Page 111 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
Lumina’s heart was like a stone, too, hurtling through space. It collided against the reality that Magnus was dead, and shattered. She was empty. She crumpled to his chest, transfigured by misery from a person to a hollow, sobbing shell, cast adrift on an ocean of hopelessness, hopelessness like sewage, raw and rotting and utterly foul.
Blackness tugged at her, coaxing, and Lumina realized she wanted to die, too.
She didn’t want to exist in a world without him. She couldn’t.
Cradling his ruined face in her hands, dripping tears onto his cheeks, Lumina whispered hoarsely, “I can’t live without you, Magnus! I can’t breathe without you! You’re my lungs and my heart and all the life I ever had! P
lease! Please don’t leave me! Please . . . you have to live . . .”
Gasping, her body wracked with tremors that seized her, shook her, Lumina laid her cheek on Magnus’s chest, sobbing.
In the stillness and silence that rose up all around, everyone, in and out of the cathedral, stared at the sky.
It was blue. A blue so vivid it was almost blinding. And right in the middle of it, hanging there like a golden, glimmering eye, was the sun. A sight not seen in a lifetime.
Lumina heard a voice, soft and caring.
“Hope.”
She looked up into her mother’s face. Pale and solemn, Jenna gazed down at her, beautiful as a medieval Madonna, her eyes endless, her nudity covered by a long strip of faded, dusty purple silk she’d torn from an altar in an alcove and wrapped around herself. A look passed between them, and she grasped the depth of Lumina’s despair without a word spoken. All there was to know was right there in her eyes, in the tears streaming silently down her cheeks. Jenna sank to her knees beside Lumina, pulling her into a gentle embrace.
I’m so sorry. Sweetheart, I’m so, so sorry.
Closing her eyes, Lumina made a sound like an animal in pain.
Another pair of arms encircled her, strong and sure. Lumina smelled spice and smoke and that wild, nighttime scent she’d come to love so much on Magnus. When she opened her eyes again, it was to gaze into a pair that were almost identical to her own, and her mother’s.
“Are you hurt?” her father asked.
Automatically, she shook her head, but then caught herself. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Can you Shift?”
Now she simply nodded.
“We have to go, love,” Jenna said. “All of us. Now. Your father and I will help the others—”
“I’m not leaving him!” It came out as a growl as she turned to crouch over Magnus’s body, fiercely protective of him, even now.
“Bring him with you. Back to the caves. We’ll take care of him there.”
In the softness of her mother’s voice Lumina found her meaning, and numbly nodded her head. Magnus would be buried in Wales. She wouldn’t leave his body here in this godforsaken city; she’d take him back to the caves and find a spot to bury him, a beautiful spot on a hill overlooking the ocean, where she could visit him every day. Where she could mourn.
Shaking violently, an unholy howling inside her skull, Lumina rose unsteadily to her feet. She looked around, numb, heartbroken, staring blindly into faces both human and animal, all of them blinking in the first light of day they’d seen in decades. Someone in the crowd said a name in an awed murmur, and it was the same name her mother had called her:
Hope.
Lumina nearly laughed at the absurdity of it, at the sheer, colossal wrongness of it all. There was no Hope. The girl and the dream were both annihilated. At least for her. All that was left was a vile, pounding emptiness, ashes and bones and death.
She Shifted to dragon, ignoring the collective gasp of the crowd. She gently picked up the body of her love in her massive gold-tipped claws, then launched into the air, pumping her powerful wings hard. She vaulted into the sky through the gaping remains of the cathedral’s roof. She didn’t notice the throng on the city streets below her, soldiers and citizens staring in wonder at the new, harmless sky, at the red dragon soaring into the endless nexus of blue. She didn’t notice the smoking remains of the Enforcement helicopters, or wonder what the future would bring.
For her, there wasn’t any future. There was only the past, where Magnus—her heart, the beating pulse of her soul—lived on.
She flew, high and fast, unable in her grief to notice one other small, but vitally important, detail:
The body she was transporting to its final resting place in Wales had stopped bleeding.
THIRTY-SIX
