Liliana's father, drenched in the lifeblood of the man he'd killed, smiled and pointed with a hissed command...and Micah's armor disappeared, leaving him acutely vulnerable to the blades that began to whirl again. As his blood flew to speckle the air, he continued to stride forward, but the man who had eyes as reptilian as his Lily's were warm, laughed. "You'll be cut to pieces before you ever touch me - and I will bathe in your blood. Such powerful blood. Like your mother's."

Micah's rage was such he almost didn't hear the whisper in his mind. Still, Micah, still. The voice of a ghost.

Liliana's voice.

Chapter 27

The blades dropped.

The Blood Sorcerer's rage made his eyes protrude, his veins bulge. "I should've strangled that whelp in her crib!" Overturning a table of magical potions in front of Micah, he backed away. "She'll be dead soon enough, anyway. Then I'll lick up her blood."

The taunt had the opposite effect from the one intended - it told Micah Liliana was alive. All he wanted to do was to finish this so he could return to her. But in one thing, the Blood Sorcerer was right - bloated as he was by his most recent sacrifice, his sorcery was too strong for Micah to defeat.

Not alone, Micah. They are here.

Liliana's voice again, showing him things he'd forgotten, reminding him that the land, the animals, weren't the only things he knew here. Reaching out with something inside him that had no name, no form, he searched for the blood that called to his own.

Nicolai.

Dayn.

Breena.

The ties of his lineage soared through him, filling him to the brim with power, and it didn't matter that the Blood Sorcerer called in an army of tiny insects that acted like sandpaper across his skin, peeling the flesh from his arms, his face. Shoving through the virulent swarm and then the sorcerer's blood shield as if it didn't exist, he gripped the monster's neck, and dragged him to the window. "Look," he said, forcing the man's eyes to the forest that was a blazing conflagration. "By the time we are done, there'll be nothing left of your legacy."

A laugh bitter with evil. "Then you will have to kill Liliana."

Micah slammed the Blood Sorcerer's head against the stone, cracking his skull. "She is not your legacy," he whispered in the man's ear before he snapped his neck. "She is her own."

The insects disappeared with the Blood Sorcerer's death, but Micah wanted to make sure the evil wouldn't rise again. Picking up the sword he'd dropped by the door, he hacked off the man's head and gripped it by the hair as he ran back to Liliana. She lay with her chin slumped on her chest.

"No!"

Her chin lifted, her eyes struggling to stay open - but she saw his trophy. "He's dead." A red smile.

Throwing the head at the snapdragon, who caught it in an eager mouth - crunching it down with greedy glee before waddling past for the rest of the body -  Micah wiped off his palms on his thighs and cupped Liliana's face. "You must not die, Lily." He tried and tried to close her wounds with the deep magic within him, but his power it became clear, was not one that was of healing.

"...all right." A whisper.

"No, no." Feeling wet down his cheeks, he realized he was crying. "You've made me cry, Lily. I will throw you in the dungeon for many days."

When her lashes fluttered shut, he growled at her. "Help me! Tell me what to do!"

The earth, Micah. I read about...

The thought seemed to hold the last of her strength, because her head dropped forward and then was motionless. Refusing to believe that she was dead, he began to wrench the spikes from her body. When another man thundered up the steps, past the dead centipede, Micah turned only long enough to see - to recognize - silver eyes streaked with gold before returning to his frantic task. "She can't die."

Nicolai began to pull out the spikes with him, both of their hands drenched in blood within seconds. Grabbing Lily from the wall the instant they'd removed the last spike, Micah ran down the steps, past a startled woman with soft brown hair, and outside into the twisted gardens. This earth was too broken, too polluted, to heal as it had once done for the royal family, long ago. But he had to try. Laying Liliana on the ground, he cut his palms, pressed them to the land.

The earth began to green under his palms, but too slow, too slow. Then another pair of bloodstained hands appeared on Lily's other side. A third pair - that of a green-eyed man with dark hair. A fourth, feminine and delicate as the blond hair that haloed his sister's face. And the land grew green around Liliana. "Save her," he whispered to the earth. "Save the one who helped save you."

The earth tried, but it was too damaged and Liliana was not of Elden blood.

"No, no!"

"Micah, I'm sorry."

Ignoring his sister's voice, so full of sorrow, he gathered Liliana's limp body into his arms, refusing to let go. "Help me, Lily," he whispered again, burying his face in her hair. It ignited a memory, of another time when he'd held her in his lap, her hair brushing his chin...blood perfuming the air.

"Slit my wrist." He shoved it at his sister's face, and he would always love her for the fact that she didn't hesitate. "Take, Lily," he said, pressing his wrist to her mouth, the wounds on her body, every part of her he could reach. "You have no need to murder me in my bed. I give you this freely."

An endless pause before her body jerked, the sorcery within her taking control. Because Liliana, sweet, gentle Liliana, who kissed him so soft and touched him as if he would break, was a far greater sorceress than her father had ever been. That was why the evil man had hated her so - even using only her own blood, she had traveled to the Abyss itself, a feat beyond extraordinary.

To repair her body, all she'd needed was the fuel to ignite her power.

Liliana's blood stopped flowing, her hand spasmed...and finally, she opened her eyes. He wanted to yell at her, but he waited until he was certain every one of the holes in her body had been repaired before dragging her to his chest and telling her all the terrible things he was going to do to her.

Arms wrapped around him, she kissed him, halting the flow of his words. He decided he would allow the kiss, but since he couldn't make her naked here, he had to stop it. "Why did you change your face, Lily?"

Liliana lifted her hands to her face at that quizzical question, terrified her father had cast a final vengeful spell. "Is it very bad?" she whispered to the man who held her in arms of steel.

"I suppose I'll get used to it," he muttered, then kissed her again using his tongue and squeezing her bottom - as if his brothers and sister, and other people, weren't standing right there.

An instant later, she decided she didn't care.

Epilogue

I suppose I'll get used to it.

Liliana stared at her reflection for the thousandth time since the day that had changed the fate of Elden. The woman she saw in the mirror was Irina's daughter, with a face of such luminous beauty that it had made Micah's siblings and their mates stare, and hair so silken it was a mirror. It seemed her father's death had broken, not created, a spell, one he must have put on her as a child.

Why, she would never know. Perhaps it was as Micah said - he'd feared her power and so had tried to break her. Or perhaps he had enjoyed the control it gave him over her and others, too. He would've gained cruel pleasure in watching men stumble over one another as they tried to win the hand of such an ugly woman. But in the end, the joke was on him.

Because Micah had loved her then, and he loved her now. He was the only one who didn't stare - because to him, she was simply Liliana. Liliana, whose eyes remained a nowhere color that Micah called storm-sky and had decreed were nothing like her father's. Liliana, whose body hadn't changed much where it mattered. While her legs were now the same size, her back remained a mass of scars and she still had small breasts and a large behind, both of which Micah liked to see naked as much as possible.

Blushing at the thought of how he'd woken her this morning, so big and demanding between her thighs, she played with the emerald-and-diamond ring on her left hand, the central stone the color of a certain lord's eyes. It was one of his mother's, he'd told her, part of the hoard they'd found beneath the castle.

He had given it to her because he was going to marry her.

"It is customary to ask," she now said as she turned to watch him button up a black shirt over that chest she'd licked and sucked and kissed not long ago.

"Why?" He shrugged. "I'm not giving you a choice."

She surely shouldn't encourage him, but when a woman loved a man so very much, it was difficult to be stern. "Let me." She did up the buttons, shaking her head when he slid his hands down her back to curve over her bottom. "So your brother Nicolai is to take the throne?"

This was the third time they had returned to Elden -  Micah couldn't remain far from the Abyss for long, for it would unbalance the realms, glut the badlands with shadows. Yet he also had a deep, unquenchable need to heal the earth here, though the presence of his siblings meant he didn't need to stay on a permanent basis.

So they came and went, the journey far easier now that her father's spells had unraveled, his monstrous creations dying without his sorcery to sustain them. They most often traveled overland - the night-horses had claimed Liliana and Micah as their own, biting the nonmagical horses they'd been about to mount when they arrived at the inn the second time. The temperamental creatures were awfully possessive - much like the man she adored with her every breath.

"Yes," he said, answering her question about Nicolai. "He will rule with his mate, Jane."

Jane was tall and slender and appeared fragile, but she would make a strong queen. She was also not a princess. Neither was Alfreda, Dayn's chosen. Breena's mate was a berserker, quite wild and as uncivilized as Micah she was sure. Not a one had turned a hair at having her become part of the royal family. "I think," she murmured, "your brother will be a great king."