The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Twenty-One

Eventually the wild hunt let me go completely. The darkness seemed to spend itself. Without any victims left, it had nothing more to do, so it left, vanished on the dying wind. I felt it release its grip on my power and lead the dead back to their graves. Even Zephan was left to that dark stillness again.

I felt tired and sore, as the day's events finally took their toll on my body. I was exhausted from all the magic I had done, all the energy I had spent. It faded from my system, taking the adrenaline with it and leaving me feeling groggy and dehydrated. But the voices had fallen silent and I was alone in my own skin again. I couldn't feel bad about that.

I wound my way through the remnants of the crowd to stand beside Kieran. It wasn't hard. What few people had continued milling around once Zephan was taken were clearly afraid that I might go for an encore.

"I guess that makes you king now," I said. I meant it to sound jovial, congratulatory. Instead, it just sounded tired. Tired and careless.

"I didn't want it to be like this," he said.

"Like what?" I asked. I guess it sounded kind of stupid, like I didn't know what had happened. It was just that he said it like he'd already thought of it as a possibility and decided against it. Like he'd known what I could do and already hated me for it. Since I didn't know what I was going to do before the wild hunt took me, I found it difficult to comprehend what he meant.

"I wanted to be king to make things better," he said. "I didn't want to make things worse."

"But Zephan's gone," I said. "Surely that's an improvement." I think he would have glared at me if he was making eye contact. Instead, he stared at the ground in the distance where the earth had opened up and swallowed Zephan. His eyes hardened as he stared into the distance.

"I didn't want to be king at any cost," he spat the words out as though they were poisonous to keep inside. "I didn't want to be the king who starts his reign in blood, with murder."

"But you didn't do anything," I pointed out.

"I hired you," Kieran said. "I brought you here and you did this. That makes it my fault."

"But-" he interrupted me.

"Look around you, Laurel," he said. "You've covered this whole world with blood." I didn't need to look. I'd seen it happen, felt the first drops of blood splatter across my face as the rain turned crimson red and hot. I stared at him, searching his face for something - anything - to let me know that things hadn't changed. He didn't say it, but I could see the thought leaking from his eyes. It may as well have been his blood that I scattered across the ground.

"What were you expecting me to do?" I asked. Silently, I was begging him to look at me. Please look at me.

"I don't know," he shook his head. "Not this. I've never seen anything so terrible." His eyes were fixed on the bloodied fields. If he could just see me instead of the blood, I thought, maybe he'll know.

"You mean terrifying." My throat swelled around the words, trying to trap them deep inside, my chest ached with the pressure of forcing them out. To call it the pain of a broken heart seems too dramatic, even for my life. But my chest felt like it was imploding, like there was something dark and terrible, sucking every last ounce of hope down into the void. "I..." my throat choked the sentence off entirely, before I'd even had the chance to finish it in my mind. "You've known from the beginning." I moved to stand in front of him and he stared at my feet. At the blood soaking into the earth. "What does this change?"