Gathering Darkness (Falling Kingdoms 3)

This really wasn’t going according to Melenia’s plan at all. Were it another night and another life lost, Lucia might have taken pleasure in that.

“I love you,” Melenia said, crossly. As if such words mattered to someone like him. “I’ve killed for you. And I’ve done it all to free you so we could be together again.”

“And I thanked you,” the young man said. He appeared to be no more than twenty, but Lucia knew there was no number for his real age.

He was eternal.

“When she’s gone, we’ll talk. We’ll talk about all of this.” Melenia spun to face Lucia, an ugly expression crossing her face, and her fist burst into flames.

So she would use fire magic to kill Lucia.

That seemed appropriate.

Lucia looked at her own hand and held it out. She summoned Melenia’s fire into her palm.

Melenia gasped as Lucia stole her magic. “What?”

Alexius has stressed this lesson and, at the time, she’d wondered why. From nearly the moment he arrived, she never understood why he’d been so adamant about tutoring her until she was exhausted and frustrated.

Now she knew that it was all so she could do this.

Melenia held out her hand to form a spear of ice, but Lucia looked at it and melted it with a single thought.

“Stop that,” Melenia hissed.

Then Lucia stepped forward, clutched Melenia by her throat, and looked deep into her sapphire eyes.

“Listen to me very carefully,” Alexius had said in the moments before he vanished from her arms forever. “Melenia will come for you. She will try to kill you because you are the only one with enough magic to destroy her. She steals other Watchers’ magic to make herself more powerful. You can do the same. When her magic is drained, she’ll be temporarily mortal.”

Melenia summoned her magic once more, and again Lucia stole it with a thought. Fear entered the elder’s eyes as Lucia focused with all her strength and, using what she’d learned from Alexius, drained as much magic—earth, air, water, fire—as she could from this beautiful but evil creature.

Lucia’s hands glowed with golden power. The cold wind and stinging snow no longer bothered her. Warmth flowed through her veins and her entire body sang with Melenia’s elementia.

When she’d taken all she could, Melenia began to tremble.

“Spare me,” she whispered, her gaze fixed on the young man who hadn’t made a single move to save her. “My love, please, spare me . . .”

“Kill her,” he said, nodding at Lucia.

Lucia thrust her dagger into the Watcher’s heart, then pulled it out.

Lucia had lied. The dagger was for Melenia, after all.

Melenia looked down at the wound welling with blood as if hypnotized with disbelief. She reached out for the young man with a trembling hand.

He stepped out of her reach.

“But I love you,” she whispered.

“And I hate you.”

She stared at him with horror. “Why would you hate me when I did everything for you?”

“You helped to keep me enslaved, Melenia. I’m no one’s slave. I never was. And I never shall be again.”

As he cast a fearsome, furious look upon her, she took a shaky step back from him before she stumbled and fell off the side of the cliff. Mere seconds before she hit the water, her body vanished in a flash of bright light, illuminating the unforgiving landscape all around them for a long, blazing moment.

Lucia dropped the dagger, her gaze fixed on the black water at the bottom of the cliff.