A Dawn of Onyx (The Sacred Stones, #1)(101)

My stomach sank like a stone in a deep sea. What did that mean?

Kane lunged toward him with lethal intent, but Fae soldiers pushed him back down to his knees.

“Stop!” I moved toward them, but more soldiers swarmed me, pulling my hands and arms backward, holding my head still.

I thrashed and gnawed, trying with all my might to move even a single muscle, but they were stronger than anything I had ever felt. Their arms and hands were like steel bands around me. Lazarus just smiled and assessed my trapped form.

His eyes swept over me, predatory and rife with curiosity.

“If you harm so much as one single hair on her head,” Kane snarled from the sand. “I will reduce you to fucking ash. I spared your life once. I will not do it again.”

Lazarus couldn’t have been less interested in Kane’s threat.

“Is that how you remember it, son?” He asked, turning to one of his men who handed him something I couldn’t make out.

I strained to see what he held, and then all the air left my lungs in a strangled gasp.

A silver dagger glinted in his hands.

Kane thrashed—thrashed against the men behind him. Horror ripped through me. I couldn’t look into his eyes. I didn’t want to see his fear. I—

“My son never told you of the seer’s prophecy? Color me shocked,” the King said, approaching me slowly, as if I were a rabid animal. “You must know that’s the only use he had for you. A tool to beat his old man, once and for all.”

I shook my head from the soldier’s hold and turned to Kane. “What is he talking about? What else haven’t you told me?” Pure fear rang through my voice. It was a wail. A cry. A plea.

“I’m so sorry Arwen. I’m so sorry—”

I shook my head as if I could rattle any of this information into place. Nothing anyone was saying made sense. Sobs and panic were welling up in me, betrayal burning my cheeks. The Fae King closed his eyes and recited the prophecy from memory.

“A world of lighte blessed across the stones,

A king doomed to fall at the hands of his second son.

A city turned to ash and bones,

The fallen star will mean war has once again begun.

The final Fae of full-blood born at last,

Will find the Blade of the Sun inside her heart.

Father and child will meet again in war a half-century past,

And with the rise of the phoenix will the final battle start.

A King that can only meet his end at her hands,

A girl who knows what she must choose,

A sacrifice made to save both troubled lands,

Without it an entire realm will lose.

A tragedy for both full Fae, as each shall fall,

Alas it is the price to pay to save them all.”

Humor danced in his eyes. “Kind of miserable, isn’t it? ‘Each shall fall’? Pity. I think we could have been great friends.”

I could barely formulate a thought. My mind was reeling, stomach turning, I—

He had lied to me. After everything.

The prophecy—

Cold, calm coated my veins as finally, finally I understood with perfect clarity. The one thing Kane had never told me, had always continued to shroud in mystery, to dismiss, to hide.

The single reason Bert had brought me to Shadowhold. Why Kane had kept me there.

The powers I had never understood—

But Kane had.

I was destined to end this man before me. The Fae King.

Because I was the last full blooded fae.

And I was fated to die.

Lazarus lifted his silver dagger toward me. “It will all be over soon, Arwen. Try not to struggle.”

I thrashed against the men that held Leigh and me. Her sobs shredded me from the inside out.

“No!” Kane roared.

A blast of dark billowing power erupted from the ground and shoved the Fae soldiers off of Kane with the force of a crackling storm. The silver clad men scrambled for him, but none of their own powers—rivers of fire nor violet light nor shimmering mirrors—were a match for his poison-black shadows. Kane slipped from their clutches and launched himself at his father with sheer, unending venom.

Deadly black smoke unfurled from his hands, rippled off his back like wings, and nearly reached the Fae King.

Nearly.

But Lazarus spun and with a wave of his hand a single stake of solid ice appeared from thin air and lodged into Kane’s chest, forcing his legs to buckle and slamming him to the sand with a hideous groan.

“Kane!” I screamed, my voice not my own.

He moaned in agony, sticky dark blood spilling out through his hands as he tried and failed to pull the ice from his sternum. I crawled and pulled against my captors, sobbing too hard to scream. My power twitching in my fingers, I could heal him, I could save him, I could—

But I couldn’t move an inch. Couldn’t even look at him when the Fae soldier behind me forced my head away from Kane and to face Lazarus.

I didn’t want Leigh to see this. I shook my head unable to think unable to breathe—

“Please,” I begged.

“Arwen…” Kane groaned from the darkness, prone in his own blood, soldiers on him once again. Eyes filled with unending, utter rage. And agony.

And sorrow.

So much sorrow it was cleaving me in two.

His hands reached toward me, but he was held down by too many, and bleeding. Bleeding out, ribbons of blood—