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How was she going to be able to get back to Earth and stop the Starks?

“He’s dead, Dee,” Niamh said.

“He’s not allowed to be dead.” Deirdre whipped her hand across his face again. “That’s not acceptable.”

“Dee… Stop it.”

Stark had gone back with Rhiannon.

She punched Melchior again. One of his scales cracked.

“Wake up!” Deirdre growled, pulling her fist back to strike him again—as many times as it took for him to wake up, or for the situation to stop being so horrible in every single way.

Vidya caught her arm. “Wait.”

Deirdre tried to look at her, but her vision was blurry. Her eyes stung. “He can’t be dead!”

“He’s not,” Vidya said. “Dragons can hibernate in case of severe damage. It’s meant to allow them to heal. But Melchior can’t heal from the Ethereal Blade, so he won’t awaken naturally.” The valkyrie pulled Deirdre gently to her feet. “I can wake him up, but it will be temporary. He won’t be able to move with the sword inside of him without dying.”

“Then we’ll take it out,” Deirdre said.

“That will kill him too.”

“So…what? You wake him up, we say goodbye, and watch him die?”

“More or less.” Vidya kneeled beside Melchior. She stroked her thumb along the cheekbone under his right eye. “Give me a sec.”

Deirdre didn’t want to give her a second. She wanted to hit Melchior a few dozen more times. It felt good to hit him, better than anything else had felt lately, better than having sex with that bastard who had run off the instant he realized Deirdre presented a real threat to him. The guy who’d gone back to his crazy bitch of a wife, even though his daughters were obviously terrified of him.

The guy who didn’t care about gaeans at all.

Niamh touched her elbow. “Deirdre…”

She jerked away from the touch. “Stop.”

“Stark’s wrong,” Niamh said. “He’s wrong and he has no taste and he’s stupid and—”

“
Stop
.”

“—and I’ll listen if you want to talk.”

She tried to tell Niamh to shut up, but she couldn’t speak. She rubbed her hands over her face. Tried to rub the pain out of her skull.

The pain wasn’t physical. There was nothing she could do to make herself feel better.

Gods, she never should have let Stark into her mind.

“Where are they?”

Melchior was awake. He was struggling to sit up, but Vidya pressed a hand against his chest, keeping him flat on his back. “You’ve only got a few minutes and you’ll die faster if you move,” she said. “Take shallow breaths.”

The dragon shifter settled back with a groan. He looked at the sword blade, his surroundings. “Where are the girls?”

“Rhiannon has taken them,” Vidya said. “Rhiannon and Everton.”

Pain creased Melchior’s brow. “
Ever?
” He groaned again. He must have breathed too deeply. A vine extruded from the wound beside the hilt of the Ethereal Blade, shiny green growth. “Rhiannon’s letting that monster near the girls?”

“I’m pissed about it too,” Deirdre said. “Must be the first time we’ve ever agreed on anything.”

“They must be terrified. You have to get them away from him,” the dragon said.

Niamh sat on a bright pink chair with a shaky laugh. “That’ll be easy, considering they’ve returned to Earth and we have no way to get back.”

“We won’t have any of our allies without Stark if we do find a way to follow them. Gianna’s shifters, the vampires…” Deirdre’s head was throbbing worse. She couldn’t seem to flame at all now. “They’re going to do the inauguration, and the Starks will become the royal family, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

“Then we have to stop the inauguration?” Niamh suggested.

“It won’t change the oath,” Vidya said. “It’s the oath that will grant Rhiannon power. That’s the magic they manipulated. Stopping the ceremony won’t stop the Starks.”

A thought struck Deirdre. “The oath.”

“The mage girl,” Melchior said. “Remove her, and you remove the oath, and the magical bindings that will give power to Rhiannon. That also removes Rhiannon’s incentive to keep Ever around.”

Remove her?
It was obvious from his steady gaze that he meant for Deirdre to kill Marion.

A fourteen-year-old girl.

But she was one girl. The number of people who would be hurt under Rhiannon’s reign was far greater than that. There would be a lot more fourteen-year-old girls who’d die in the wars to come—and they’d all be a heck of a lot more innocent than Marion.

Niamh and Vidya were both looking at her, silently questioning if she would really do it.

Even Deirdre didn’t know.

She liked the thought of the inauguration arriving with nobody to conduct it. And if there were no oath protecting Rylie, then there would be nothing to keep her from destroying Rhiannon.

It would be a free-for-all, and it might be the most merciful thing possible.

All that would require was one death.

But another death was coming first. Melchior’s hands curved around the hilt of the sword, as though he still couldn’t quite believe it was embedded within him. “Gods. They’re gone. It’s over.” The reality of Melchior’s mortality seemed to finally sink in. “It’s over.”

“It should have been over in Original Sin,” Deirdre said. “Every breath you’ve had since then has been a damn present from fate.”

“It’s nothing to do with fate. Alona and Calla, their naiad magic, the way it interacts with my fire…” He gazed helplessly around the room. “They kept me here. And now, without them, it’s over. I’m going to die.”

“The kids called you Papa,” Deirdre said.

“I’m the only dad they’ve ever known,” Melchior said. “And they’re the only family I’ve ever known. Everything with Rhiannon—everything I have tolerated these past years with her—has been for their sakes.” There was so much love in him.

Love. From a dragon.

Deirdre’s world, and everything she knew, had been shattered.

Stark wasn’t a strong man of principle. He was weak. Helpless to his wife. Disinterested in helping people.

Melchior wasn’t a serpent driven solely by greed. He truly loved two children that he had nurtured for years.

Deirdre didn’t know anything anymore.

Melchior’s chest hitched. A tiny flower blossomed at the edge of his wound.

“Stark said that he sent the kids with you to protect them,” Deirdre said. “But you surrendered them—and yourself—to Rhiannon. Who’s lying?”

“Neither of us,” Melchior said. “I was there that night, when Rhiannon went into labor. Alona came out blue-skinned. Nobody had seen sidhe at the time. They didn’t exist before Genesis. All we knew was that she was wrong. Rhiannon said it was a mistake and immediately conceived the second with Everton, but Calla came out the same. Blue and drenched in magic.”

“Naiads,” Vidya said. She was staring at the wall, eyes distant with the same memories that had taken Melchior.

“We didn’t have the word at the time, so Rhiannon called them demons. She blamed Ever. Said that he must have been half-demon Gray, a creature between man and monster, and that he had passed his devil seed into her.”

“So Stark had you take them away to preserve their marriage,” Deirdre said.

“I would have done anything for him back then. We still trusted each other.” He squeezed his fists around the sword, jaw clenching as a fresh wave of pain crashed over him. “I took the compulsion because I thought that both Ever and Rhiannon wanted it, because I wanted to protect the babies. But when Rhiannon found me, she told me that Everton had lied to me. She wanted to keep the girls. He had forced me to steal them.”

“What happened in Genesis?” Deirdre asked. “What is Rhiannon?”

“A witch. Just a witch, like she always had been. But a lot of magic was unlocked in Genesis, arcane and deadly forces that allowed her to harness the girls’ powers for herself. Their magic lets her masquerade as sidhe.”

It also gave her a lot more power than she would have had as a mere gaean witch.

What a bitter pill that must have been—coming back after Genesis surrounded by so many people who had been granted amazing, inhuman powers, only to discover she hadn’t been changed.

“You know Rhiannon didn’t chase you down because she loved her daughters, right?” Deirdre asked. “She chased you down so she could harness their powers.”

“Using the girls doesn’t hurt them. Rhiannon loves the girls. Why else would she have struggled so long to find a home safe for them in the Middle Worlds? The seelie, with all their nauseating righteousness, wouldn’t have anything to do with us. They wouldn’t forgive Rhiannon for the crimes she committed on Earth.”

“Crimes against the seelie?”

“Crimes against the people who became the seelie. Rhiannon was an orphan raised by the Arigotti family.” He said the name like it should have been significant.

Deirdre looked to Vidya, who explained. “A coven. No more than a gang, petty criminals. Practically mafia. And known for experimenting on werewolves before Genesis.”

“Rhiannon tried to apologize,” Melchior said. “The seelie wouldn’t take it from her.”

“Probably because she was full of crap,” Deirdre said.

He didn’t seem bothered by that. “But the unseelie took us in. They hid us from Ever. They helped us enchant safe rooms for the girls.” The bedroom that they had seen with all the grass and trees.

Now they were heading back to Earth so that their mother could use their magic while taking over the Alpha position from Rylie. And better still, Stark was serving as Rhiannon’s mate.

One big happy family.

“Send us back to Earth, Melchior,” Deirdre said, digging her fingernails into his chest again. “I know you can do it. You’ve been hiding out in the Winter Court for years, and you know how to get out.” She caught his gaze, holding it steady. “You can also make me a phoenix so I can kill the Starks.”

“But the girls need Rhiannon.” Melchior groaned again. Without the naiad magic, the Ethereal Blade was now shifting inside of him every time he breathed, budding with new flowers. Sweat rolled down his cheek.

“You know why Rhiannon wants them,” Deirdre said, stroking Melchior’s forehead. She couldn’t deny him the small comfort of human touch. Not when he was dying. “You know I’m right about her. They’ll be safer without her. Without either of their parents.”

He nodded reluctantly without opening his eyes. “You don’t need to convince me. You can get back to Earth through the ley line juncture we used last time. It’s still there—invisible. I’ll change you so that you can fly into it.”

Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat.

He was going to make her shapeshift again.

Excitement quickly dissolved to fear. That was only one change. One chance to embrace her animal. She had quickly lost her form last time, so she didn’t think she’d be able to maintain it long enough to confront Rhiannon, and Deirdre didn’t think she’d be able to change again.

The only man who could make her into a phoenix was dying.

“I’m taking you with me,” Deirdre said. “If anyone can heal this, it’d be Marion. I’ll
make
her heal you.”

“Before you kill her?” Melchior asked.

“Okay, that wouldn’t work. But there’s gotta be someone who can do it.”

“I wouldn’t make it that far. You have to go without me.”

Deirdre’s heart felt like it was shattering.

Dammit, it wasn’t
fair
, having her animal dangled in front of her and taken away again.

Melchior gripped her wrist. She’d never seen such grave intensity in him before. He’d always been flippant, as though above the petty politics of mortals. But now he was dying. And there was something he cared about very much. “Get the girls away from them,” Melchior said. “Rhiannon doesn’t love them and Everton will only hurt them. Find someone who will love them without fear. Please.”

The dragon had revealed to Deirdre the one treasure that mattered to him above all else.

She rested her hand over his. “I’ll do everything I can, but I won’t be able to defeat Rhiannon and Stark without your help. I can’t control my phoenix.”

“You don’t need flame,” he said. “You have something better than that.” He moved her hand to the hilt of the Ethereal Blade. It was warmed from proximity to his body. “Take it out. Take it out and save my girls.”

My girls.
The children who had virtually become his daughters in the years since Genesis.

“You’ll die,” Deirdre said.

“I died the instant you buried it in my chest,” Melchior said. “You’ve already murdered me.”

She’d murdered the man who made her shapeshift, the only person who loved and cared for Alona and Calla.

The regret was so powerful she almost choked on it.

“They have a head start,” Vidya reminded her. She didn’t sound remotely grief-stricken. She was unbothered by her former comrade’s looming death.

Deirdre’s eyes stung. Fresh flame guttered over her skin, glittering on the dragon’s scales. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

Melchior caught her gaze. “Change.”

She changed.

Deirdre’s body rearranged itself. The sensation was bizarre, but not painful.

She clapped her hands over her mouth. The beak protruded from the bones of her gums, teeth falling into her palms, hard little white rocks.

The tip of her beak was hooked for tearing, sharp as a knife. And when it pushed out of her face, it made the skin of her lips stretch back, painfully thin.

Feathers bloomed around the edge of her beak.

Niamh watched in awe as Deirdre shook herself, trying to relieve the incredible itching created by the feathers emerging from her skin. It felt like they were always lurking there, trapped, waiting for a hair follicle to open and allow them to escape.

She became a bird. Something between hawk and heron.

A phoenix.

The last of the change only took a few moments. All of her human parts were gone, and Deirdre lifted one of her feet to study it. Her skin was leathery, yet light, the skin as flaky as though she were made of papyrus. Feathers hung to her knee.

The talons tipping her toes were magma-black. They looked cruel and sharp, like she could cause real damage with them, the kind of damage that Stark did with his claws as a bear wolf.