Chapter 182 The Point Of The Staff

Chapter 182 The Point Of The Staff
Marguerite’s staff does not swing at me...

It drops toward Rhydan’s spine.

I move without choosing to move.

I do not think.

I am already there.

Colorless light tears out of my palms and meets the violet point with a sound that splits the air in half. The impact throws me sideways. My shoulder hits marble. Stone cracks under my ribs. The staff tip carves a smoking black groove past Rhydan’s neck instead of through it... close enough that his hair burns... close enough that I smell it.

He screams.

Not the controlled sound from before, this is a full, ripped-open scream that empties his lungs and keeps going on broken breath. Violet surges through every vein in his throat. His back arches clean off the floor. Blood runs from his nose in a dark bright line and drips onto the marble under his cheek.

"Rhydan!"

His eyes find me for half a second.

Then they roll white.

"Rhydan... Rhydan, stay... stay with me..."

Marguerite laughs.

Short. Bright. Delighted.

"Faster than I expected! Good. I hate slow children."

She pulls again.

The entire hall answers her at once.

Bodies arch. Someone at the east tables starts seizing and does not stop. A professor drops mid-ward with his hands still raised. Power screams up the ley-lines into her staff until the air around the dais bends like heat over a forge. The hit I just landed... my light... gets sucked out of the air, turned inside out, and comes back purple in her hand.

"Stop throwing!" Zael’s voice is raw from the archway. "She converts it! Everything you put out feeds her and makes her worse!"

I realize right at the same time.

I realize and Rhydan is drowning in light three feet from my hands and I cannot touch him.

Corvyn drags herself up the base of the dais by her elbows. Blood sheets off her chin. She gets a knee down. Then a foot. Something old and furious is already building in her unbroken hand.

Marguerite does not turn.

She stamps on Corvyn’s wrist.

The sound is wet wood snapping.

Corvyn’s breath leaves her in a single ruined cry. She drops face-first and does not rise. Her fingers still twitch against the stone... still trying... still not finished... while blood pools under her cheek.

"Nadire," Marguerite murmurs. Almost tender. "Stay down. You already lost. You lost the day you hid a Resonant from me in a Vermont kitchen and called it love."

Petra screams her name and runs, Dara behind her.

A violet whip takes Petra across the thighs mid-stride and puts her into the floor so hard the marble dusts. Dara drops beside her. Maren grabs both their arms and drags them again, teeth bared, tears streaming, while Cassian throws himself against a secondary pulse and gets thrown back into a pillar hard enough to crack it.

"Cass!"

He does not answer me.

Then Sera steps over the smoking groove and blocks the only path left to Rhydan.

My face.

My mouth.

My eyes full of a triumph I have never felt in my life.

"You should have signed," she says in my voice.

Soft.

Intimate.

It is the exact voice I used in his bed when I told him I was sure, the exact breath I used against his throat when I asked him not to stop.

"He would be warm right now. Instead he is dying with your name on his tongue and you are still too proud to kneel and save him."

Something in me breaks clean in half.

I hit her with my shoulder, full weight. We hit the floor in a snarl of black velvet and stolen skin. Her teeth click on a cry that is half mine and half hers. For one second the glamour rips and I see Sera underneath it... thinner, younger, terrified of what she asked for... and then Marguerite flicks two fingers.

The whip that takes me across the back lifts me off the floor.

I hit a table.

Wood explodes. A goblet shatters against my arm. Glass opens my skin from elbow to wrist. I land hard enough to lose the air in my lungs and the taste of metal floods my mouth.

Rhydan’s tether flares in answer.

She has linked us.

Somehow, we are now connected.

Every hurt I take now pulls something out of him.

He makes a soft, animal sound into the floor that ends on my name.

"Stop," I choke.

"Then come here," Marguerite says.

Elder Valecrest finally breaks.

He lunges off the dais toward his grandson with a sound that does not belong to an Elder... it belongs to a grandfather... raw and wrecked and years too late.

Marguerite’s staff points at him without effort.

"One more step and I take your heart instead of his power."

Elder Valecrest freezes mid-stride.

Hand out...

Face the color of bone...

He does not finish the step.

He chooses his own life over Rhydan’s with the whole hall watching.

Something in my chest goes cold enough to burn.

I get one palm under me. Then the other. Glass in my skin. Blood under my nails.

I reach within me. I search. I pull...

And suddenly something is coming off around my shoulders and the light coming off me is not a ring anymore. It is a fracture... pale and wrong and spreading like ice racing across a window... and it hurts. It hurts to hold. It hurts worse to drop. It feels like something trying to be born through bone that is not ready.

Marguerite’s eyes narrow.

"What is... that?"

"I do not know..."

"Then bleed with it until you do."

She lifts the staff again, point down... aimed at the base of Rhydan’s skull.

"Last chance, little flame. Walk to me now... or watch me empty him while you stand there becoming something pretty."

Sera, half-faced, crawls backward on her hands, staring at the fracture-light climbing my arms with a hunger that is almost religious.

"Grandmother..."

"Be quiet, Sera."

I look at Rhydan.

He has turned his face enough to find me. Almost no gold left in his eyes, only grey... only him. Blood on his mouth. Violet in his eyes. He is shaking so hard his fingers leave red smears on the stone.

He mouths it.

Do not.

Then, smaller...

Please.

I walk anyway.

Straight toward the point of the staff.

Every step costs me. The fracture-light climbs my throat. My mouth fills with the taste of storms and copper.

And under the floor the dragon hits the seal so hard the marble under my shoes dusts upward in a fine white breath... once... twice... a third time that cracks a vein of stone from my foot to the dais... and still cannot get through.

Zael’s voice breaks behind me.

"Veyra, do not let her touch you... if she gets a hand on your essence, she will not convert it as a working... she will convert you..."

I hear him.

But, I keep walking.

Rhydan’s eyes track me the whole way. He is still mouthing it. Do not. Do not. Do not.

I am sorry.

I am so sorry.

I step into range.

Marguerite drives the staff down with everything the hall has given her.

And I drive the fracture up with everything I have left.

They meet over Rhydan’s body.

The sound is the Iron Bell ringing a second time.

Marble spiderwebs white in every direction. Tables lift and crash. Every remaining window in the upper gallery blows out into the night. Students scream and drop. Elder Valecrest falls to one knee with his hands over his ears. Sera’s stolen face tears down the middle and for one awful second she is two people at once, shrieking in two voices.

And I feel Rhydan’s frequency surface through the tether...

...one clean grey note...

...his hand breaking water...

...before the light pulls out of him and turns on me so hard my knees buckle.

But it does not go toward Marguerite.

It goes in... into my chest, into the well, into the place beneath the well. It burns a path through everything I have ever been and stands up inside my bones like something that has been waiting fifteen years for the seal to finish dying.

I hit the floor on my hands.

I am screaming and I only know it is me when my throat tears.

Marguerite stares.

The staff between us is smoking. The wood is blackening from the tip down. The silver orb flickers... guttering... afraid.

"What," she whispers, "are you?"

I lift my head.

The fracture-light is in my eyes now. I see it on her face. I see it on Sera’s ruined glamour. I see it on Elder Valecrest when he looks at me and finally, finally understands what he tried to sell.

Rhydan whispers my name like a man praying to something he cannot see.

I answer him with a voice that does not belong to only me anymore.

"I am coming."

And the thing that stood up inside the fracture opens its eyes all the way.