Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(91)

Kay’s truth coming out of the Administrator’s mouth was the worst kind of salt on this new wound, and Ari stung all over. She looked over the side of the dais to where Gwen was still crumpled, unconscious or worse. The crowd followed her gaze, murmuring with longing at the sight of the fallen queen. This was proof. They did want more than Mercer crap. They wanted love. Hope. Truth. They were starved for it.

The Administrator flashed a cold smile into the arena, unaffected. “Moving. Truly. How much for the movie rights?”

“I’m not for sale, Administrator. And that’s why you should have been afraid of me a long time ago.”

Behind her, Lam’s explosives cracked the arena wide open, and the place turned into a screaming rush of fleeing people. Morgana shimmered into existence beside Ari, bearing Excalibur. Ari took the sword and drove it through the center of the Administrator’s chest. He slumped, pinned to the stone altar by an antique token of hope.

“It’s true. I’m no murderer,” she said, pulling the blade free. “But I do have an impulse-control problem. And a sword.”





After Ari ran the Administrator clean through, everything was a blur of crowds and running and shouting until Merlin was back on Error, watching the mall explode. A brilliant cloud of red swallowed itself as quickly as it had appeared, the oxygen burned out in a flash, the fire quenched.

And just like that, the flagship of the Mercer Company had been destroyed.

Error was one of thousands of ships that had fled the mall only to pause and take in the beautiful destruction. Merlin was grateful for this moment. Not only was Heritage being torched, he finally had a chance to look over his band of ragtag survivors: Val had taken a stab to the back, Jordan and Lam were bleeding from a few dozen places, although none looked life-threatening, and Gwen had a severe concussion from her fall, and a purple knot on her head that looked troublesome.

Merlin was tired. More tired than should have been possible unless one was mildly immortal. Mildly.

Nin had confirmed it, then. He would die of young age.

And Kay? He was dead. The kind of dead that you didn’t come back from. Val and Merlin had tripped on his body during their mad escape. Merlin had lost precious minutes checking his pulse, hoping for a miracle. But Kay’s heart stayed silent.

Val had had to get Merlin back on his feet as he leaked surprised tears—over Kay, one of his least favorite characters in this over-spun tale. Wonders never cease.

“Good-bye, Kay,” Merlin said. “You were an odd hero, but a good one.”

His friends stood taller as the devastation of Heritage turned into the best Viking funeral he’d ever seen. And he had seen quite a few in his near-endless days. Unlike Merlin’s backward eternity, Kay had been given twenty short solar years, a cruelly brief calendar based on a planet where humans no longer lived.

Merlin turned to Ari. She stood to the side, looking more Arthurian than ever. Grief had been a sizeable part of this story since the very beginning. It made Ari seem like she’d aged all at once, calm and resigned as if she could fight everything except this moment. Excalibur’s point bit the floor of Error while her hands rested on the hilt, majestic—particularly with the soundtrack of the roaring dragon stuffed into the cargo bay.

“Are we safe with that thing in there?” Jordan asked.

Ari chuckled sadly. “She’s stuffed on associates. We’re safe.”

“I thought you said you were only going to blow up the mall a little bit,” Val said to Lam as pieces of Heritage began to separate, floating free of one another.

“Minor miscalculation,” Lam said, with a look that convinced Merlin it was no such thing. “At least Kay is going down with the ship.”

“Gods damn it, he loved that fucking mall,” Val insisted. “Even in all of its Mercer-inspired awfulness.”

“A fitting tribute for a warrior’s death,” Jordan said, folding her arms with a kind of deep understanding.

Ari crossed the cabin and shut the door to the hallway, no doubt hoping she could keep her grieving, injured parents from having to relive their son’s death. “Kay wasn’t fighting when he died,” she said, sadness etching her words. “He was telling the truth. About me.”

“And you were the thing Mercer feared most,” Gwen said, her voice reaching across the rather notable distance between them. “A girl they couldn’t control, who wouldn’t stop talking. That’s the scariest damn thing in the universe.”

Another huge explosion silently lit up the space outside Error’s largest window. Debris went free-floating everywhere. “What is all that?” Lam asked.

“Looks like food,” Val said. “Billions of snacks. That must have been the grocery section.”

“A twenty-one-snack salute,” Merlin murmured with surprising joy.

Ari gave a sad laugh. “Well, now it really is his funeral. And at least we saved Kay’s baby,” she added, running a hand down Error’s riveted wall.

The baby in question was Kay’s ship, of course, but the words conjured up another meaning. Everyone’s eyes went to Gwen’s stomach, including the queen’s.

“Truly?” Jordan asked, wiping her brow in tired disbelief.

“I knew it,” Val muttered. “You can’t get something like that past a good adviser.”