Chapter 204: Not this time

Seraphel

Draca turned his split face toward me and smiled, and up on the highest terrace, Luceriel tried to catch him again.

I saw it happen.

Luceriel had only just let go of him, and he was swaying on his feet with Solmira holding one of his arms and blood still drying on his lip, but when Draca moved toward me, he flung his hand out anyway.

The emerald rings came snapping back into the air around Draca, one inside the next, the way they had held him before.

They held for one heartbeat.

Then Draca simply kept walking, and the rings bent around him like wet paper, and they shattered.

Time broke with them.

I do not know how else to describe it.

The whole world stuttered. The dust falling from the retaining wall jerked back up into the air and then fell again.

A torch flame flickered out and relit itself.

A scream from somewhere further down the terraces cut off and began again from the start, the exact same scream, as though someone had torn a page out of the day and pasted it back in crooked.

My stomach lurched so hard I nearly fell, and all along the terraces I saw people stagger and grab for walls and each other.

On the upper terrace, Luceriel went down against the balustrade with both hands clutching the stone.

He did not kneel.

Even from where I stood, I could see him refusing to kneel. But his head was bowed and his whole body was shaking, and the green light in his eyes had gone out entirely.

He had nothing left to hold Draca with, and Draca knew it.

The first ward broke like a window in a storm.

Some stupid part of my brain had still believed the wards would hold for longer than a heartbeat.

They did not.

He walked toward them, and the outer layer cracked from top to bottom as though it had been waiting for permission.

Shards of blue light rained down around my feet and dissolved before they touched the stone.

"Seraphel!"

Azriel came over the edge of the third terrace like something thrown.

I did not see him climb.

One moment he was far below with Anomas and the headless body of the lord they had killed, and the next he was landing in front of me with his hair loose and his robes torn and blood on his hands that was not his own.

Draca lifted one finger, almost lazily, and the last two wards came apart together in a spray of blue light.

There was nothing left between us now but Azriel.

And Draca stopped walking. He actually stopped, folded his hands in front of him, and waited with an expression of polite patience, like a man who has arrived early to a performance and does not mind watching the actors warm up.

"Go on," he said. "Say whatever it is you need to say to each other. I can be generous."

Azriel did not look at him. He turned his back on the Demon King as though Draca were nothing more than a chair someone had left in the wrong place, and he looked at me instead. His hands came up and framed my face.

They were shaking, very slightly. I had never once felt them shake.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

"No." My voice came out wrong. "Are you?"

"That is not an answer to the question I asked you."

"It is the only one I have got right now."

His thumbs moved across my cheekbones. His crimson eyes went over my face the way they do when he is trying to memorize something, and I hated that look, because I knew exactly what it meant.

Then he leaned down and kissed my forehead.

It was the same place he had kissed me in the corridor, when the sky first went wrong.

He held his lips there for a long moment, and I felt him breathe in, slow and deep, sandalwood and red lilies all around me.

"Stay behind me," he said against my skin. "Whatever happens, stay behind me."

He let go of me, and turned, and opened his hand.

Red vines tore up out of the flagstones in a wall as tall as a house, thick as a man’s arm and covered in thorns the length of daggers, and every one of them lunged for Draca at once.

They wrapped around his legs and his waist and his chest. They dragged at him. For one hopeful second, I thought they might actually hold him.

Draca looked down at the vines with an expression of mild interest, and they turned black.

The rot spread up them in a single breath, from his ankles to the very tips of the highest thorns, and the whole wall crumbled into ash.

Azriel did not stop. He was already moving through the falling ash with diamond petals spinning off his fingers in a storm, each one sharp enough to cut through steel, and they struck Draca’s face and chest and arms and drew thin lines of pale light wherever they landed.

"You are a very poor host, nephew," Draca said, and backhanded him.

It was a lazy blow. It barely looked like anything at all. But Azriel flew backward across the terrace and struck the stone a few paces from my feet so hard I heard something crack, and he rolled onto one knee with his head bowed and his breath coming ragged.

I stopped thinking.

I have tried since then to explain what happened in my head at that moment, and I cannot do it properly.

The closest I can come is this and it made me remember how I saw Azriel on his knees in front of me, between me and the thing that wanted me, and I saw him start to get back up.

And I remembered the last time I had watched him get between me and something that wanted me.

I remembered the lightning. I remembered holding him while he went cold, and the sound he did not make.

Not again. Absolutely not. I was not going to let it happen again.

I closed my hands into fists, and the light came when I called it.

It was not the gentle glow I had practiced with in the training yard in Verolona.

It came up from somewhere under my ribs, hot and white and edged with the same blue as my father’s eyes, and it ran down my arms until my fingers burned with it.

Azriel was halfway to his feet when he saw the light.

He turned his head and saw me and his face changed.

"No," he said. "Seraphel, go back."

"Sorry," I told him. "Not this time."

I put my palm against his chest and pushed.

The light went through him without hurting him. I made sure of that.

But it lifted him off his feet and carried him fifteen paces back across the terrace and set him down behind the line of the barrier, where Raizel and Thamiel were already turning in shock.

He hit the ground rolling and came up furious, and I did not stay to hear what he was going to say.

Draca was watching me with open delight.

"Oh," he said softly. "There you are."

"Yeah," I said. "Here I am."

Then I reached out, took hold of his hand, and pulled him into my domain.

I had only managed to open it three times in training, and never once with anyone inside it but me.

It opened now as though it had been waiting all my life. The terrace vanished. The noise of the battle vanished with it.

We were standing on an endless sheet of still, shallow water under a sky of pale, shining blue, with no horizon and no sun and no end in any direction. It was very quiet.

The only sound was the water lapping gently around our ankles.

Draca looked around slowly, turning in a full circle, and laughed.

"How charming," he said. "A little room of your own. Did your father teach you this, or did you stumble into it on your own, the way you stumble into everything?"

I let go of his hand.

My palm was stinging where I had touched him, as though I had grabbed hold of a pan straight out of a fire.

"You talk way too much," I said.

"And you tremble far too much for someone who has just trapped himself alone with me." He smiled with Kaevian’s broken mouth. "You do understand what you have done? Your mate cannot reach you here. The sins cannot reach you here. The Prince of Pride cannot stop my time here. You have taken away every single thing that was protecting you, little vessel, and you have done it with your own hands."