Another volley of gunfire rang out, and Magnus was hit in the shoulder. Snarling, he flitted from column to column in the arcade that flanked the main nave, then charged the shooter, crashing headlong into the man and sending them both tumbling to the ground. The other Peace Guards scattered like buckshot.

His injured arm didn’t prevent Magnus from breaking the man’s neck with one sharp twist of his hands.

He looked up just in time to see a group of enormous black animals, roaring, leap on a group of Peace Guards huddled in a side chapel. Gunfire rang out. Several panthers slumped to the ground, shot, but others surged forward to take their place. Soon the white hazmat suits were ripped to shreds, and so were the men inside them.

He took down four more, taking aim at the group near the altar. Then pain, searing, blinding white, flared through his body. For a moment, everything went black.

He opened his eyes to find himself on his back, staring at the vaulted ceiling far above. He couldn’t feel anything in his lower body, his sense of smell wasn’t operational, and he couldn’t hear much either. The world had taken on a dreamy, slow quality—the flames arching and rolling gracefully in the periphery of his vision, Ikati and Peace Guards running in slow motion, even the new spray of bullets streaking by, inches above his face, did so at a lazy speed, so he saw each bullet turn and wink in the light. He lifted his head and looked down. There beneath his body was a spreading stain of red. His own blood, quickly leaking from his body.

No. Not without seeing her. Not like this.

Lumina!

Magnus! Magnus, where are you?

He was just about to answer when into his field of vision stepped a large figure, clothed in white. There could be no mistaking the Peace Guard’s intent; his rifle was trained on Magnus’s chest. His finger was on the trigger.

A shot rang out, then another, then even more. He lost count. His body twitched with every impact, every muscle spasmed and screamed in misery. The pain was a living thing, ripping through him with a strength that left him breathless, washing over him in waves. He’d known physical pain before, though, pain far, far worse than this. And he’d known the gut-wrenching, soul-eating agony of having the blood of innocents on his hands. Those were terrible things, things that stained and warped him in innumerable ways.

But now Magnus knew true anguish, because he understood with a wrenching flare of clarity that he would never again set eyes on the woman who’d saved him from himself, who’d resurrected him from a living death, and shown him the way back to the light. He’d go into eternal oblivion without a final look at his love, his beautiful angel of fire.

He always knew he’d die alone. It was what he deserved, and right. But to do it without being able to tell Lumina that she was his touchstone, his true north, the only thing of beauty he’d ever known, seemed a fate too cruel to comprehend. He’d meant to tell her how much he loved her; why hadn’t he? There hadn’t been time, not nearly enough time, and now there never would be.

The last thing Magnus saw was his own face, reflected in the glass of the Peace Guard’s mask. Then he closed his eyes to block out that terrible vision, and surrendered his soul to the hungry darkness that had been waiting to claim him for years.

Lumina felt it the instant Magnus died.

Her heart clenched. Gravity lurched then disappeared altogether, like a planet pulled out of orbit, everything spinning and wobbling and just wrong. She’d flown up into the cathedral through the main elevator shafts of the prison, moving so fast she was a streaked blur, and she’d taken human form again after slipping through a gap in the floor. The moment she stepped forward into the small marble chapel, with the first beat of her heart, she knew.

Then she saw him.

Ignoring her nudity and the war zone around her, the chaos of shouting and gunfire, flames and fighting, the stream of Peace Guards pushing into the cathedral through all the side doors and the huge, muscular animals running to meet them, she flew across the checkerboard floor and was at his side in seconds. She threw herself to her knees in a howl of banshee grief, and took his head in her hands.

All the exposed skin on his face, arms, and hands was blistered and weeping, burned by the poisonous rays of the sun. He was covered in blood, his own and others’, a pool of it under his body, slick, still warm beneath her knees. There was no trace of heartbeat, no respiration, no life left in him at all.

In the inhalation that came before her scream, time stopped. Profound silence, a split second of weightlessness . . . and then the scream.

It was expulsive. There was a thundering, bass boom! that shook the walls and floor, the earth itself. A violent jolt rocked the cathedral to its foundations. The entire roof was ripped away as a powerful pulse of energy exploded upward, destroying in a gust of light and pressure the colorful mosaics, toppling the bell tower. The sky flared with color. Pulled with a sudden drag of winds, the red clouds were set into motion, blurring to streaks then tearing apart, dissolving. Every electrical circuit in a hundred-mile radius overloaded and shorted out, sparking and smoking. Every light was extinguished. Every Enforcement helicopter circling the cathedral dropped like a stone from the sky.

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! Please! 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.