Maul let out a rattling wheeze, as though he was telling her it would be okay, even as the red glow in his eyes flickered and dimmed.
“No.” She shook her head, her curls falling in her face. Tears soaked her cheeks and into her clothes. “I won’t let you.”
Leaning over him, she blinked the tears onto the hellhound. Then waited. Kasia had healed Brand this way once. She’d said it had taken time.
Please, please, please.
But his breathing slowed, each inhale and exhale more painfully labored than the next.
“Please don’t die.” She gently moved his head and tried again, letting her sorrow drop onto the wound directly. Then went back to cradling that massive head. She watched and waited, smoothing his big ear with her hand. A faint emotion reached her through his fading…comfort. For her.
But nothing happened.
What if only Kasia could do this?
“It’s going to be okay,” she assured him.
She needed to get him to her sister. Only she couldn’t teleport without a mirror, and no way could she heave his massive body through one. But…Maul could teleport if he could see. “I’m going to get help, boy.”
Lighting her fire, what little she had left, she looked toward the glass door leading to the atrium, changing the reflection to the hangar, zooming in on her sister’s dark-red hair. Skylar at her side. “Do you see her? Do you see Kasia?”
Her sister was there, at the edge of the landing, out in the open, in view of the entire mountain. Maul whimpered, then wheezed. She was losing him.
“Can you get us to her?”
She’d hardly gotten the words out and they blinked, paused in the black, cold abyss of the in-between, then appeared at Kasia’s feet.
“Maul!” her sister screamed.
Meira lifted her tearstained face to them. “I can’t fix him. It’s not working. It worked for Kasia.”
“Oh gods. Please not him.” Kasia’s voice broke.
Her sister stumbled over his legs, trying to get to him, then placed her hands on the hellhound and did the same thing Meira had, feeding phoenix tears directly to his wound. Tears that should have healing properties.
Maul struggled to lift his head, his body shaking, and gave Kasia the tiniest lick a creature that huge could manage, then dropped back into Meira’s lap with a whimper.
He heaved one last breath, the air shuddering from him. The red glow in his eyes went out.
Meira dropped her head so they lay cheek to cheek, softly petting his spiked fur, and cried quietly, her tears soaking his fur, her own emotions blocking everything else out. Kasia’s sobs and Skylar’s soft murmurs to her sister the only sounds in a world gone utterly silent.
…
Samael shifted to human form as fast as his injuries and exhaustion would allow, which was not fucking fast enough.
Stumbling, one leg trying to buckle under his weight, he made his way to where Meira lay with the hellhound. Her emotions were so broken inside him though the channels, barely formed, now binding them together, he had no idea how she could bear them. How had she borne the empathic ability she carried without going mad?
Rather than try to take her away, Samael dropped to the ground behind her and wrapped his arms around her.
She took a deep breath, the only acknowledgment he was there.
But the rawness of the feelings battering him from that link eased slightly, and he knew she took some comfort from his presence.
“I’m sorry,” he said. For Maul. For Gorgon. For pushing her away. All of it. “I’m so sorry.”
“You were going to leave me.” Her accusation was raw.
He squeezed his eyes shut tight. No use denying it. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “You changed your mind.”
The relief and joy she felt, even through her own grief, penetrated the darkness inside him like a sunbeam, warmth spreading throughout him.
A sucked-in breath had them both lifting their heads. Everything stilled inside him, inside her.
Maul was glowing. Not a bright, heavenly light, but red, like his eyes, eerie. His body pulsed with the color that lifted from him like an aura, before solidifying into streamers of flowing red, casting its light over everyone gathered around the hellhound.
The streamers slipped and swirled and coalesced, forming an image. Murky at first, then clearer, each feature of a man becoming more defined with every passing moment until he stood, hovering above the hellhound’s body.
Skylar jerked forward, though Ladon, now beside her, tried to stop her. “Father?” she asked.
In his arms, Meira gasped and struggled to her feet. Samael helped her, staying close to her at the same time. He studied the man’s face, which was vaguely familiar.
Tyrek Amon’s brother. The resemblance was there.
Could it be? Legend held that hellhounds were warriors with unfinished business, returned in the form of death incarnate to complete it.
“Zilant Amon.” The name flew on hushed tones through the chamber and around the mountain. Turning his head, Samael discovered every single white dragon remaining had stopped fighting and hovered, wings beating slowly, staring at the figure of the man.
“The king,” those voices said in hushed tones, now in his mind as much as spoken.
The figure of the man looked at each phoenix in turn and smiled.
“Dark magic.” A voice boomed through his internal thoughts. Everyone else’s, too, if the way the white dragons flinched was any indication. “Lies.”
A single white dragon dropped lower in the sky, the only one to move. Not King Volos, whom Samael had met in both dragon and human form before. That white dragon’s opalescent scales were hard to miss. This one was more the color of curdled milk.
“They killed our king.”
Volos was dead? When? Today?
“They go against the true High King,” the white dragon continued. “They feed us lies about more than one phoenix when there has only ever been one. That one has been mated. You’ve seen with your own eyes the change in our king, no long rotting from old age—”
He cut off as the
