*
Merik flew in a blind terror. Kullen was almost to Lejna, hurtling down to the first pier. But something was wrong. He had torn away from Merik quicker than Merik could fly—and with an uncontrolled violence that Merik had never seen before. It had sent him spinning wildly behind, grappling for any sort of control he could find.
When Merik finally reached the city, he slammed onto the splintered first pier—to where he’d seen Kullen go down. Yet he saw nothing in the cycloning storm. Even more frightening, his magic pulsed against his insides. Scratched wildly beneath his skin—as if people were cleaving nearby. As if they would soon send Merik teetering over the edge.
In leaping bounds, Merik crossed the pier toward shore. Lightning cracked beside a storefront, and Merik caught sight of Kullen. He knelt at the mouth of an alley, and fat, blinding veins of electricity ran the length of him. Then the lightning faded, and Kullen was hidden by air and seawater, kelp and sand.
Merik reached the street. He flew headfirst toward the spinning wall of lightning and wind.
No—there was more now. Glass and splintered wood. Kullen was felling entire buildings.
Merik crashed against it all in a roar of light, sound, and static. Then it swept him in. The wind bent him. The water beat him. The magic engulfed him.
And Merik couldn’t fight it. He wasn’t half the witch Kullen was, and with his own powers feeling as if they might cleave at any second, Merik could do nothing but let himself go.
The cyclone funneled him upward, so fast he left his stomach somewhere far below. Up, up, up he flew. His eyes clenched shut. Debris pelted him. Glass peeled off his exposed skin.
But then, as quickly as he’d been sucked into the storm, Merik was released. The spinning stopped; the wind let go. Yet the storm raged on—Merik heard it, felt it …
Below.
He forced his eyes open, forced his witchery to keep him aloft just long enough to gauge what had happened.
Merik was in the clouds above Kullen’s storm. Yet the cyclone was climbing, sucking in the clouds around Merik and, soon enough sucking at him too.
But there, hundreds of feet below, was a dark speck amidst the storm. Kullen.
Without thought, Merik threw himself forward in a painful thrust of his own wind. Then he released his hold on the magic, and he fell. Faster than he had risen through this storm, he now plummeted back to the street. As he flew through a world of hell and witch-storm, he never let his streaming eyes lose sight of his Threadbrother.
Kullen saw him. Crouched on the cobblestones beside a torn-apart … no, a still tearing-apart building. Kullen clutched his chest with his head tipped back, and Merik knew that Kullen saw him.
Kullen’s hands thrust up. A blast of wind knocked into Merik, catching him as he fell. Easing him onto the street. Into the eye of Kullen’s storm.
As soon as Merik’s boots were on the ground, he lurched for his Threadbrother. Kullen was kneeling, facedown now.
“Kullen!” Merik yelled, his throat ripping to produce any sounds over the storm’s endless thunder, the crack of building frames, and the shattering of windows. He dropped to the street. Glass shards bit into his knees. “Kullen! Stop the storm! You have to relax and stop this storm!”
Kullen’s only response was a shuddering in his back—a shudder Merik knew too well. Had seen too many times in his life.
Merik yanked his Threadbrother upright. “Breathe!” he roared. “Breathe!”
Kullen angled his face toward Merik, his lips moving ineffectually, his face gray and bubbling …
And his eyes as black as Noden’s watery Hell.
Breathing could not save Kullen—not from this sort of attack. Merik’s Threadbrother was cleaving.
For a single, aching moment, Merik stared at his best friend. He searched Kullen’s face for some sign of the man he knew.
Kullen’s mouth opened wide, the cyclone screaming with his fury, and the corrupt magic charged through Merik, threatening to cleave him too.
But Merik didn’t cower back or push Kullen away. The storm outside was nothing compared to what raged within.
Kullen’s fingers, black blood oozing from burst pustules, latched on to Merik’s shirt. “Kill … me,” he croaked.
“No.” It was the only thing Merik could say. The only word that could possibly contain everything he felt.
Kullen released him and, for the briefest flicker of a heartbeat, the black in Kullen’s eyes shrank inward. He gave Merik a sad, broken smile. “Good-bye, my King. Good-bye, my friend.”
Then, in a blur of speed and power, Kullen sprang upward and rocketed off the pier. Wind and wreckage crashed down on Merik, slammed him against the street and blanketed all his senses. For an eternity, all that Merik felt and all that Merik was was Kullen’s cyclone.
Until a great crack! split the chaos, and wood and pain thundered down.
Merik’s world went black.