The wind picks up, guided by the current of my magic. Just as the heavy bell overhead starts to sway, Carver speaks.
“I love her.” It’s a quiet and sorrow-filled confession that halts my magic in its tracks. “I love her,” he repeats. Carver’s words echo through the room.
His words slip straight into my heart, shoving uncertainty right into me.
He... loves me?
How? How does he know he loves me? I don’t even love me...
The fight I’ve put into pulling my arm away from my father falls away. I stand in his grasp, staring at the regretful look in Carver’s lavender eyes.
Is that what love looks like?
His gaze is locked onto mine, sinking confusion into my chest.
He can’t love me. Love isn’t dependable. It can be ripped away too easily.
“Why would you say that?” It’s a fearful question. A shaking question that holds too much emotion within me.
A line creases his brows.
“Because—because I love you, Vi.” His voice is quiet but steady. Honest. Too honest.
It makes it hard for me to remember how to breathe.
It terrifies me because Carver is the rational one. He’d never say something he wasn’t one hundred percent certain of.
Nollix shifts, his attention held intently on the dirty ground. He fists his weapon in his hand, and it shakes from the magic swirling through him. I feel it. I feel his prickling magic as if it’s my own.
“Ah, I should have known it’d be the broken one who loves you. It is always the weakest who love the easiest.” My father nods his head, and he studies Carver as if he can see him perfectly.
His words make my magic flare with anger.
What he doesn’t realize is that we’re all broken. Lost souls always manage to find one another. They steady the recklessness that beats within us. They make us a little saner in an insane world.
That is the reason we were accepted into the Wild Hunt.
And that is the reason Nollix snaps.
Nollix brings his blade up high. He jars it down with great strength, ripping through the air. It happens so quickly. One moment, my father is clutching ahold of my wrist. The next minute, his arm is lying in a bloody mess on the floor.
Nollix straightens his shoulders as he stares with a crazed look into my father’s eyes. The angle of his jaw tightens as his lips purse tightly together. Blue smoke wafts from his blade, steaming between him and the king.
Jeriko slams the hilt of her blade into Nollix’s back, causing him to stumble forward. When Jeriko and Nollix face one another, deadly tension fumes through the room. Strong winds twirl between them. Two unstable forces. Nollix swings his arm up, and the stone the building is made from pulls from the structure. It twirls with the breeze. The tower shifts as the far wall crumbles down to the ground far below. Nollix pushes hard at the winds and throws the debris squarely into Jeriko’s chest. It hits with a solid thud and slams the Fae to the ground. The room shakes from the jarring impact.
Jeriko is not a Fae to fight with. She’s arrogant, and there’s a reason for that arrogance. She shoves off the crumbled stone and stands. Rage shakes through her. Her fingers arch as her own magic swirls. She reaches for the flame that’s dancing within the lantern.
The wind carries the embers, streaming with fire like a tornado stemming straight from the underworld. The fire streams right into her hands, and fear trickles all through me.
I step in between Nollix and Jeriko.
She hates me. I see it in the sneering way she looks at me. Jeriko looks at me like she wants nothing more than to burn me from existence.
Fire strikes out from her palm, blazing through the air. But the wind is my friend as well as hers.
I put every ounce of strength into my magic, and the air hits the fire with a burst of embers. My jaw tics as my assaulting breeze sweeps up the flames and carries them high into the night sky like a comet striking across the heavens.
During the chaos, Carver doesn’t move an inch. He keeps his sword held low as he watches my father, who in turn watches the three of us.
