The Blood of Darkness

Chapter 46

Kye

I'm still dying.

The Lychnus inside of me isn't gone. All Ignus did was somehow allow my magic to be accessible once again. If anything, now that my magic is free, the Lychnus is more present, more painful than ever.

But Val and my friends came for me, and that makes everything okay. What's not okay is that General Andras and Arden are still alive, which is why I made myself stay here instead of going with Val, no matter how much I wanted to.

In my pain-hazed mind, three things are abundantly clear:

I love Val. Gods, I love her. And she just might feel something for me too.

It's far too late for me to be healed.

I need to kill the General.

If I'm going to die, I want to die useful. I want to die as more than the son of a traitorous merchant. I want to die as the Flame.

I'm sitting on the floor, waiting to hear the sound of the General's heavy footsteps rise over the fire sirens, trying to ignore the excruciating pain constantly roaring through me as well as the room's increasing heat. The smell of smoke fills my nose, but the fire that threatens to devour this inn is not out of control yet, thanks to my magic. I can control the flames I know rage nearby, keep them at bay. But the cost is great, for I can practically feel my energy slipping away with every strained minute that passes.

Attempting to stop my vision from blurring too badly, I keep my gaze focused on the door that Val walked out of half an hour ago.

She didn't look back.

What she said to me still echoes in my head tantalizingly. "This past week....oh gods, Kye, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't breathe. All I could think about was you and I was so damn scared because...."

The ghost of words that never were threatens to consume me. And maybe I'd let it, if things were different and I was with Val right now and we were safe and I wasn't nearly dead.

I wish things were different.

"But they are not," Ignus says in my mind, his voice insistent. "Listen to me, Flame. You are slipping away, right here, right now. And I cannot allow you to. If you want to live to kill the man you intend to, you must let go."

Let go of what? I think, my mind scrambled from the combination of a god in my head, handling unbearable pain, and still using my magic to keep the nearby flames at bay.

"Let go of the flames," Ignus commands. "Stop using your magic, or else you will die within minutes."

I do what he says, but barely feel any different than before. If you don't want me to die, then do something about it, because I'll still be dead soon enough.

"I cannot save you," the God tells me. "Someone else must. Just as you must agree to her terms."

Who? is all I can think. Whose terms?

"The General is coming," Ignus says instead, quickly retreating from my mind. "I do not have to give you the strength to kill him; you will find it yourself." Just then, I hear the door at the bottom of the steps slam. Then there's the jingle of a set of keys.

Drawing Val's sword that she gave me before she left, I force myself to my feet. It takes most of my breath just to stand. Everything hurts, and beneath the pain, weariness seems to have penetrated my very marrow. This is not the tiredness induced by Lychnus and hunger and interrogation and remnants of watery painkiller. It is the exhaustion of a body that is nearly done fighting.