My eyes crept right. The world swam, and each fragment of a breath was torture. I met Oliver’s gaze, glowing with the pure magic of who he was.
As I watched, the light in his eyes dimmed and dimmed. He was stopping—and I couldn’t blame him. He had already given more than he needed to. He had come back, and my soul would never forget.
Save yourself, I thought, though he could not hear me with our bond broken. I hoped he might see the want in my eyes. Save yourself, Ollie. Please go while you still can.
The slightest tug wound through my gut. Then the flicker of a thought nestled inside my brain. Somehow, despite our broken bond, he still managed to meet my mind with his.
And what he thought was simple: No.
At that moment the sword popped from Marcus’s chest and hit the sand. Then the bullet in his forehead spat out. The bullet from his heart.
And again, the hint of Oliver’s thought flamed inside me.
No.
Oliver’s magic cut off. In two impossibly long strides, he came to me.
He grabbed my wrist.
And his vast demon soul hurtled through me. Instantly, the electricity doubled. Tripled. It grew so hot, I lost all sense of where I was or who I was. My body became a distant, fleeting thing. A vessel much too small for all this raw power gathering inside.
Three spirits laced together as one. Joseph. Oliver. And me. Power boiled in my brain, beneath my ribs, behind my eyes. My clothes burned—my eyelashes, my hair. Everything ignited.
And our power hit Marcus’s attack. For an endless fragment of a second, it was a balanced collision of souls.
But then the scales tipped too far. In a heavy, clicking twist, all the electricity shifted.
And Marcus could not stop it. His eyes widened. His mouth fell open with silent screams. His skin caught fire, melting over sinew and bones.
Elijah’s skin. My brother’s body was crumbling before my eyes.
Oliver felt that loss too—it sang through our shared electricity. A high-pitched shriek of grief for someone whose soul we had already lost . . . and whose body we now lost too.
But we did not stop pushing against Marcus. Skin flayed off his skull. His yellow eyes spun and rolled . . . and then burst. They exploded outward. Blood sprayed.
Then, bit by bit, his lungs and guts scorched and popped. The red muscle ignited . . . and then shaved away.
Until there was nothing left but a skeleton and a pulsing, festered heart.
Joseph’s fingers all furled in, save one, and then he thrust a final whip of electricity at Marcus.
And his heart exploded. Black, oily blood spewed on the sand, on the bones, over us.
And the necromancer Marcus Duval collapsed in a pile of charred bones.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There was a long silence that seemed to fill the earth after that.
No one moved. No one spoke.
But then screams slithered into my ears. Into my consciousness.
Allison. She sobbed for mercy at our feet, begging us to help her.
“He took my life,” she screamed. “You must get it back! You must get it back!”
I ignored her. I could not even look upon her. She turned to Joseph. To Oliver.
But none of us had any mercy to give. She had dug her own grave, and now she could lie in it.
I stumbled to Marcus’s blackened, ashy bones. Elijah’s bones. I brushed them gingerly aside. I would save them; bury them somewhere here in this ancient, timeless necropolis.
But first . . .
I found the ivory clappers. Clean and white, both hands were now open. No souls left inside.
I swooped them up and turned to the frozen battle behind us. “Go home,” I whispered.
It was the only phrase I could rasp out, and in a great lurch of movement, the imperial guards left. They radiated in all directions, bounding for their tombs all across Egypt.
The queens’ guards followed.
“Here.” Oliver’s voice was a broken, rattling thing. “Take these too.” He offered me the queens’ clappers . . . and my gaze slid up his dusty, ripped sleeve to settle on his face.
To stare into his hazel eyes. Hazel. Not gold.
“Oh no,” I breathed, gripping for his arm. Then his chin. “Oh my demon, what did you do?”
“I did what needed doing.” He tried to look away—but my left hand cupped his jaw. Tears pooled in his gold-flecked eyes.
“Oliver, Oliver.” I pulled him to me. My arms clutched his shoulders, and I held him as tightly as I could. “Oh my demon.”
“I am your demon no longer, El. I am just . . .” His voice broke. He sank his face into my neck. “I am just a man now. A man with no magic. A man with a . . . a man’s soul.”
And as he began to weep, I wept too.
He had given up his demon soul to save us all. The electricity from the crystal clamp had blasted it away, just as it had in Paris—but a thousandfold worse. Oliver’s immortality was gone, his soul shrunk and shredded to a human size. My demon would never, ever go home. He would never touch magic again or cross the curtain or be anything but Oliver.