She didn’t have to die.
I didn’t have to be an orphan.
There was still a chance to hang on to some small piece of my past, to rebuild what I’d lost from the ashes.
“Let them go.” I took a step closer to my mother. “Let’s just talk. Tell me why, at least.”
Hope sparked in my mother’s eyes as she raised her head and stared at me. Her lips, framed by the clear tracks of shed tears, trembled. She raised a hand toward me. When I didn’t take it, she simply nodded. “It’s so complicated, Jace. The simplest version is that fearful idiots destroyed my work, and your father’s. In their blind obedience, the seers of the Church of the Grand Design carried out the Empyrean Flame’s order to betray the Eclipse Warriors. They wiped out our only defense against the horrors that threatened us all. And then, to make sure it would never happen again, they banished us.”
Pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t thought about for too long slowly fell into place. I wanted to rush to my mother, to hold her in my arms and ease her pain. “That wasn’t the Flame,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me,” she said, a bitter edge to her words. “The oracles read its words in the Design—they are its mouthpieces. They stripped your father of his title and work, they cast us down to be the lowest of the low. They could have just killed us, Jace, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted us left alive, as examples of what would happen to any who crossed the Flame.”
My mother’s sorrow infected me. It twisted and turned in my heart as I saw how everything that had gone wrong in my life could be laid at the feet of men and women who had lied about the Flame’s edicts to enrich and empower themselves. Their machinations had killed my father, broken my mother, and sentenced me to a lifetime of trauma and misery. Without their intentionally flawed predictions, none of this would have happened. Maybe my mother was right. Together we could— “No, Mom,” I said. “The oracles lied about what the Flame wanted. They lied about so many things. I’m sorry you believed them. I’m sorry you gave up so much to strike back at the Flame, because it was never—”
“You lie!” she shrieked, her voice rising so high and powerful it shattered the windows behind her. “Your father was not wrong! Larissa wasn’t sacrificed because of a mistake. My war is righteous. You are the one who was misled, you—”
My mother’s rant tore at my soul. She’d sacrificed so much to the burning need for revenge. She couldn’t see how she’d struck back at the wrong thing, how different the world would have been if she’d only known the truth. The hope in her eyes was burned out by a madness that had buried its hooks so deep within her, I didn’t know how we’d ever get them out. She threw herself at me, slapped my face, pounded her fists against my chest, baptized me in tears that rained from her eyes in a torrent.
And I wept with her. Tears, and then blood from the wounds her nails opened in my cheeks. I weathered her assault because I knew that beneath her fury and insanity, her pain was born of love for the family she’d lost and the world she would never know. I accepted her emotions and pain until the only thing left in that world was the two of us.
My mother’s attention was solely on me. Her technique died, and the web collapsed. Eric and Clem hit the ground behind her, stunned, but alive.
Take her, I thought to Abi.
To his credit, my friend didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward, his skin already turning gray as the technique flared to life. Strength and protection radiated from his aura as he crashed into Eve Warin and knocked her to the cracked and warped deck. By the time they landed, his body was harder than stone, and his arms were a prison.
“Jace,” she panted, unable to break free of Abi’s grasp. “Don’t do this. I will not lose!”
Vision of the Design showed me flares in my mother’s core. Silver power exploding out of her in a coruscating explosion that transformed Abi to glowing bones and windswept ash. The expanding wave of heat and violence stripped the flesh from our bodies and hurled us into the canyon below the house. Silver light carried my mother into the sky, and she vanished before the carnage she’d wreaked hit the ground.
A split second later, my mother gasped in surprise and tears flooded my vision. She stared up at me, drowning on her own blood, her core so dim. Her hands closed around my fusion blade, fingers torn by its unyielding edge. The weapon’s tip was buried in her heart.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
The light went out of my mother’s eyes, and her core blackened and withered.
I fell to my knees and held her face between my palms, our foreheads touching, and washed her face with my tears.
The Forge
ERIC WAS THE FIRST to reach me after I killed my mother. His firm hand on my shoulder pulled me back from the edge of oblivion and reminded me I wasn’t defined by my loss. This death was the end of one life, but the beginning of a new one. It took me a few more ragged breaths to pull myself together, then I released my mother, straightened my spine, and turned back to my friends.
“I’m okay,” I said, though my shaking voice made it clear that it would be a long time before that would be true. “Eric, are you ready?”
The Resplendent Sun stepped back and gave me a cocky grin. “Do your worst. The sooner we wrap this up, the
