“You can’t kill me,” she gloated, her blade cutting into the soft skin at my throat. Fetid breath of the not so recently dead wafted over me in a sickening sweet-and-evil mixture that would have sent any lesser being to their grave instantly, but I was no stranger to death. “I have been around since the dawn of time.”
Dolion smiled at me, the faintest reflection, a mirror image of that same smile he gave me the first time he waited outside my crypt in the graveyard. Not so long ago but an age all the same. He didn’t shift or move or run or cower, not with all his muscle, or his inner strength that gave the same to me. Peace passed overmy body as I breathed in, remembering the way he held me in the convent, how he sat with me on the rooftop the first time he took me there. The way he showered me in cold water, and the first time I showed him my true home. All the parts of me that he understood, and that I learned about him. Because while I was so busy showing him everything about me, what I’d learned about him was that he had nothing. No home, no place. No one.
Just the people in this graveyard.
The mad impostor who sired his best friend and murdered his lover three hundred years ago. The best friend who woke him because he couldn't stand to be alone with the grief he hid and longer. The witch who tried to love an immortal she wasn’t sure could love her back, and…
Me.
I matched Dolion’s soft smile and turned in Anitta’s coiled embrace. The wiry thinness of her resurrected arms strained as I twisted all too easily in her grip. She gaped at me as I let her blade slice my neck, the burn from my insides already roiling through me, the pain from her deep cut familiar as an old friend.
A sharp inhale told me Dolion took his last breath as I expelled the life force inside of me.
“You made a mistake, demoness. I am no firebird.” I stared into her eyes, speaking while I still had the ability, my voice fading with every word. “I am the Dawn,” I whispered, as the tip of her knife nicked something important, and blood flowed forth in a river that would end my life. “And my friend is Time. You cannot outlive what birthed you, creature.”
Anitta stared in bewilderment at me. Her face, after all she had suffered as she strove for greater power, was almost comical, but I had no life left. No blood. No breath.
Just fire.
Light and heat burst from me and obliterated everything within my radius. What remained of her pitiful, rotted fleshcurled as it peeled away from sharp bone already protruding through frail flesh. Her eyeballs boiled in their sockets as the demoness danced macabrely in her own juices. Bones creaked in their joints, cracked and shattered until in the end all that was left were twin piles of ash that a warm wind brushed away watched over by a silent stone sentinel.
And I died again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DOLION
My world remained dark no matter how much I struggled to fight against my stone state.
She’s not gone. She’s not gone.
But my heart refused to believe anything but. The ache in my chest swallowed the grief that lay beneath the pain, though I knew it was there anyway. I’d seen the demoness cut her throat, watched my Steorra’s body fall as both life force and flame erupted from her, taking the world along with it.
And I retreated inside myself, taking my stone form as my heart stopped beating and refused to start once again.
My fallen star is gone.
And coward that I was, I couldn't make myself look to check for the pile of ash that would be swept away and face the rotting pile of flesh that Sebastian would have to fight alone, if he hadn’t already run from his maker.
The ruined creature that ended Ash’s life.
Hot tears tracked my cheeks, only they didn't belong to me. Because stone men didn’t cry.
Something told me that Ash would have an inappropriate comment for that, but I didn’t wait for another minute withouther passing to find out. My eyes flung open before my arms reverted to their moveable state. I searched the graveyard for her and came up…
Empty.
Absolutely empty.
Every row was devoid of people, from what I could see from my immovable position in the center of the graveyard where I had placed myself between the demoness and the tiny fragment of family that is still claimed as some sort of home.
And inside the radius of the devastation the woman I loved would create when she died.
Tears that were mine joined the cooling ones already decorating my cheeks.
“Steorra,” I croaked, staring at the blackened ground that covered every available surface. Every single marble crypt, grave or stone was stained jet black, and ash embers, some still alight and glowing red or amber at the edges. “I am sorry.”
“I am not.” Soft, warm lips grazed the corner of mine in an undeniable touch that left me aching in a different way.
