POV: Rena Vale
Sound rips out of me before I know it’s my voice.
“KAI!”
Moon-poison detonates in the air, a pale, sick light that eats color as it moves. It hits him center-mass like a judgment. He jerks, arches—then drops, all the strength carved out of him in one brutal flash. His body slams the stones. Breath vanishes. Skin washes to ash. Dark lines spider through his veins, racing from the wound like ink poured into glass.
“No—no, no, no,” I choke, stumbling down the steps so fast I hit my knees. “Kai!”
Auren is already there, sprinting through the chaos like a blade with legs. He hauls Kai’s limp weight by the collar and under the arms, teeth bared, eyes wild. “Back! Cover!” he yells, dragging him toward the shadow of the arch. Arrows scream overhead. Riven’s voice is distant thunder. The courtyard buckles with the shock of clashing packs, but all I see is the man I love turning gray.
I drop beside them hard enough to bruise bone. “Don’t you dare,” I sob, palms flying over Kai’s chest, hunting breath, hunting anything. “Don’t you dare die.”
His lashes flutter. A ghost of a smile cracks his mouth. “Rena…” barely a breath, a scrap of sound torn off a storm. “I told you… I’d die for you.”
“No.” Heat surges under my skin like I swallowed the sun, like my bones remember they were made from light before they were wrapped in skin. “No, you don’t get to make that promise true.”
Another pulse from the spear lances the air. My markings flare, then stutter. Pain licks up my ribs. Rage answers—pure, clean, merciless.
“Back,” Auren orders, shoving his body between me and the next blast, one arm braced, the other still cradling Kai’s head. “Rena—focus on you—pull in—”
“Get out of my way,” I whisper, and the whisper is a quake.
Silver detonates from my sternum, a ring of force blasting outward. The courtyard floor cracks like ice under a falling boulder. Soldiers fly. Banners snap. The air shakes. The world goes white for a breath, then slams back into color—richer, sharper, hungrier.
“Rena!” Auren throws his arm up against the flare, squinting through the light. “Easy—Easy!”
“I am done being easy,” I snarl, crawling to Kai’s side, getting my hands under his head, lifting his face into my lap. His skin is cold. The poison’s black threads creep up his neck, along the vein under his jaw, toward the delicate throb of his temple. “Kai,” I beg, shaking, stroking sweat and grime off his cheek with trembling fingers. “Look at me. Look at me.”
His eyes fight for me. Storm-gray, glazed, stubborn. “Pretty… liar,” he murmurs, mouth trying a smile. “Told me… not to die…”
“Shut up and breathe,” I command, tears burning. “That’s an order.”
A rush of air slaps the space beside me—no footsteps, just a displacement, reality opening and closing like a door. Aunt Eloise is suddenly there, palm already on Kai’s sternum. She feels for a rhythm. Her mouth hardens. “Too slow,” she hisses. “Too dark.”
“Tell me what to do,” I plead. “Tell me how to fix it.”
“You either kill the poison,” she snaps, eyes cutting to mine, “or you kill the boy.”
“I won’t let him die,” I say, voice raw steel. “Tell me how.”
“His only chance is YOU,” she shouts over the battle’s roar, shoving my hand to his chest, right over his heart. “Luminous fire meets moon-poison like ice meets tongue. It will sear. It will stick. It will try to pull you under with it. You have to out-burn it without burning him.”
“I—” Air stalls. Fear spikes. Love roars louder. “Okay.” I lower my face to Kai’s so his breath, if it still exists, has to touch my mouth. “Stay,” I whisper. “Hear me? I’m right here.”
Auren pivots, putting his back to us, his sword—no, he lost it; he snatches a fallen pike—up and ready, stance wide, one arm useless, the other a promise. “Do it,” he grits, eyes on the chaos beyond. “I’ll keep you covered.” He glances down once, just once, and the look in his eyes is all the words he isn’t wasting. “Bring him back.”
I lace my fingers over Kai’s sternum, press hard enough to feel bone, then harder still until I can pretend I’m touching his pulse and not the silence masquerading as one. I close my eyes. I drag my power inward. The gold under my skin bunches, coils, condenses until it hurts to keep it contained.
“Rena.” Eloise’s hand snaps to the back of my neck. “Control. Focus.”
“I know.” Breath in. Hold four. Out six. I build the star in my chest and slowly, carefully, lower a vein of it down my arms, into my palms, into him.
The first touch is hell.
Moon-poison meets Luminous fire and screams—no sound, all sensation. It bites. It licks my nerves with frost and flame at once. Pain detonates from my palms up my arms until my elbows feel like they’re packed with razors. I gasp. Almost pull back. Don’t.
“Stay,” Kai whispers—maybe memory, maybe miracle. “Look at me.”
“I am,” I breathe, and force more light through trembling hands.
The black threads resist, writhing under his skin like snakes in tar. My power hits them and they coil tighter around his veins, defensive, hungry. I push harder. The smell of something scorching rises—metal? magic? me?—and bile burns the back of my throat.
“Rena,” Eloise warns. “You’re taking it into you.”
“I know,” I bite out. “He can’t hold it. I can.” My markings flare so bright the world blurs. The poison’s cold slides under my skin, past my wrists, up my forearms like midnight ink throwing hooks. I clench my jaw until my teeth ache. I flood him anyway.
“More left,” Auren pants, slamming the pike into an enemy that got too close. “Five—no, six—keep your head down, Rena—”
“I’ve got you,” I whisper to Kai, to myself, to the part of the night that wants offerings. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you—”
His body jolts. Once. Twice. The dark threads slow. The black at his throat fades to bruised purple, then to an ugly gray. I pour and pour, heat fusing my bones while ice tries to unmake them. My left forearm burns like it’s being carved from the inside; my right goes numb in patches, dead stars dropping into my skin.
“Enough,” Eloise snaps, fingers bruising my nape. “You’ll lose the arm.”
“He’ll lose everything,” I spit, and give him more.
“Kai,” I plead, voice cracking. “Come back. Take it from me. Take it.” Energy stutters through my chest; the world tilts. “Please—”
He gasps.
It’s small—shallow—but it’s breath, not the slow nothing that was stealing him. Relief breaks me so hard I almost lose the thread.
“Again,” I whisper, sobbing, hauling the light up out of my ribs like I’m lifting a city. “Breathe again.”
He does. Deeper. His fingers twitch against my thigh. The lines under his skin unmar their way down, fading from the pulse in his neck to the map of his sternum where my hands shake.
“Rena!” Auren barks, voice panicked, body slamming into another attacker and shoving them off the edge of the balcony. “How much longer?”
“Until he opens his eyes,” I hiss, and push through the kind of pain that makes everything white at the edges. “Until he says my name.”
“Kai,” I beg, forehead to his. “Say it.”
His chest jerks. His mouth opens. No sound. My heart plummets. I shove more light through palms that don’t feel like mine anymore, through fingers that are turning cold and wrong, through bones that sing with too much.
“I will not lose you,” I say, shaking apart. “Not today. Not to him. Not to this.”
The last clots of black under his skin blanch, turn the gray of old ash, then crumble into nothing I can feel. The poison fights like a cornered thing. It turns. Looks for another home.
It chooses me.
Agony slams my left arm elbow-to-wrist, a violent, crawling cold that eats sensation as it moves. My breath shatters. I keep my palms on Kai’s heart—one burning, one dying—and don’t let go.
“Rena—stop!” Eloise’s voice cracks. “Enough—enough!”
“No!” I scream, and the scream is a command, and the command is love, and the love is a blade I will hold by the edge if I have to bleed to keep it sharp. “Take me instead,” I snarl at the poison. “Take me—leave him.”
Something in the world leans. The moon looks away. The spear hums like it’s laughing.
Kai’s lips part.
Air rushes in. He coughs, chokes, coughs again—then drags a breath that sounds like a man clawing out of a grave.
“Kai!” I sob, laughing and crying at once, shoving hair off his brow with shaking fingers, slapping his cheek lightly. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. Look at me.”
His eyes open—dazed, furious, alive. “Ser—” The rest is lost to a ragged inhale that breaks both of us open.
Behind me, Auren curses in relief so fierce it’s a prayer. He drops to a knee, hand finding my shoulder, squeezing hard. “You did it,” he breathes, voice wrecked. “You did it.”
Eloise’s palm leaves my neck; she exhales like she’s been holding the sky up with one hand. “Hold pressure,” she orders, softer. “Keep his heart warm.”
“I’ve got him,” I whisper, leaning over Kai, kissing his forehead, his cheek, the corner of his mouth, tears wetting his skin. “I’ve got you.”
“Rena…” he rasps, fingers fumbling up, searching for me, finding my jaw. His thumb strokes once, reverent, disbelieving. “You… idiot,” he whispers, and laughs a little like it hurts. “You saved me.”
“Of course I did.” The world tilts.
My left hand doesn’t answer me.
I try to lift it—nothing. I try to flex—nothing. I look down.
From elbow to fingertips, the skin is wrong: color leached to a gray-blue, veins ink-dark, the glow strangled. Sensation retreats in a tide I can’t command. Cold eats the joint, the wrist, the palm.
“Kai gasps back to life—but Rena’s arm goes limp and darkens from the poison she absorbed.