“How? How?” Her voice was a rasp. She shook violently in his arms.

Magnus took her face in his hands and looked deep into her eyes, smiling. “Did you think a silly thing like me dying could keep us apart?” His smile faded, and his voice became a low, vehement whisper. “Nothing could ever keep me from you, Lumina. Nothing. Not even death itself.”

She burst into tears.

Then, chaos. Everyone jumped from their chairs. Cries of joy and disbelief echoed off the cave walls. They were swarmed. Xander and Morgan, Demetrius and Eliana, Christian and Ember, Hawk and Jack, Honor and Beckett and everyone else, the entire tribe, jostling and shoving, shouting and reaching out to touch him. The Seeker, returned from the dead.

Resurrected from the dead . . . by love.

“I don’t understand.” Lumina kept repeating it, a litany that Honor finally answered.

“You must have Gifted it to him. Like you did to me.”

Lumina turned to look at her sister, still uncomprehending, her face wet, her green eyes tear-glossed, little jerking hiccups wracking her body. “Gifted it?” The words were hoarse and disbelieving, like the sound she’d made when she’d looked up at him, arisen from the dead. Honor batted them aside like one would an annoying fly.

“I told you before you left, dummy—I wasn’t the one who took Caesar’s immortality. That was you. And then you Gifted it to me. You shared it, get it?”

Lumina stared at her, frozen, not getting it. But a pulse of understanding went through Magnus, palpable as a fist squeezing his heart, and it was as if a door had been opened and a great wind rushed through, and he could finally see. What he saw was the future.

Ah. Yes.

Honor rolled her eyes, folding her arms across her chest. “Your greatest power isn’t that you can take other people’s talents, other Ikati’s Gifts. It’s that you can give them away again, to whoever you want. While still keeping them yourself. Kind of like the world’s best sharing software.” Her lips pursed, and she gazed at Lumina with disapproval. “How do you not know this?”

“I . . . I . . .”

“Wait,” Beckett cut in. He stood just behind Honor, one hand resting lightly on her waist, and Magnus knew by that simple, proprietary gesture their relationship had gone in an entirely different direction since he and Lumina had left for New Vienna. “So, what you’re saying is . . . Hope can . . . she can . . .”

“Gift it to all of us,” Honor finished Beckett’s thought when he faltered into stunned silence. “Yes. I mean, if she wanted to.” She shrugged, as if the thought had never occurred to her before, but then blinked, looking around at the crowd, who had now also fallen quiet. Her voice very small, she said, “Oh.”

Oh indeed. Judging by the expression on her face, the same pulse of understanding that had just run through him was running through Honor. Their eyes met, and they shared a moment of profound silence, broken by another pulse of understanding, evidenced in the form of a ragged gasp.

“Room . . . spinning,” Lumina croaked, sagging against Magnus. He caught her before she fell, lifting her easily into his arms. He felt surprisingly strong for having just survived a trip to the afterlife.

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, looking down at Lumina in his arms, “how long was I dead?”

“Almost an entire day,” she whispered, clutching his shirt. “We were just about to bury you.”

“Hmm. In that case, I’d say my timing is better than good; it’s impeccable.”

Lumina rested her head against his shoulder. “I picked out a really nice spot,” she whispered. “Good view. Lots of sun.”

She stroked his neck, her touch reverent, and he followed her gaze. At the end of the gold chain around his neck glittered her dragon pendant, winking at him in the candlelight in its friendly, serpentine way. He knew with absolute certainty that he’d never take it off. The woman he loved more than life itself had put it there, and there it would stay forever.

Magnus brushed a kiss over her forehead. Full of wonder, his heart bursting with love, he said, “Too bad I’ll never need it, since I’ll be spending eternity with you.”

His words produced a fresh onslaught of tears.

Then Honor said, “Um, that’s not completely accurate.”

Magnus looked up at her. She smiled at him with a kind of ecstatic, childlike glee. “You’ll be spending it with us.” She sent a pointed look at her sister, then made a small motion with her finger, a circle that encompassed the room and everyone in it.

The urge to laugh arose again, and this time Magnus didn’t fight it. He threw his head back and gave himself over to it. The joy he felt was simple and total, bright as a starburst, growing even brighter when Lumina smiled up at him through her tears and began to laugh along with him. Then they were all laughing, rampantly happy, ridiculously, impossibly, alive.

Magnus began to push through the crowd, Lumina as light as his own heart in his arms. The laughter followed them all the way back to the small, spartan room he called his own.

Hours later, sated for the moment and lazily heavy in the afterglow of love, Magnus pushed to his elbow and gazed down in adoration at the woman lying on the rumpled sheets beside him. With mussed hair and a sleepy, satisfied smile, she reached up and drew her finger down his cheek, the softest caress.

“All the sun burns healed,” she whispered, tracing her finger over his jaw.

He grasped her hand, kissed her fingertips. “Lucky for you, or you’d be spending forever staring at Frankenstein’s monster.”

Her brow furrowed. She moved her head on the pillow, getting a better look at him. “But your scars are still there, from when you were in that prison. Wonder if it’s because they’re from before you first Shifted—”

He stiffened. “How do you know about that?”

The words came out harder than he’d intended, but she simply smiled. “Gregor MacGregor.”

A snarl ripped through his chest before he could stop it. Bizarrely, that made her laugh. She curled into him, nuzzling his throat, sliding her foot between his calves. “Who, by the way, isn’t as bad as we thought.”

“Not as bad as we thought? He betrayed us! He’s a dead man! I’m going to track down that son of a—”

She shushed his outburst with a finger to his lips. “I admit his methods are questionable, but his intentions were good. Eliana told him about Demetrius’s . . .” she glanced up at him, hesitant to speak of the Dream that had foreseen his death, even after all that had happened. “Gregor didn’t tell her, but he had connections to a group of Dissenters inside the Peace Guard. He didn’t know where the prison was, but he knew they would. He also knew the only way to get me inside without exposing them was to make it look like he’d found me himself, and was turning me in.” Her voice turned wry. “I’m sure the enormous bounty helped in the formulation of the plan.” She sighed. “So he hedged his bets. If things went badly for us, he wouldn’t be suspected and neither would his allies, and if things went our way, he’d still have a giant pile of money. But he was trying to save you, Magnus, by sending me alone.” Her voice gentled, and she gazed at him with the softest, warmest eyes. “And for that I count him as a friend, no matter what his other faults might be.”

“You could’ve been captured,” he growled. “You could’ve been tortured—”

“But I wasn’t.” Her voice was firm. “And in the end, I did what I went to do.”

Magnus held himself still. The possibility of success hadn’t occurred to him before now; he’d just awoken from being dead, after all, had just found out he’d never have to go through that particular experience again. The shock of being alive, of seeing her again, had trumped everything else. Slowly, his eyes searching her face, he asked, “So . . . you mean . . . we won?”