Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(97)

But Zan was slumping against me. When my hands came away from his back, they were red with his blood.

I let out a wrenched cry.

I was wrong. It was not Victor’s blood that had broken King’s Gate but Zan’s. Cael had delivered his death strike before I ever arrived at the tower. Aren’s final foretelling was coming true right in front of my eyes, and I was helpless to stop it.

“No,” I begged, lowering him onto the bed of bloodleaf and tearing his gag away with my bloody fingers. “No.” My voice was breaking. “Please, Zan. Don’t go.” I took out my knife and held it to my palm. “I can fix this,” I said. “Like I did before. I can—?”

“Nihil nunc salvet te,” Cael rasped from behind me.

A spidery blue light burst from Zan’s body and spiraled into the clouds. Beneath him the bloodleaf vine was coiling, stretching, straining toward his trickling lifeblood while his spirit materialized above. I lifted my head from his prostrate body just in time to see his ghost glimmer and fade, as if swept away into the swirling storm.

I let out an angry sob, pressing my forehead to his chest and twisting his shirt in my fists. His hand fell limp to his side, and from his cold fingers tumbled his mother’s ring. It fell onto the blanket of bloodleaf just as the first tiny, white petals began to unfurl.

Blood on the snow.

I reached for the ring and stood up to slip it onto my finger, now filled with a terrible calm.

Cael was amused. “Well played,” he said. “Using someone else’s blood. But I got you one better, didn’t I?”

The last king of Achleva had fallen, and with his death the final seal holding the wall’s magic into place gave way, and the plane of the spell cracked into tiny, jagged shards. Above us the black moon oversaw it all, a portal into darkness itself.

I turned to Cael, knife in hand.

He tilted his head. “Your weapon is useless against me, girl.”

“It’s not for you,” I said.

Sorrow and rage burgeoned inside my body, corrosive and catastrophic. I wrapped my fingers around the glass blade and gave a quick, searing yank. Then I fell to my knees and pressed my hands against the stone, feeding the energy of my loss into the tower and deep into the power below, letting it expand and grow until I was not simply me; I was the tower. I was the storm. The magic. The bloodleaf.

Then I lunged and closed my bloody fingers around Cael’s neck. The force of my grip sent him reeling, slipping in Victor de Achlev’s blood and falling backwards against the bloodleaf-ridden battlement. He was stunned for a moment, before throwing his head back to laugh.

When the first vine of bloodleaf wrapped around his throat, the laughing came to an abrupt stop. “You can’t hurt me,” he said as more vines encircled his arms, his legs. “I cannot die.”

“I don’t want you to die,” I said. “I want you to suffer.”

I clenched my fists, and the bloodleaf tightened in response. Lines of red were spreading from the veins of the leaves across his skin, leaving black trails behind them, like the spirits of Achlev’s gates.

“My mistress will destroy you,” he said, choking. “She is angry, she is wrathful, she does not forgive—?”

“Nor do I,” I said as I unleashed the last of my magic into the vines holding him.

The bloodleaf absorbed him, consumed him, became him. It ate away his body, separating cell from cell, until he was nothing but a pile of blackened leaves and thorns that fell into dust, whipped away on the wind.

“Nihil nunc salvet te,” I said, and sank to my knees.





?37




When I gathered enough strength to reopen my eyes, it was to a world of white.

The Harbinger was watching me.

I blinked. No, not the Harbinger herself. The image reflecting in the stain was not flesh and blood or spirit. It was Aren’s statue. I pushed myself away from it and then saw him.

Prostrate on the bloodleaf lay Zan.

Blood on the snow.

But of course, it wasn’t snow, I now knew. He was lying motionless on a bed of drifting white petals. His eyes were closed, one arm bent beneath his dark head.

I sobbed as I knelt beside him and tried to gather him into my arms, hating how chilly his skin was, how blue his lips were.

This was it—?Aren’s vision made real. Zan was gone. Dead and gone and cold, and here I was, surrounded by bloodleaf flower when it was already too late to use it.

Then a single petal floated down and landed on Zan’s lips, as fragile as a frond of frost at the break of day. I stared at it there and remembered: Had not bloodleaf flower overcome death before? Had I not gone to the other side and come back myself?

Ever so carefully, I brought my lips within an inch of Zan’s and let out a slow, soft breath into his mouth, sending the petal fluttering between his parted lips, where it dissolved and disappeared.

Nothing happened.

I rose and slammed my fist into the foot of Aren’s statue, violently resentful of her impervious, stony expression high above me. I hit and punched and kicked at it until my knuckles were torn and bloody.

“How dare you?” I screamed. “How dare you show me his death and not show me how to stop it! What was it for, Aren? What was it all for? Why was I saved? Why preserve my life and guide my path if you were only ever leading me to this?” I dragged my sleeve across my burning eyes and running nose. “Bring him back!” I screamed at Aren. At the wind. At the stars. I sank down beside him and buried my face into his chest. “Please,” I begged. “Please bring him back.”