Crystal Storm (Falling Kingdoms #5)(22)
“Yeah? So am I.” Felix cracked his knuckles. “All I need is a few moments with him. If he looks like a man, walks and talks like a man, he might have a heart like a man that I can rip right out of his chest.”
“You’ll be killed before you have the chance to lay a finger on him.”
“Then I’ll be happy to meet up with Lys in the everafter much sooner than I thought.”
Jonas surprised himself by letting out a snort at that, which earned him a sharp, searing look from Felix. “She’d be surprised to know how much you cared about her.”
“I didn’t just care about Lys. I loved her.”
“Sure you did.” What happened to Lysandra was still an open wound to him. Even her name spoken by someone else made him flinch. “You barely knew her.”
“I know how I felt. You don’t believe me?”
Jonas knew it would be best not to lose his composure by engaging in an argument about Lys, but he feared he was too close to the edge to control himself. “If you really loved her, perhaps you should have been there to help protect her.”
Felix narrowed his eye, making his glare even more menacing. “You don’t want to start this with me right now.”
“Perhaps I do. After all, you suddenly claim that you were in love with her.” Jonas stared at him for a long, silent moment, his forehead growing hot. “But I’m the one who had to stand there and watch her die.”
“Yeah, you watched her die. If she’d been with me instead of you I know she’d still be alive.” Felix took one threatening step closer, and then Jonas saw his gaze go blank like the skilled assassin he was.
Jonas wasn’t afraid, though. This conversation had quickly made outrage flare up within him. “True love, huh? Were you thinking about Lys while bedding Amara? Or was it only after you heard she was dead?”
He saw Felix’s fist only after it had already connected with his nose. He heard a crunching sound, felt a wash of pain, and then a rush of hot blood trickling down his face.
“You know what the worst thing is? It’s that Lys didn’t love me, she loved you,” Felix snarled, “and you let her die, you useless shit.”
The splitting pain of his broken nose—of Felix’s accusations, of the memory of Lys’s final horrific moments—hit Jonas like a cannonball to his gut. Rather than drop to his knees in the face of this pain, he clenched his fists and threw a glare of sheer hatred at his accuser for making everything more painful than it already was.
All of a sudden, without Jonas making a single move, Felix gasped. His smug look vanished, and then—as if an invisible giant had scooped him up off the ship’s wooden deck and tossed him like a rag doll—he flew backward twenty paces. Felix had to grab onto the railing to keep from falling off the side of the ship and into the sea.
“What the hell—?” Taran’s voice called out from behind Jonas. “What just happened?”
Jonas couldn’t find the words to reply. He could only look down at his tightly clenched fists. In the fading light of dusk, he realized with stunned disbelief that they were glowing.
He turned to Taran with wide eyes. Taran, his sword held loosely at his side, stared at Felix, slack-jawed.
He hadn’t noticed Jonas’s glowing fists.
Felix gingerly pushed himself up from the deck, his attention fixed on Jonas, a thousand unspoken questions harbored within his confused expression.
Without uttering another word, Jonas turned and hurriedly made his way to his cabin, stumbling over his own feet to get there. He swung the door open and went immediately to the tarnished mirror in the corner, by the small porthole.
His hands, though no longer glowing, trembled violently.
Jonas’s chest burned and roiled, felt as if there was a swarm of maggots trying to bore directly into his heart. He grabbed his shirt and tore it open, not bothering to unbutton it first, to expose the creatures that tormented him.
But they weren’t there.
Instead, there was a mark. A mark that hadn’t been there until now. A black swirl, the size of a man’s fist, in the center of his chest.
The mark of a Watcher.
The sharp sound of a gasp wrenched his attention away from his reflection and to the open door. There stood Olivia, now in mortal form and wrapped in a dark gray robe.
“What is happening to me, Olivia?” he managed to blurt out.
Olivia’s emerald-green eyes were wide and glossy as her gaze moved from his bare chest up to his face.
“Oh, Jonas,” she whispered. “Timotheus was right.”
“What is this mark on me?”
She drew in a shaky breath, then closed her eyes with forced calmness. She raised her chin slightly and looked him directly in the eyes. “I’m sorry.”
He was about to say “For what?” when the image of Olivia blurred and darkened at the edges.
Jonas didn’t remember falling, but he felt the rough floor against his face for a brief moment before unconsciousness claimed him.
CHAPTER 7
LUCIA
THE SANCTUARY
Before Timotheus’s large and shining image vanished from the tower, he asked Mia to accompany Lucia inside. While all other immortals kneeled before her, their heads bowed, she nervously followed the Watcher to the base of the elder’s residence. A door in the surface of the tower, invisible to her until she was only an arm’s reach away, opened before her.