Chapter 99: Half A Second. Both Choices Were Her.
Maddox rotated mid-air, arms still locked around Guinevere.
His back hit stone twenty feet from where they’d been standing, breaking her fall. Both decisions, the rotation and the grip, had been made in the same half-second and neither had been optional.
His ears rang with a pitch that swallowed every other sound. Every person in the ballroom was on the floor. Flat. Pinned. The gold in the hall flickered to darkness, like a snuffed candle except for one woman who was currently on top of Maddox and probably had no idea she was still lit.
"Are you okay, baby?" Maddox pressed his mouth to her ear and kissed it. "I won’t let anything hurt you."
She didn’t answer. Her hands found his arms where they were locked around her and held on like they were the only architecture left standing.
The pressure hit next, heavier than gravity, pressing five hundred bodies into the stone like a god had put its palm on the room and pushed. His ribs groaned and not from Guinevere. His arms were lead, but still around her.
Then out of his peripheral vision, he saw the silhouette of the body. It was still vertical. It had never fallen.
Dead men don’t stand. That was a rule. Biology, gravity, and every god who had ever bothered writing the laws of the physical world had agreed on this.
It stood there holding its own head like a man adjusting a helmet. The fingers found the gaping neck, pressed down, and shoved until bone met bone with a grinding crunch that made three people gag. When the eyes opened, they were solid black and looking directly at Guinevere.
A long, midnight-black tongue slid out of its mouth, split at the tip, flicking and tasting the air. A few women screamed. Either from the reattachment or the tongue. Maddox wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t judging. He wanted to scream too.
Maddox rolled, pinning Guinevere beneath him so his body covered hers. The pressure increased. The temperature dropped. Fast. The kind of cold that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with what just entered the room.
Sound came from the mouth. Multiple voices overlapped, speaking the same words at the same time.
"More of us. In this hall. In your walls."
"Wonderful. A nursery rhyme," Kael muttered from somewhere to his left.
The voices chanted louder.
"Kingdoms burn and kingdoms fall. Who’s the traitor in the hall? One is lying. One pretends. Three will break before the end."
The smile stretched wider than natural.
"All five have started your clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock."
The face glitched in jerky motions.
"Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick."
What happened next was instinct. Collective. Simultaneous. From the floor, Maddox forced his arm up, against the weight of whatever was pressing down on them.
He was not alone. Ryker, Sterling, Kael, all of his men, and dragon lords did the same in unison.
Flames of different colors hit the thing from at least twenty-five different angles.
Dozens of shrieks poured out of the body at once. Overlapping. Clawing over each other like rats in a burning wall. The sounds were the sounds of whatever had been living inside that shell being evicted by force.
Then the screaming stopped. All at once. The body fell. It should have been cremated. It wasn’t.
The weight vanished from the room. Every chest expanded at the same time. Five hundred simultaneous gasps that sounded like a hall learning how to breathe again.
Maddox pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Stay here, baby. Don’t move."
He pushed himself up and took inventory. The room was wreckage. Lords groaning. Elders on the floor. Guards scrambling for weapons that had been pinned to the stone seconds ago.
"Mages on guard until Jaxon arrives. No one touches it. Guards on every exit. This hall is sealed until further notice."
The body lay where it fell. The head was still attached, which felt like a personal insult given the effort Maddox had put into removing it. Smoke curled from the remains in thin black threads that moved against the air currents instead of with them.
The doors burst open and Jaxon entered at a dead sprint. His hair was a disaster. His shirt was buttoned wrong and half-tucked in a way that suggested it had been fully untucked recently, and the retucking had been done in a hurry and probably in the dark. There was lipstick on his jaw.
Sterling’s eyes narrowed from the buttons to the hair. Then to the lipstick. His mouth opened. He closed it.
Jaxon crouched over the body. The magic that left his hands was not the blue or gold Maddox was used to seeing from him. It was darker. Violet at the edges. Threaded with something that pulsed like a heartbeat.
That was new. Added to the list.
Dark tendrils rose from the corpse like smoke, twisting upward before Jaxon’s magic dissolved them on contact. One by one. Methodical. Clinical. The last tendril fought. It lost.
He stood, wiping his hands on his already ruined shirt. His eyes tracked to Guinevere on the ground behind Maddox. Something crossed his face that he decided against voicing. Maddox clocked it. Noted. Also added to the list.
He turned back to the hall. Five hundred people were waiting for the next command from a king who was standing over a headless body that had reattached itself and recited poetry, and the expectations for this evening had long since left the building.
He was mid-order when the sound didn’t come. That was the problem. He didn’t hear it, his back was turned, and he wasn’t aware of it.
A dry heave fought its way up Guinevere’s throat and she trapped it behind her teeth so hard her shoulders shook. Blood ran from her nose in a thin line.
When he turned, Kael was already beside Jaxon, his hand on the mage’s arm, his mouth at his ear but Maddox could hear every word. "Dark magic makes her sick. Every time she’s exposed. The nosebleed is new. Or it’s not and she’s been hiding it."
She shot Kael a look that communicated an entire argument in under a second. "You’re joking."
Kael raised both hands. "If it walks like a martyr, talks like a martyr—"
"Finish that sentence and I will light you on fire."
"I would pay to see you try to light me on fire. Or fight with a blade with your eyes open."
Fury hit first. Then the worry ate through it. Kael knew things about his mate that he didn’t, and that fact alone was enough to make his blood boil. But she was bleeding, and boiling was a luxury for men who didn’t have a hall to secure and a mate to reach and thirty feet of stone between the two priorities.
He continued with commands. Every sentence moved a person, cleared a route, or assigned a task. All necessary.
But he could still hear what was being said, and the longer he listened, the tighter his chest got from three directions at once.
Blair ran over, and knelt on the ground beside Guinevere, her neck mottled purple where the dragon iron had been.
"He must not have heard that the flame-bearer could also break dragon iron."
Maddox stole a glance, still giving orders, and saw Jaxon working on Blair’s throat, blue light pulsing against the bruising.
"Stop. Focus on Gwen."
"Your neck is bruised, Princess. Let me—"
Blair swatted at Jaxon’s hands. "Focus on her."
"I’m fine," Guinevere insisted. "Chain marks on a throat trumps a nosebleed. Sit down and let him heal you."
"You’re on your hands and knees, Gwen."
"All part of the plan, Blair."
"And there it is," Kael said flatly. "All part of the plan everyone if you didn’t know."
"I’m right here, Kael."
"I know. You’re on the floor. Being fine."
Maddox finished the last command mid-stride because waiting was no longer something his body was willing to do, and the king in him could argue with the man in him later.
