I glance back the way we came. “We cannot turn back.”
“No.” Sighing softly, he shakes his dark head again, and his broad shoulders fall. “The only way forward is through.” Gently, he presses his forehead against mine and whispers, “I will take care of them. Just stay here.”
I grab his cloak before he can pull away. “They should not have to die for us to live.”
My stomach churns, sick with knowing what he means to do. If he even can. He alone cannot take down twenty men, Eastlanders at that. Can he? The God Knife hasn’t proven itself as the divine weapon I once believed, though he seems to think it’s a critical piece in this game we’re playing.
He tilts my chin, and even under this red haze, I can see that the pretty green of his eyes has turned black.
“Believe me, this is the last thing I want to do,” he says. “But you’ve seen what these people are capable of. They will not spare us, Raina. They will kill us or take us to their prince. Or worse. Make no mistake.”
He tosses up his hood, shadowing his face, and kisses me. I don’t know why his hands on my cheeks or the press of his lips feels so shocking. Perhaps because it also feels so natural—so impossibly right—when it should feel anything but those two things. It’s a tender kiss, but it makes me weak all the same, scattering my mind like I’m sure he knew it would.
“Do as I say,” he whispers against my mouth. “Do not follow me. Your life depends on it. I will come back for you, but no matter what you see, no matter what you hear, do not follow. Swear it.”
I hate every bit of this, but I press the word Promise against his chest, not missing the way his heart pounds like a war drum beneath my touch.
It turns out I’m more of a liar than I ever knew, because minutes later, the earth quakes and rumbles like a star fell from the sky and crashed in the middle of this godsforsaken forest. Then I’m tying our horrified horses to a tree, stripping off the cumbersome gambeson, freeing both my blades, and creeping up the path in the cold, just as Alexus did.
A momentary white light splits the wood, stopping me in my tracks. The horrible groan of trees falling and snapping—a thousand at the same time—shatters the night, followed by men screaming in misery.
Their screams die at once, and the wood falls to absolute silence and stillness that makes my blood turn to ice. The wolves have stopped crying, and the crows have abandoned the trees.
The rocky hillside digs against my back, the jagged stones loosening as I move. One snags my bodice—under my arm—slicing through the fabric covering my ribs. I wince at the sharp pain. I’m cut, I think, but I’m more worried about every noisy pebble that falls, setting my pulse racing. I’m a liar breaking a promise, but I must know if Alexus is okay.
Finally, I’m at the cliff’s edge, panting around my anxiety. It takes all I have to gather my defiant bravery and peer around the rocks.
My heart lurches in my chest, slamming to a stop before speeding up all over again. The Eastlander campsite—no, the path and even part of the wood—looks exactly like my imagination conjured.
Like a star crashed in Frostwater Wood.
There’s a crater in the middle of the forest, obliterating the path and surrounding landscape. As for the Eastlanders, there’s no sign of them, though dark stains splatter the open earth, and bits of wet flesh hang from the limbs of broken trees.
In the middle of it all is Alexus, kneeling like a fallen god.
Even from here, I can see that he’s in pain. He rests his weight on one fist while the other hand pounds his chest like he’s driving a stake through his heart. He gasps so hard his back bows with the effort.
I hurry down the hill, stumbling and sliding to the shallow crater. The moment I reach the basin, I’m running. When I reach him, I drop my weapon and fall to my knees, slipping my arm across his back, hoping to help him when I’m not even sure what in gods’ death happened.
At my touch, he jerks his head up. Black veins web the blanched skin around his eyes which are still that same liquid darkness, only now it’s not only his irises. Even the whites of his eyes have been overtaken.
“Go!” he roars, and the deep, reverberating sound of his voice is bone-rattling enough that the echo hits my core in ominous waves. It’s so arresting that I’m shaking, and I almost obey.
Almost.
I feel magick. Not Nephele’s magick. Not Witch Walker magick. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, kissing my skin like that charge in the air the first few times I ever met Alexus Thibault’s stare. Only stronger.
Every hair on my body stands on end, and chills run up and down my arms, but not out of fear. The magick in the air is silky to the touch, so cold, and thick enough to taste. It tastes like him—like honey and cloves—and like something else. The wood perhaps, where magick now permeates the soil, the roots, the trees, the leaves.
In reverent form, Alexus presses his forehead to the ground, palms flattened to raw earth, and rocks back and forth, chanting. His voice is too low for me to make out the words, but they’re Elikesh, ancient and beautiful, and I know their cadence.
A plea, not a prayer.
I’m not sure how long we sit there, him chanting, me watching and listening, helplessly, but eventually, his rocking slows, his words fade, and he collapses in on himself. His cloak falls to the side, revealing the God Knife, still safely sheathed at his thigh inside Finn’s dagger belt.
I roll him to his back and touch his face, wiping away the snowflakes that settle on his eyes and in his beard. The black veins around his eyes have faded, leaving behind purplish bruising in their stead, and his tunic is untied, revealing his reddened chest.
After a moment, he blinks up at me and cups my hand, pressing my palm to his cheek. I expect him to be furious—to scream at me again. But he isn’t, and he doesn’t. He looks relieved, like a man who just survived something I can’t begin to understand.
“Are you all right?” he asks, and I nod. “Good. Help me stand?”
I do, though I’m not sure how much help I am. Alexus is two of me, and whatever he did to those men weakened him a great deal.
With his arm wrapped around my shoulders and my blades secured, we trudge back up the hill toward the crest, but I pause, leaning him against the rocky hillside once we get that far.
“You killed twenty men.”
He nods and rubs his eyes, squinting at me like they burn. “Yes. I did.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“In an unnatural way.”
A half-nod. “That depends. Magick is not unnatural.”
“It is if your magick died a long time ago.”
Magick that he didn’t employ during the Eastlander attack, nor with the wraith, and I have to wonder why.
“Yes. I offered the Eastlanders a reprieve. They did not accept. And so I did what I had to do.” He sighs. “Do you hate me again?”