FARON JOLTED AWAKE WHEN SHE FELT A SUDDEN DRAIN ON HER energy, as if it were being tugged from her body strip by strip. She had fallen asleep curled in an armchair in her room, still dressed in her riding leathers from the battle. Her mind swam for a moment, trying to remember the night before, but exhaustion dulled her senses. Shame mingled with the exhaustion until her body felt heavy, and she wanted to go back to sleep. When she was awake, all she saw was Elara’s face on the battlefield, before Faron forced her to go.
At least when she was asleep, she dreamed of nothing at all.
There was another drain on her energy that made her surge to her feet. She swayed for a moment, almost tumbling back into the armchair, before she placed a hand against the back of it to steady herself. “What are you doing?” she sent across the bond.
Neither Gael nor Lightbringer answered.
She stumbled into the hallway, still seeing Elara’s face every time she blinked. Elara had come for her, and Faron had sent her away. Faron had used her newfound power against her own sister. Faron was the monster she had always feared she could be. If it weren’t for the drain on her magic, she would have stayed in that chair until the war ended and they came to arrest her. But she couldn’t sit by wondering what Iya was doing. The least she could do was keep watching him.
Though she had no idea where Iya was, she could follow the pull of the magic whether she was fully conscious or not. It led her down the stairs, through the corridors, and toward an empty classroom with a locked door near the back of the school. She tried to summon heat to her palms to melt the lock, but even that much effort made her eyes flutter as she nearly passed out.
Hours or seconds later, the door opened and Faron fell into a pair of unfamiliar arms. Unfamiliar only in the sense that she had never been held by them before, because, when she drew back, she saw Jesper Soto looking down at her with shadows in his eyes. Even his smile radiated the kind of malice common in the soucouyants from Iryan storybooks. But though he wasn’t a shape-shifting old hag, this boy somehow had the dark energy of a creature that sucked the blood of sleeping humans.
It was so different from the Jesper Soto she had met that she put some distance between them. “What…?”
“You don’t recognize me in this body?” The smile widened. “And here I did this for you.”
Faron stared. “Iya…?”
Iya spread his arms as if to say, What do you think? “You asked what I planned to do with his blood. Well, here it is. I am a Soto once more.” He smirked. “Twice more, I suppose.”
Faron’s back hit the opposite wall, her eyes roving his figure in horror. He had used their combined magic to transfer his soul into Jesper Soto’s body. Instead of killing his descendant, he had overwritten his soul, trapped him in the same prison that Reeve had been in. It shouldn’t be that easy for him to just take people like this, even if they were dead. It shouldn’t be something he could present to her as a gift, as if she’d asked for this. It shouldn’t—
Wait.
“Where’s Reeve?” she asked.
Iya gestured behind him. “Right this way.”
He backed into the room, allowing her to step past him. Instead of desks, inside were two beds: one was empty, the sheets removed to leave behind a bare mattress, but in the second, Reeve slumbered, the slow rise and fall of his chest the only thing that kept her from crying out. On one wall was a long chalkboard. On another wall was a window. Beneath the window was a long table on which there was a bowl smeared with red and several dragon relics, illuminated by the sun that reached through the curtains.
“What is this?” she asked around her rapid heartbeat.
“I recreated the circumstances of my original rebirth,” Iya said from behind her. “But instead of the blood of a santi and dragon relics, I combined the relics with the power of two former Empyreans. My blood and your power.”
“Jesper’s blood,” she breathed. “You used Jesper’s blood, because he’s Gael’s descendant.”
“Blood magic was common in my time. Even now, though it’s no longer practiced, magic continues to run through bloodlines. Jesper Soto was always able to bond to Lightbringer, as I once was.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “My initial attempts weren’t fruitful, and I couldn’t figure out why at first.” He reached into his pocket—Jesper’s pocket—and withdrew the stone from Rosetree Manor. “Until I found this. I have no proof you had anything to do with this, but the spell went more smoothly once I relieved him of it.”
As she watched, Iya clenched his fist until she heard a series of cracks. The stone, now reduced to dust, trickled from between his fingers to the floor. Useless.
Faron laid her hand over Reeve’s chest to feel his steady heartbeat. She was sure her own must have been wild, racing, as she was, between fear and revulsion, between relief and horror. But if Reeve even knew she was in the room, his lashes didn’t so much as twitch to show it. “You said you did this for me, but I never asked for this. I would never have asked for this.”
“We’re connected, Faron. Gael Soto knows how much you hate us because I looked like him.” Iya was standing at her shoulder now, his shadow bisecting Reeve’s body. “You can see past my conquest, past the atrocities, but you could never see past that. He doesn’t just want you to know him.” His voice was soft, but there was an edge of steel that made her finally look up. “He wants you to see him.”
“And you’re suddenly in the business of giving him what he wants?”
Iya shrugged his broader shoulders. “I know you’ve noticed a certain… disharmony between my souls. This resolves the problem. As Lightbringer’s Rider, I am strongest in a body that shares my blood. If we remain on the same page, there will be no further issues.”
All the work she had done to berate Gael for his lack of courage, to plant the seeds of his rebellion—it all had been undone. If Gael wished for Faron not to hate him because of Reeve, and Lightbringer had granted it, they would be of one mind again. She would never draw him out from Lightbringer’s control again.
Faron blinked back tears. “Is Reeve going to be okay?”
He was, after all, only alive thanks to the deal his parents had made to trade his body to Iya for power. Once, he’d told her that he had been sickly as a child, but he had never gone into detail about what that meant. Without the sliver of connection between the two of them, the link that had allowed Iya to control Reeve’s body once Iya had been freed from the Empty, would he be that sick again? Would she get him back only to watch him fade away?
Her eyes burned at the thought, but she refused to cry in front of Iya. If she started, she wouldn’t stop.
“His body has been through much,” said Iya. “He just needs to rest. I’m not sure for how long.”
Faron looked back at Reeve. His paper-white skin looked translucent, and his breathing was so soft, she could hardly hear it. She ran a hand over her face, overwhelmed. Something about all this just wasn’t connecting in her head. Kidnapping Jesper Soto only to use his blood to invade his body, just because Gael… what? Cared for her? That was not a side of Iya she was used to. It was a lot of effort for very little gain, as Gael’s moments of mild lucidity had done nothing to threaten Iya’s conquest.
Faron was being lied to.
“Why did you really need Jesper’s body?” she asked, positioning herself between Iya and Reeve’s slumbering form. “You didn’t have to take over his body to sever his bond with his dragon. You were already stronger than anyone when you were still in Reeve. And I refuse to believe you did this for me or Gael. I’m not that stupid.”
“And why wouldn’t I have?” Iya shot back. “That body means nothing to us and everything to you. I’ve been clear with you about my goals, Faron. What you choose to believe is none of my concern.”
Hearing Reeve referred to as nothing more than a body rankled. Faron’s cheeks burned, but she refused to be diverted.
“Jesper’s body must offer you something more important. There has to be a reason you wanted him badly enough to kidnap him.” Her eyes scanned him again. “What could it be?”
The realization hit her so hard, it knocked the breath from her lungs.
“Blood magic. You can do blood magic again. And the only other person who could possibly match you with that power is Signey.”
Iya tilted his head, a slow smile spreading across his new face. “And she wouldn’t dare attack her own brother.”
“You have my summoning magic, you have Rider magic, and now you have blood magic. A kind of sorcery that hasn’t been seen in centuries.” Faron covered her mouth with her hand. “With this much power… you’re not planning a conquest. This was all just a distraction. You’re planning a massacre.”
“And what if I am?” Iya’s every word dripped with Lightbringer’s endless capacity for cruelty. His brown eyes flashed green, his pupils narrowing to catlike slits, as the dragon swelled within this body, consuming every other soul left within. “Sometimes, we must destroy the old to make room for the new. This world needs a resurrection. A rebirth.”
“People will die.”
“Dying is what mortals do. It’s what defines their ephemeral existence, the knowledge that it will one day end. If they’ll die regardless, why not have their deaths serve a greater purpose?” Iya gestured toward the large windows letting sunlight into the room. “You cannot tell me this world is worth saving. Your island was thrice colonized. Your childhood was defined by a war you were too young to fight in. Even before dragons entered this realm, your species were inventing new methods of harming one another every second. Would it really be so bad, Faron? To burn it all down?”
“No,” Faron admitted in a hoarse whisper.
She should have felt ashamed. Iya was a megalomaniac, who cared only about the flaws of the world because he wanted to remake it in his malignant image, and it should have made her feel filthy to agree with him. But it didn’t. He was right. The endless wars. The disrespect to her sister, her hero, even by her own gods. The politics and the selfishness, the imperialism and the idea that there was a divine right to rule—all mortals did was hurt one another. Hurt her.
And, yes, she had made mistakes, and she had done some of the hurting. She had likely hurt her sister worse than anyone had before, and she would always have to live with that. But she was so tired of living in a world that forced her to whittle down her edges until she was smooth and palatable, until she was what everyone needed her to be instead of who she was.
She was not good or evil. She was not young or old. She was not powerful or weak. She was simply Faron Vincent, a girl who defied definition.
A girl who sometimes wanted to burn it all down.
“You must be so exhausted, playing at morality. Their morality.” Iya stepped closer, his eyes returned to their dark brown shade although his voice still sounded like two intertwined. “Imagine a world where you get to decide what’s good. A world where something is right because you’ve decided it’s so. Instead of playing god, imagine a world where you have become god. You have suffered so much, Faron. You deserve that which you have always been denied: control.”
Their gazes locked. Faron swallowed. “Not like this.”
“Think about it,” Iya said, moving away, so she could finally breathe. “I have a prior engagement, but you know where to find me when you see the truth.”
Faron stood there, frozen, for far longer than she should have, her mind restless. Reeve. Reeve, she finally decided. She would watch over Reeve. It was the one good thing she could do right now.
But in the back of her mind, a snakelike voice whispered: Don’t you just want to burn it all down?