Tanith peered at him as if she were seeing him, too, for the first time. “Caius?” She looked down at her hands, her gaze roving over the tracery of black veins and the dusting of bright white light clinging to her skin. “What’s happening to me?”
“You don’t remember?” Caius asked. He didn’t relax his stance or lower his knives an inch, but he didn’t charge her either. Even though she was as vulnerable in that moment as they were likely to ever see her.
“I— Bits and pieces—broken fragments…” Her eyes snapped up. “I left you there. In the temple. I knew she would come find you.” She took a step forward, a tentative one, as if she didn’t trust herself to pilot her body of her own accord. “She found you.”
Caius dipped his chin in a slow nod. “Yes. Tanith, that was days ago.”
“Was it?”
Echo wanted desperately to step toward them, but the magic held her in place. She was all that was holding the street together. “Caius,” she hissed quietly. “This is a trick.”
“She doesn’t have anything to gain by doing this,” Caius hissed back. With painstaking slowness, he sheathed one of his daggers and lowered the other. He walked toward his sister, who was staring at the rift in the ground, her brows pinched in horror and confusion.
“You have to stop me, Caius.” She angled her head toward his approaching footsteps, but she kept her gaze on the black gash cutting across Fifth Avenue. “Promise me you’ll stop me. This isn’t what I wanted.”
“Caius,” Echo called out. Then, again, less quietly: “Caius. Don’t listen to her. She’s lying.”
He shook his head as he advanced toward his sister. “I don’t think she is.”
Tanith dragged her gaze away from the breach. She reached for him, her black-veined hand extending in supplication. “Brother…”
Alarm bells sounded in Echo’s head just as the voices of the vessels rose to a fever pitch.
“Caius, no!”
But he reached for his sister anyway, and there was nothing Echo could do to stop him. The second his hand touched Tanith’s the black bled back into her eyes and she twisted his arm with a vicious wrench of his wrist. He cried out in pain, but Echo still heard the telltale sound of something cracking. The bone must have broken.
“Tanith,” he choked out. “Tanith, you can end this. You opened the rifts. You can close them.”
“Oh, Caius.” It was as though a completely different person was speaking now. The pitch and cadence of her voice were entirely distinct from the woman who had so plaintively called out to her brother to help her. “Why on earth would I want to do that?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Caius had always appreciated the symmetry of a good story. There was something beautiful in the circularity, the wholeness. A good story made him feel like the world and all its fundamental truths were encapsulated within its neat enclosure.
He supposed he’d always known how his story would end, even if he had not realized it until the moment it did.
His sister’s eyes gleamed black. Darker than the night sky above, darker than the velvety shadows of the in-between, darker even than the rift she had torn open in the world. They were unfathomable. Alien.
Pain lanced up his arm. His wrist was broken. But pain was a physical concern, the body crying out against some unpleasantness. Decades of Caius’s life had been spent training to push pain away, to lock it behind a seal to be dealt with at a later time. The pain was nothing. The pain would not win, would not make him pliable, would not soften him for the shadows to claim. Not this time.
Tanith’s power—not hers, not truly, but the power that rode her body like a knight rides a horse—pushed at the boundaries of his body, aching to tear them down, to spill across his skin, into his veins.
He held it off with all his might and choked out his sister’s name, even as the syllables were crushed in his throat by the power clawing to get in.
Golden eyebrows furrowed, oddly pristine against the charcoal-veined ruin of her face. A flash of red fought through that black gaze. A glimmer of truth stealing an illicit peek through a curtain of darkness.
“Caius?” Her tone was soft, tentative. Confused. Her grip on his shattered wrist loosened.
He could hear Echo calling out to him, shouting that it was a ruse. Not to trust it. Not to trust his sister, his blood.
Her reddish eyes rolled to the side, then upward, taking in the horror she had wrought. The wound in the heavens. The fissure in the street. The ravenous creatures of darkness and despair she had birthed in her frenzy of violence.
Moisture gathered on her lashes, tears threatening to spill.
More than a century had passed since the last time he’d seen his sister cry. And this was his sister. Not a monster wearing her skin like a mask. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun would set and the moon would rise.
“I don’t want this,” she said. She was herself once more. The darkness had receded, pushed back by the strength of her emotion. But how long her reprieve would last, Caius did not know. Tanith’s grip on herself seemed a tenuous thing. There one moment, gone the next. But Caius would not let it claim her. Not again. If she died here today, she would die as herself and no other.
Darkness be damned.
Caius sagged against his sister. She supported his weight, as they had so often done for each other over the years. As they had forgotten to do, torn apart as they were by time and tragedy.
“You can stop it,” he said, his forehead falling to rest against hers.
Her eyelashes brushed against his skin. She shook her head, blond hair falling around their faces like a curtain, shielding them, this moment, from the broken world beyond.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can,” he countered. “You—”
“Not by myself.”
Her words halted his reassurances. The truth in them rang as clear as a bell, too loud, too resounding to be denied.
She pulled away, enough to force her slightly less reddish eyes to meet his. There was a battle raging within her, and she was losing ground to the enemy. Their enemy.
“I’m sorry, Caius. I’m so sorry.”
The apology was too big for words, but still, she tried. He heard all the things she didn’t—couldn’t—say.
I’m sorry for Rose.
I’m sorry I failed you.
I’m sorry I failed myself.
I’m sorry for this.
She was not wrong. He hated how right she was, but not even he, the Dragon Prince newly crowned, could defy the truth when it was so abundantly clear.
She could not close the rifts. Not alone. It had taken both their magic to crack the seals, to open the gaping chasm in the world that was consuming it with the inexorable hunger of a black hole. It did not matter that his magic had not been willingly given, that she had stolen it for herself and her own selfish desires.
It had taken both of them to open the rift in the world, and because the universe also loved the symmetry of stories, it would take both of them to close it.