Toxic Part Two (Celestra Series Book 7.5) (49 page)

“I talked to your Mom,” he says it plain. “Told her I wanted to help.”

“You’re neither Count nor Celestra and she let you in?” It makes me wonder if my mother was breaking the rules or if this implies something else altogether.

“Welcome to the party.” Chloe demands his attention as she sways by the fire. She gazes out at him with anticipation, her desperation as transparent as it is pitiful. Chloe wants to cover him with her love the way the sky lies over Paragon, thick and smothering. But Gage doesn’t bother glancing in her direction. 

“I’m here now, Skyla. That’s all that matters.” He touches his hand to Logan’s forehead as if he were checking for a fever.

“In all of the other regions when a person died they would evaporate.” I pause to look up at Gage. “But Logan’s still here—he’s still with us.” I hold my breath, hoping he’ll run with the idea and tell me everything will work out, that Logan didn’t evaporate for a reason.

“I’ve come to take him, Skyla.” His wings expand in a clap of thunder, holding a bolder shade of blue than my own. He gives a peaceful smile and his skin ignites a molten gold from the inside. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure Logan can see the sun again, breathe air in his lungs—that he can love you.” The smile melts from his face. “You made him whole, happy. You’re all he ever wanted.”

I run my fingers over Gage’s beautiful face, and a current passes through me, soft and soothing like the strum of a guitar.

“What’s happening?” I can hardly get the words out as my mind riffles through the short list of possibilities.

“I love you, Skyla.” It thunders from him, deep and unrecognizable. His eyes ignite like a tempest. They rage like the tumultuous sea just before a storm. “Get the sword and come home to me.” He leans in and blesses me with a sublime kiss as we hover over Logan. 

“Home?”

Gage presses out a smile as he transforms into a molten being, glowing like bronze set in a furnace. He lays his hands over Logan and they begin to disintegrate.

“Wait!” I snatch at the empty void in their wake. They’ve both disappeared to nothing—evaporated, simple as a vapor.

I glance up at the nest of lightning, above the inferno, as if it might tell me emphatically if what I fear is true.

“Dude…” Ellis whispers, his face bleached white as stone.

Chloe steps forward. The evil gleam in her eye is sharp as the tip of a knife.

“Lost them both in a single night?” Her teeth glitter as she revels in my misery. “Pity.”  

It takes everything in me to rise to my feet, my plumes ruffling out like sheets.

This is heartbreak, a knife in my existence that can never be extracted. I feel the aftereffects of Chloe’s sword with each breath I take, knowing Logan is no longer with me—that Chloe’s blade may have taken out Gage as well. Truly only eternity waits for me now.

Demetri stands at attention with his hands behind his back.

“I’m deeply sorry for your loss.” His voice resonates low and even. I look right at him, and innately, I know he’s telling the truth.

“Were you sorry when you burned my father?” I don’t wait for a response. I walk over to Chloe, mechanical and stiff. She holds the shield high over the fire with her eyes pinched shut, but she doesn’t have the guts to enter. Chloe is a coward of the highest order. She exhales into her defeat and lowers the metal sheet to inspect the wicked flames.

“I bet it’ll hurt like hell,” I say, standing shoulder to shoulder with her, taunting her to do it. A part of me wants to witness Chloe Bishop writhing in the blaze.

“Not with the shield,” she whispers.

“Especially with the shield,” I counter. 

A riot of voices clamber from the mouth of the entry.

“They’re here.” Chloe glances over in a panic. 

The voices escalate with aggression as a wall of animated flesh surges just shy of the opening. They’re going to take it. Someone will lay victory for the Counts—God knows it won’t be for Celestra. Logan wouldn’t have wanted it this way. He would want me to fight, but I’m numb from the trauma of it all and Chloe is right. The only thing I want to do now is join Logan in Paradise—God forbid I find Gage there, too. I can’t bring myself to believe it, any of it.  

Demetri waves his hand over the entrance to the cave and the mob blurs to nothing.

“Two minutes—I’ll hold them no more,” he says, donning his signature wicked scowl. “Go on, Skyla.” He gives a depreciative nod. “Retrieve what’s rightfully yours.”

“Skyla?” Chloe harps with disbelief.

I don’t wait for either of them to realize his error—instead I yank the shield from Chloe’s grasp.

“You wish,” she hisses, knocking me down toward the flames and my right arm falls through the fire. A gut-wrenching cry expels from my lips as I cradle it in pain. I glance down at the seared pink flesh, my blackened hair at the tips. This is how my father died. The horrific surprise of the fire, the inextinguishable blaze.

I jump to my feet and lunge at her as she ducks behind Ellis, the shield tucked behind her cowardly back.

“You’ll never do it.” I try to step around him but he blocks her with his body. “You can’t stand the thought of burning.” I hold up my arm and reveal the crimson beads dotting the surface. “Move.” I bite the air with my command, but Ellis doesn’t budge. “I said,
move
!” I scream.

“Less than a minute,” Demetri vocalizes from the vaporous wall of the entry. “In the event you need this…” He pulls a sword from a sheath strapped around his hip and holds it to the light—long and svelte—it lights up a miraculous shade of cerulean that you could bottle and sell to the sky. He lowers the blade and glides it across the floor, landing the handle just shy of my feet.

I swipe it from the ground. I remember what happened the last time I accepted a gift from my father’s killer. It cost me a region but now none of that mattered. If it backfired, I would welcome it. With death as my new friend, there were no true errors.

The blade shines like nobility. It looks like a perfectly good sword, feels like one, too. I could kill Chloe or it could kill me. Either way, I would win. One of us would die today, that’s the way I would arrange it in the end.

I motion for Ellis to step aside but he shakes his head with a nervous fervor.

“Get out of my mother fucking way.” I say it low, staggering each word as if it were its own sentence.

Ellis takes a breath. He holds out his hands like he were trying to settle a schoolyard fight. “I can’t.”

“You’re going to die if you don’t move.” I have very little sympathy left for anyone who stands between me and that monster.

Ellis’s right arm dangles unnaturally, the lower half reduced to a bloodied glove. “You made me promise to never let you hurt Chloe.”

I’m so sick of that diatribe I want to shove the blade down my own throat for convincing the world of its false value.

“I’m going to hurt you, Ellis, if you don’t move.” I swing into his midsection and stop just shy of eviscerating him. God—what was I thinking running around telling everyone to keep Chloe safe from my clutches? And now she’s taken the two most important people from me, and life will forever be a shadow of its former self. “I would never say that, Ellis. It wasn’t me. It was Fem or that witch that cowers behind you. I would never in a million years not want to off Chloe.” The image of me trying to help her in region eleven comes back to haunt me. Marshall healed her in my stupid honor.

“Thirty seconds,” Demetri shouts his icy warning.

“Ellis, damn it!” The words burn as I belt them from my lungs.

He ticks his head. “I’m sort of seeing, Chloe.”

There it is.

“You’ve always had bad taste in girls,” I spew the words out with venom. “Move before I knife you, Harrison. I may or may not bring you back for a second spin on the planet.” And Logan and Gage can never return. I hate Chloe with everything in me. “
Move
!”

“No.” Ellis steps forward and raises his hands as if he means business.

I cut the air like swinging a baseball bat and slice clean through his midsection with one swift blow.

Ellis glances down at the bloodied line expanding around his middle then looks up with a sense of dread.

“Oh, God.” I take in a sharp breath and stagger at what just happened. In my madness to kill Chloe I hurt Ellis instead.

Ellis falls to my feet in two equal parts, his eyes fixed up on me in horror.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. Chloe drove a stake right through my heart, and in my delirium, I hurt others. 

Chloe looks to the fire then to the shield. She hesitates a moment before lifting the metal sheet in the air and tossing it into the flames. The precious alloy detonates. It explodes with a loud clap of thunder as it disintegrates in the caustic whirlpool. There’s no way in hell it was going to protect us. It was all a lie.

There it is. Everything is done. All hope is gone. Logan, Gage, and Ellis—they cared deeply about me, they wanted to help and now they were all dead. Loving me has proved to be the worst curse of all.

Marshall appears in his velum form that I haven’t seen in so long. He blesses me with a dull smile, one that bleeds condolence. Not even his magnificent presence can quell this pain. Nothing this life offers could comfort me with my friends forever gone, my heart right there with them.

“I’m going to do it.” The words swim out in a sea of chaos. I step in toward the open flames and the heat blisters the apples of my cheeks.

“I’ll push you.” Chloe sings the words like a necrotic poem.

Marshall moves in behind me. His wings widen like a sheath as he protects me like he always does.

I force my right foot to take another step.

I’m going to burn and the thought disables me from my heroic effort.

“What’s the matter, Skyla?” Chloe taunts. “The idea of your skin melting off not working so much for you? Face it, Messenger. Nothing can survive that fire.”

“Only gold.” Demetri sounds off.

Chloe gleams a wicked smile, delighted to be front and center, present at my final hour.

“What did you say?” I dart a look to Demetri. He stands with his shoulders back, chin up as his haughty eyes give a long blink of admission.

“Only gold, Skyla,” he resonates from afar. “Only pure gold.”

I look up at Marshall and quiver. Had this been what my father was preparing me for? And here I was to memorize those words, and it was Demetri who brought my father’s eternal wisdom back to me.

“I’m as pure as gold,” I whisper.

“You’re as pure as gold.” Marshall nods before bowing down and landing a kiss on my cheek.

The fire explodes in a fit of wicked growls. I turn to face it, to face my destiny and wonder how I’ll ever survive those flames.

“Will I live, Marshall?” I gaze up at him with a pleading expression.

He closes his eyes and gives the slightest hint of discouraging news.

I glare into the fire with a new resolve.

I won’t let myself rest in peace—not before I fall on the sword of the Master. I’ll crawl to it in my dissolving state if I have to. I’ll do something right. Celestra and Sectors will prosper. The people in the tunnels will still have hope. If that were the sum total of my life, it would have been worth the misery.

My left foot touches the last bit of soil—the next step changes everything.

My life comes to me in jags. I see myself as an infant in my mother’s arms, her face a mirror of the one I would wear. All of the good times I shared with my father crumble before me like a house of cards. I see Lizbeth, then Tad, my new family—the view of Paragon from the ferry. Logan and Gage in the bowling alley with Brielle by my side. I see Logan lying over me on Ellis’s pool table as his kisses render me under his “ever after” spell right there, right then. Gage and his sea of delicious love—his incurable ache for all of my heart. He’s always had it. Always will. One memory after another—a carousel of kisses, the indescribable yearning—they swarm faster and faster until all I see are the crimson waves of the flames, calling me, luring me with their prickling fingers deep into the fire.

Submerged within the blaze, I see them—resplendent and beautiful—Logan and Gage, Ellis behind them. They hold out their hands for me to join them in the blue heart of the flames. An apparition envelops each of them, Logan as the lion, Gage as an eagle, and Ellis an ox.

My feet move.

Falling in love is a lot like death. It chooses you. It decides the moment and the chain of events that will preclude the precise intersection of life in which it occurs. It uses you—treats you as though you were malleable in its warm hands. It doesn’t bother to ask if you want it or need it, just fills the gaping hole of destiny’s design.

Love. My world bloomed with its beautiful never-ending ache. I would give all of my blood to my enemies to have it completely—if I knew it would satisfy them—if I could live without it. But I know the resolution. I knew the end of the story before it ever began. I have chosen love. And now, I will surely die. 

This is the moment in my life for love and for death. Fate had intertwined the two, bereaved of any mercy. The architecture of my being, my infrastructure, was built for this very moment. The pillars of my life had been established long ago—the blueprint written in my bloodlines.

Marshall chants over me—such a pretty song to die to.

“I’m as pure as gold,” I whisper.

For Logan and Gage who both fought so hard—for Celestra—I step boldly into the flames.

Thank you for reading
TOXIC Part Two
. If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your point of purchase. Look for
ELYSIAN the final book in the Celestra Series,
coming 2013!

The Following is an extended preview of Addison Moore’s new series:

Ephemeral (The Countenance)

Ephemeral