“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

Faces. So many faces. Every one familiar, even through the blinding haze of light. Weightlessness, the heady scent of wildflowers, a feeling of wonder. Warmth. Music.

Peace.

It was so beautiful here, wherever here was. So tranquil. He never wanted to leave.

He moved toward the light, toward the faces, happy now, at ease. Effortless motion, gliding without resistance, formless yet whole. He raised his hands in front of his eyes, and they were made of the same light as everything else, incandescent, pulsating right through his skin. He laughed, and it was music. Plashing fountains and birdsong and all that dazzling, glimmering light . . . all of it so exquisitely beautiful. So real.

A whisper made him pause. It was a voice . . . a woman’s voice. Lovely, yet ineffably sad. The voice was familiar, but not. The name it called was familiar, but not. A puzzle. It bothered him, a little at first, then more and more as he perceived the raw note of anguish reverberating through that voice, the endless, aching pain. The pain was out of place in all this loveliness.

Looking around, he wanted to find the source. He wanted to comfort the owner of that voice. He wanted to offer solace to such unutterable longing . . .

Suddenly he wanted that more than anything else in this new, magnificent world.

He turned away from the light, and a solid resistance arose inside him as he did. It hurt to turn away, but that voice hurt him even more. It called to him, urgent, pain like a hot welter over the center of his chest. A shocking kaleidoscope of images hit with breath-stealing intensity: the dim gleam of pale skin, the curve of a bare hip. The elegant arch of a neck, lit by candlelight. Hair like spun gold, lucent eyes fringed in a curve of black lashes. Laughter like the pealing of bells, from a mouth he wanted, needed, to kiss.

A face. That face, even more lovely than all the ethereal beauty around him.

Fire.

Hope.

It left his lips soundlessly, but the lovely voice that had been calling out in such longing, such wretched pain, fell silent when he thought the word. Carnivorous hunger arose in him, a need to see that face, a face he loved more than anything else in the whole of his existence. A need to hear that name she’d been calling out with such depth of sorrow . . . Magnus.

His name.

With the force of a wrecking ball, it all came back to him. His past, his life, the endless labyrinth of searching for something he’d finally, finally found, only to have it ripped away from his hands.

Lumina. Hope. Two names that meant the same thing to him: love. She was his home and his home was her, not this dazzling place. It was empty without her. It was nothing without her.

He was nothing without her. He would not—not—give her up.

As soon as the certainty of it solidified within him, the world tilted and spun, flashing lights and falling stars and a sense of falling down, down, into nothing. Into darkness.

An eternity of darkness. And then . . .

Light again, but different this time. Diffuse. A sly, sliding flicker glimpsed through a blurry screen. Music again, too, but also different. Not instrumental, but natural. What was it? It was so familiar, he’d heard it before . . . water. Yes, flowing water, murmuring, sighing, splashing over rocky streambeds, dripping down stone walls, thundering over sheer cliffs to fall into deep, clear pools below.

He felt the same sense of peace, though. The same wonderful feeling of wholeness had followed him from wherever he’d been. It almost made up for the unholy hardness of the thing at his back. That discomfort, along with a creeping chill that accompanied it, was what finally convinced him to sit up.

When he did, Magnus was met with a scene of such impossible absurdity, his first impulse was to laugh. It was a good thing he didn’t; by the look of horror and shock on everyone’s faces, that would have been a bad move.

Row upon row of chairs, filled with silent people dressed in black, in a dim, rock chamber, illuminated only by candlelight. Vases overflowing with flowers, their scent perfuming the air. A burning cone of incense in a silver thurible near his feet, exhaling a sinuous fume of smoke along with spicy notes of bergamot and sandalwood. Beneath him a long, rectangular outcropping of rock, elevated a few feet above the stone floor. And on his lap, the black shroud that had covered his face and body, rucked to folds around his waist as he’d sat up.

Holy hell. He’d just interrupted his own funeral.

Into the astonished hush, he said in a voice thick and scratchy, “Well. I always knew I had good timing, but this is ridiculous.”

A sound below him caught his attention. He looked down, and there knelt his love at the base of the altar upon which he sat. She stared up at him with wide open eyes, her face pale as stone, trembling hands over her mouth. She made the sound again—a high, small whine of heartbroken disbelief—and it shattered him.

Magnus reached down, dragged Lumina to her feet, and crushed her against his chest.