Page 175 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
“No.”
I turned to find myself facing that same boy who’d watched Mattheus die, too. The Fated General who’d just defeated the last monster in the square was, in this moment, just as terrified. Just as small.
Which meant it was up to me to shove down the biting edge of grief and think for the both of us.
“No,” I repeated urgently, even as more of Dyonisia’s antipower came spiraling down. “Once she sees all of her exiled ones back in their original states—once she seeshim…” I nodded vaguely at Lexington’s dismembered body. “She’s going to know you were here. And if that happens, she’ll scour Hallow’s Perch in search of you. You don’t want her to scour Hallow’s Perch, do you? You don’t want her anywhere near your adoptive family or the others?”
Coen shook his head, his eyes hanging onto mine as if my words were the only thing keeping him from drowning in the tears surely running down his throat.
“This is what we’re going to do, then,” I whispered.
With our blockades still open for each other, I poured my entire plan—the one I’d been forming since last night—into his mind, barely registering the widening of shock in his eyes in my haste to get it all out in time. The mist was congealing around us, much like a spiderweb, threads of that milky power swimming closer and closer to us.
But there were still enough gaps in it for me to look sideways at the entrance of the nearest alleyway and note the two shadows stirring just behind that corner. Observing. Waiting.
When I was done, Coen gave a frantic shake of his head.
“I can’t leave you alone with her, Rayna.”
“Hey, hey, hey. Look at me. Look at me, Coen.”
His name—hisfirstname—on my tongue stopped his pacing pupils in their tracks.
I placed his hands around the back of my neck, digging his fingers into the ridges of my brand. Into those five Sorronian words.
“My heart will not falter,” I breathed up at him. “Okay?”
It took him a moment, but when the first rope of antipower touched his skin, Coen winced at the hiss it made on contact and nodded.
“Okay.”
I didn’t think twice. Life was too short to think twice. Lifting myself up to my tiptoes, I fit my lips against the curves of his.
He tasted like copper and salt on the surface, the residues of battle still clinging to his lips. Death. Destruction. Decay. Everything the Fated General was destined to embody.
But as soon as his shock wore away and he yanked me against his chest to kiss me again, that sweet, dark aroma filled my mouth and sent a deep calm down my veins. Nowthiswas Coen. Life. The sparkling starlight in the dark. A fierce, ferocious warmth even amid the cold.
I closed my eyes, basking in the brief moment of bliss.
Until the weight of his lips disappeared from mine.
I opened my eyes to find Coen several paces away from me. Garvis’s body and Old Veracious were gone, my crescent knife was back in my hand, and a crow-led carriage was veering down from the sky.
When the carriage touched down, the wheels sparked against cobblestone. The crows, about three dozen of them in harnesses strapped to reins, broke into a frenzy of squawking.
“Well, well, well. The Mind Manipulator and the Wild Whisperer, trapped in the same web at last.”
Even after all this time, Dyonisia’s voice still grated down my spine.
I watched warily as she used the carriage footstool to step down, her Wild Whispering coachman holding her door open.
The milky mist of the dome had wrapped around Coen and me, thin strands of it sweepingthroughus from every direction. The essence of it burned where it touched my skin, as if those parts of me were struggling for air. As if they were being smothered.
But Coen was worse. Dyonisia had wrapped him up even tighter, spiraling ropes of power around his mouth so that he couldn’t speak. So that he couldn’t even move.
Her curtain of midnight hair swished to the side as she surveyed Lexington’s dismembered head in the opening of the alleyway beside us, her nose wrinkling with disgust.
“I assume you’ve both figured out my power is the dome itself?”
