My mind refuses to believe what I’m seeing, but my heart instantly does. It shatters beat by beat. I press my hands around the blade. It’s my knife, the one I threw at Mother before she flew away. A Metal Mage must have thrown it back at me, but Kato intervened.
Blood gushes between my fingers, running in hot rivers over my hands. So much! Too fast!
People shout for a healer. Griffin is there. There’s noise and chaos all around me, but I only hear one thing—the wet clicking in Kato’s throat as he desperately tries to breathe.
I shake, tears blinding me. A wound like this leaves no time, no time to make it right!
Kato’s cobalt eyes dim, losing their wonderful light.
“Selena!” The scream rips from my throat, but even as I yell for her, I know it’s too late. If she showed up right now, it would still be too late.
Every moment Kato and I have spent together is a kernel of warmth in my heart. I want a thousand more like that. He’s deep in my soul. He makes me laugh. He never judged me. He kept me sane in the dark.
The others surround us, but Kato doesn’t look away from my face. I don’t think any force in the world could make him. The final pinpricks of light fade from his eyes, and I can’t breathe at all.
“Stay with me!” I plead, grief wrenching my soul. Griffin’s hands curve around my shoulders, but somehow I don’t feel them at all.
Kato’s big frame settles. The last tension dissolves from it, and a shuddering breath rattles my aching chest. He shielded me with his own body. He traded his life for mine. It’s Eleni all over again. It’s too cruel. This can’t be Fate.
I crack straight down the middle, and there’s no way I’ll ever fit back together again. Magic explodes from me, disjointed and out of control. It throws everyone else away from us as I drop forward onto Kato’s chest and sob. He’s still warm and pliant, still here, yet not. His life force begins to swirl around me, his warrior’s soul heading for the golden path. It brushes my skin, and I could swear it whispers over me that he doesn’t regret a thing—and that he’d do it all again.
I grip him harder. But I regret. I would change everything.
I can still feel him—with me, around me—and I want so badly to keep him that my magic condenses into an entirely new thing, so blindingly powerful that at first I don’t even recognize it as coming from me. But then…
My head snaps up, and I take a startled breath. This is what Mother was talking about.
Conceive. Believe.
But it’s immeasurably more than that. It’s the reality that has always been written in my bones, but that I could never read. Ares tried to tell me at Frostfire. Even Artemis said it way back in the Ipotane vale. I am more a child of the Gods than I ever realized, than I ever dared to believe.
True understanding thuds into place like the building blocks of my own past, my now, and my tomorrow. I had all the pieces. I just didn’t know how to put them together before now.
Mother wields magic so expertly because of our Olympian bloodline—and because she has no conscience to interfere with her desires. I have more than the ancient bloodline in my favor. I have actual parts. My outside is a combined shell of my human parents. My insides are a stew cooked up by the Gods—Elpis, Nike, the Furies, and who knows who else, with Zeus’s own blood as the binding broth.
I can do anything I want, anything I put my mind to. Griffin knew it all along. Probably everyone did. Ares as good as told me I’m the idiot who second-guessed myself into near-total magic loss when I have the power of the Gods at my fingertips. The only thing ever stopping me has been me.
My magic storms around Kato and me. He’s the brother of my heart. I will not lose him.
With Kato’s unmoving chest beneath my hands and not even a twinge of regret in my conscience, I shed my second skin, the armor that wasn’t so much protecting me as protecting everyone else from what I could become. That mantle falls away, and a cold, hard sort of determination takes its place. I gaze down at Kato’s bloodless face. Stubble on his jaw. His blue eyes open. I’ll make them see again.
“Stay with me.” This time it’s not a supplication. There’s compulsion in it, strength of will. It’s a command.
My power grows, raging within me, outside of me, everywhere. Lightning webs through shadows. I let the storm turn wild and use the first bolts to seek out the Metal Mages, not knowing which one of them threw the knife. With only a thought, I annihilate them all. Then I pull the storm back in, tightening it around us until Kato and I are cocooned in a cyclone of dense magic shot through with crackling bolts. My power weighs on my back and blocks his soul, keeping it with me until I can figure out how to bring him back. I won’t let him go.
I pull the knife from Kato’s neck and drop it on the ground. I can’t heal him with that in there. But it’s more than healing him, isn’t it? I have to go beyond the realm of any magic I’ve ever known and do what only the Gods are capable of.
Large hands grip my shoulders and pull hard. Griffin yells my name, his voice frantic and hoarse, but I shake him off, the storm pounding out of me in gusts. Only Griffin can get through to us, but he can’t stop me. No mortal can.
My power turns dark and deafening as I grip Kato tighter, trying to search out and understand the magic I’ll need in order to give him back his pulse. I block everything else out, pushing the world away from me, pushing even Griffin back, far from my fractured heart. Somewhere in the infinite cosmos is the answer I seek. All magic begins to unfold for me, revealing its secrets one by one. I sift through the endless possibilities for the only thing I need or want. I’ll find it. I swear to the Gods, I will.
But suddenly, an unstoppable force takes my lightning from me, ripping it from my control. The bolts change direction and then crash straight down, forming a blinding column of light that cuts Kato and me off and makes Griffin reel even farther back.
I cry out in pain and shock, knocked sideways across Kato’s chest. A second surge of unimaginable power overcomes my storm completely and delivers a scorching blow to the air above my head. For a moment, everything is warped and white and blazing. Then a hot, heavy hand seems to press down on me, crushing. Crushing until I know I’ve done something terribly wrong.