Saints and Sinners

Fifty-nine:

Fifty-nine:

The first thing she was aware of was that there was someone singing softly to her. "Sunrise, be mine. Sunrise show the light. Sunrise, give me life. Sunrise, like my love, burn bright." Her eyes flickered open. She was in a white room with strange objects all around her, making shrieking sounds that she couldn't quite register.

None of this was right. The last thing that she remembered was the fight with The Starless Saint. And then there had been darkness. Luda had helped her make it so that she could stop him. She had promised that The Starless Saint wouldn't get what he wanted. She had known that he'd been obsessed with her, that he wouldn't let her go. And that he had taken the magic tricks too far with the Tsar and that they were going to come and destroy him for all the chaos he'd caused.

The singing stopped, and someone grabbed her hand. "Ah. You're awake." She looked up, and found herself staring into a familiar pair of gray eyes. "Luda thought that she could get rid of The Darkling by freezing us in time together. She didn't take into account that to do something like that, you have to have a soul. Which I don't have. She destroyed The Darkling with her little spell but she didn't destroy you. Or freeze anything except for herself, really. And of course, that foolish ancestor of mine. He came with her to find his Alina. It was ever so easy for my shadows to escape into him from the statue that Luda tried to make me."

Alina shook her head. "No. No----Eryk."

"Yes." He grinned down at her, sitting on the edge of the strange bed that she was in. "And the best part is those ridiculous Blessings stayed. Which means we're tied together, for eternity, the way it always should have been."

He kissed her on the lips, and whatever soul Alina might have had, died in that single moment.