Page 94 of Redeeming the Angel

He shook his head and kept pulling me.“Can’t stop.I must bring you.”

“Bring me where?”

“To him.”

The cold chills on my flesh seeped into my blood and bones.Someone had bespelled him.“Listen to me!You don’t want to do this.”

“I must.”Though I dug in my heels, he was too strong.I slid along the wet forest floor until a root or stone sent me sprawling.

With cold indifference, Lucian dragged me along, leaving it up to me to scramble awkwardly on my feet.

“Fine.”I conjured a new fireball in my free hand.“I’m sorry, Lucian, but I must.And maybe it will wake you up.”

With that, I guided the fire to his arm.His sleeve caught ablaze.He didn’t respond at all.He just kept walking.The reek of burn hair and scorched fabric made my eyes water.

Regret and despair washed over me, peppered with worry that he’d burn to death.Quickly I called the water molecules in the air to come together and douse the arm.

We reached a clearing and my heart sank in dread.A portal shimmered in a circle of stones and some sort of yellow powder.A barren desert shifted in and out of focus.There was only one desert that I knew of that was that lifeless and radiated evil.Qua’ al-fán.Someone had put Lucian in some powerful thrall spell to bring me to Mephistopheles.

To bring both of us.

“Lucian, no!”I screamed, pulling harder against his grip.“Snap out of it!”

I muttered every counter spell and curse lift I could remember, but the ones most likely to work required time and supplies I didn’t have.

“I must bring you,” he repeated with that same blank stare.

Phantom yowled behind us in a broken, desperate voice.I prayed to the fates that he wouldn’t follow us into the portal.

Footsteps thundered behind us.My heart leaped with hope that someone had heard me and come to help, but I was unable to turn around and see.

A blade swung in a wide arc, the late winter sunlight glinting off its sharp edge.Lucian’s head glided off his body and I screamed at the awfulness, collapsing to my knees beside the rest of his body.

I had a moment to hope that returning to Luminista would break the spell before strong arms seized me.

“No!”I screamed.“Let me go!”

“Kerainne!”Lucian’s voice shouted in my ear before he turned me around.

He looked like himself again.His skin was warm and flushed from running, his eyes shone with the vitality and love that made him, well, himself.I started to embrace him, then stopped.“Careful!There’s someone else here!They cut off your head.”

“There’s no one else here.”He pulled me into his arms.His voice rumbled against my ear.“Icut my head off.”

“What?”I lifted my head from his chest.Surely, I hadn’t heard right.

“Look.”

My eyes followed where he pointed.The sword lay in the snow, curiously bloodless for having just decapitated someone.And the body… My eyes squeezed shut, not wanting to see, but I forced them open.

“Oh shit,” I breathed.

The body was crawling toward me.And the head, lying several feet away, blinked at me with those unsettling vacant eyes.The mouth shaped words that it no longer had the vocal cords to speak.

Chapter Thirty-One

Lucian

“It’s a corpse-walker,” Kerainne’s whisper was filled with disgust that I could only imagine.

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