His heart pounded under her palm, matching her racing pulse. “Maybe I needed to be touched.”
“I shouldn’t have said—”
Too late. He shuddered under her hand. The ring scalded her skin with icy fire. She struggled to yank back, but he wouldn’t let her go. He would never let her go.
When he opened his eyes, the copper brightness glimmered and sunk behind the returning shadows, like a penny falling into a well.
“Sera,” he murmured. He lifted their joined hands. His skin was unmarked, the reven gone. But a creased line appeared between his brows as he frowned. “I thought this quiet aloneness without even memory would be heaven.”
“Ferris?” Tears jammed in her throat. “It’s my fault. I brought your soul with me. You’re here because of me.”
“Yes, it’s your fault heaven isn’t enough for me now.” He released her hands. “Sera, you have to go.”
She swallowed hard. “I won’t leave her like she left me.”
“That wound is yours. You hold her here.”
“No.” The vortex echoed her wail.
“Yes. A hell of your making.”
A chill swept through her. “Corvus was right. I’ve always brought on the end.”
“You’ve always been seeking.” He turned away from the faded reflection of her mother, away from the hole in the world. “But not all answers are yours to find.”
“If I can’t be sure—” She choked back the rest of her hopeless questions.
“You fight on. And now, as always, you fight on faith.”
“Faith? You of all people would spring that on me, here of all places?”
“Where else? And who better than someone who lost everything else but found hope?”
The widening vortex, a luminous beacon to every denizen of hell, cast the edge of his jaw and his deep-set eyes into stark relief that emphasized the resolve on his face. From the beginning, his strength had borne her when she would have faltered in confusion.
She took one last step toward the lingering shade of a woman she’d never had the chance to know. “I love you. I’m sorry.”
Even as the Veil between the realms unraveled, so did the knot in her heart. With a rushing clap like ethereal wings, the silhouette of her mother’s specter collapsed, sending out a fleeting cat’s-eye gleam of dawn light.
Mists roiled upward, as if gigantic, unseen forces stirred in the depths to fill the empty space.
Sera felt herself shaken, not in this realm, but in another. The cavern was crumbling, bricks crashing down. The rift was massing toward critical, about to obliterate everything in reach.
She took a steadying breath. “What just happened?”
“Looked like that little piece of hell inverted, and something didn’t like it. We have to get you out.”
“Me? What about you?”
His hand fisted, tendons tight beneath the unmarred skin. “That army of walking corpses shredded the souls bound into the Veil. Someone—some soul—has to stay to heal the wound.”
“No, I won’t leave you too. This is not how it ends.”
“Sera—”
Corvus burst from the churning mist, eyes white ringed. Streamers of gray clung to him like torn flesh.
At the horizon behind him, a dark band formed. The thrum of a half-heard sound sent a tremor down Sera’s spine.
Archer spun her away when Corvus lunged.
“Thief,” Corvus shrieked. “Soul thief. Give it back. I need to go back.”
Archer circled, barring his way. “You have to leave, Sera, and seal the Veil behind you.”
She sheltered in his wake. “Not without you.”
“You left me before.” His tone never changed, but his words folded the mist upon itself in wrinkles of deepening gray.
She flattened her hand against his taut spine. “And you tried to keep me away from what only I could do. We both did the wrong thing for the right reasons.”
“We know all about good intentions.”
“The road to hell,” Corvus snarled. “But there’s a road out.” He leapt straight at them.
Archer pushed Sera out of the way and grabbed Corvus.
The dark band on the horizon resolved into individual shapes. A dozen men with spears. An elephant and a lion. A woman with a whip. They stretched as far as the eye could see. A gladiator’s victims. Had Corvus conjured them out of the mist as Archer had swathed himself in isolation, as she had faced her mother?
“Let me go,” Corvus chanted.
“Archer,” she called, “let him go.”
Archer glanced over his shoulder at her, his gaze clashing with hers. Then he sprang away.
She snapped the pendant from around her neck. She had no means to judge Corvus, no right to keep his essence. She swung the stone toward him, holding tight to the cord like a censer.
Out of the stone, a sooty bird, small as a sparrow, soared for a heartbeat toward Corvus, then plummeted, its wings fluttering, broken.
Corvus flinched away. “Not more black,” he hissed. “And flawed. It mocks me still.”
Seething from the horizon, the vicious crowd fell upon him. It tore him apart. With a crescendoing scream, he unraveled in a spray of blood black feathers and inky crimson splatters that stained the mist.
Sera recoiled, aghast. Archer drew her gently under his arm. He eased the pendant from her numb fingers and tied the cord behind her neck. “I always said dying was the easy part.”
She tightened her grip on the ring still around her thumb. What she had to offer him wasn’t easy at all.
She slipped off the cracked stone and held it up. “Your soul was in one half. Without it, your body can’t truly die. Your demon, which could heal you, is in the other half.”
He looked past her where black feathers clogged the mists, forcing back the light. The remnants of Corvus’s soul might mend the Veil, but she had to retreat now, winding the frayed threads back with her.
“You accused me once of storming the bastion of last vigils to force answers. So I won’t ask now.” She took a breath. “But releasing your soul alone, you stay dead. If I release the demon too, you live. Possessed.”
“I should choose damnation a second time? Knowing what awaits me back there?”
What could she say? Pain, violence, heartache. That was on the days he wasn’t battling the darkness that left his body in tatters, his soul in shadow. But he knew all that.
The ring trembled in her fingers. She hunched her shoulders, desolation a cold wash through her body that swept away any possible words.
Except . . . “This time, I will be there.”
His tarnished gaze pierced her.
“I told you once not to risk your soul dying on my behalf.” She held out her hand. “But whether this bond between us is fate or something we brought on ourselves, you are the other half of my soul. Will you live for me?”
He lifted his unmarked hand.
She slipped the ring over his finger, held him for a moment, and let go.
The vortex closed with an inverted oscillation that exploded against her eardrums and sternum, and threw her backward. The worldly realm bloomed around her, icy cold and agonizingly bright.
Archer convulsed beside her, one hand clawing for the sky. She pulled herself to her knees, reaching for him.
Just beyond, Corvus’s body twitched, smearing gray matter.
“The building is coming down,” Niall shouted. “Get them.”
Through the rain of bricks and glass, the talyan rushed forward.
Warm, strong fingers tangled in Sera’s as Archer took her hand. Hers was covered in blood, his in the bold black lines of the reven.
She’d remember to care about the fate of the world in just a minute. She laid her palm against his jaw, brushing her thumb under his violet-shot dark eye, and kissed him.