Beyond the Veil (Zodiac Academy, #8.5)

by Caroline Peckham

I bellowed Roxy’s name as my path to her was cut off eternally.

I didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to look at her and confirm this unspeakable truth, because if the two of us were here, then my departure from the land of the living would have destroyed so much more than just Roxy’s life.

My beautiful, brave, mother, broken by the monster who had destroyed her life all over again.

“You had so much to live for,” she whispered, and somehow, I saw what she meant, like her memories were playing out for me within my own head, shared between us as she opened the gates of her mind to me.

I saw myself with Roxy, saw the way she looked at me when I wasn’t paying attention, how she let her walls crack sometimes and the love she felt for me spilled through. I saw my mom’s heartbreak when she found out we were Star Crossed, felt her unending hatred for my father and what he had cost me. Then I felt her explosive joy when we’d defied the stars despite it all. I felt the pride she’d experienced when watching me turn against my father, the love consuming her as she saw me soaring over the battlefield.

“We gave all we had until there was nothing left for us to fight with,” she swore to me. “And when Lionel came, we only had our Orders, but we knew…we knew that we weren’t a match for him and those who followed on his heels in their shifted forms.”

“I re-watched the battle and saw you fighting your father when I arrived here,” he said roughly. “I saw it all and I…you should have won. Fate was a wicked thing in that moment, and I cannot fathom the thoughts of the stars when they saw fit to take you from life and the love of your dear queen. It was a brave and honourable sacrifice you endured, and it was not without meaning. Xavier lives because of you. And many more besides him managed to flee the battle when the tides turned, making the most of the time you bought them to escape, ready to fight another day. You gave all you had.”

“Never think that you are not enough,” Hamish growled, his grip on me tightening, and he took my jaw in his hand, locking his gaze with mine as he seemed to peer directly into my soul. “You fought with all you had, unflinchingly and without fear, giving yourself entirely to a fight that could have righted the world. You fought for love and justice, and you should have won. I am endlessly proud of you, dear boy. Endlessly, utterly proud of the man you proved yourself to be.”

The man who had sired me had never once been proud of me like that. His pride in any accomplishment of mine had been purely a reflection of his own ego, any talent he saw in me something he simply claimed as his own doing.

He made me feel like I was a man worth knowing, worth following, worth something far more important than my name or any title I might claim.

“Roxanya Vega was right to deny your bond when it was offered,” my mom added. “Because it was the push you needed to find yourself, to become the man I had always known you could be. You set out to prove yourself worthy of her love, but in finding what was needed to do so, you became so much more. I have been proud of you from the first moment I held you in my arms, but I am honoured to have been there to watch you step into your destiny as fully as you did.”

I shattered then, held between my mother and the man who she had found such brief and pure love with. I broke between them, for all I had failed to do, all I had lost and all the life which had been...

I gasped as I felt the power of the woman who I had pledged my life to whipping out with such ferocity that it could be felt even here, beyond death.

“I will tear the heavens apart for this,” Roxanya Vega snarled, the curse of a true queen lashing across the heavens and scoring them with her conviction. “I will shred your world to pieces and rip your hold on destiny from your fucking fists with blood and fire and vengeance for this,” she screamed at the stars, her power making the ground beneath me tremble, magic unlike any I’d ever felt before burning its way between the realms as she forced the stars to take note. “On my life, I curse you. On his life, I curse you. And for our fate, I’ll end you!”

If she refused our fate, then I would too. I would fight with whatever power remained to me and use whatever I could to see an end to this injustice. If there was any way for us to reunite our souls once more, then I would give all I had to do so. There was only her. My one, my only, my wife.

My wife had been a vision in life, and death had immortalised that beauty, the stars always seeming close to her, like she was their prized possession beneath their eternal roof. Though even they could not lay a claim to her that was deeper than mine. They could admire her all they wanted, but they could only envy the king who she had chosen as her keeper.

but it was the other man who was moving this way that I could not stand to greet. The one who should have remained in the realm of the living with my daughter, bound to her, protecting and loving her.

“Your son’s love knows no bounds, and I know well that he would die for my daughter.

I would remain Hail Vega and stand at the side of my wife for all of eternity. But while my daughters remained in peril and Lionel Acrux still walked the world, I would always be afflicted by their suffering, and I would not bow to the whims of the stars while my family were in danger.

“It is my daughters’ fight, so it is mine,” I snarled.

It was instantly obvious why fate had delivered me to this place, the power of Roxy’s curse on the stars summoning me to her in her moment of earth-shattering grief.

I didn’t have to wonder though. My beautiful, broken, warrior of a wife was no mystery to me.

“I’m here, Roxy,” I growled more forcefully, reaching out to brush my fingers through her hair, but my touch met with nothing, and she didn’t so much as blink in my direction. Pain shredded the fragments of my heart as I was forced to watch her shatter for me, her silence this piercing, soul destroying thing which ate into me and made me bleed for her while she just lay across my vacant body, willing the world to change its mind on our fate.

I couldn’t be in a place without her. I couldn’t go back on the oaths I’d made to her so soon. She was mine and I was hers. We weren’t destined to be apart. I refused it.

“And I won’t rest until I make every star in the heavens fall for trying to cleave us apart.” “Yes,” I growled, all the power I owned ratcheting up within me, blazing with a need for an outlet, my desire to touch her making everything surrounding me quake. I reached for her bleeding hand, urging her to feel me, to know I would never truly leave her.

This war was not won, the fight not over. I had never once seen that girl back down from anything, and even here, in the midst of defeat, her husband’s blood staining her hands and her whole world shattering around her, she still stood tall and defiant, daring the world to come for her.

She wasn’t going to break. She was rallying herself for the fight of her life, and I was right there beside her, urging her on.

“You can do this. You were born to wear the crown, and you can bear the weight of it no matter how heavy it becomes,” I swore to her.

The grief that consumed me was compounded for her; all she could see of me a dead body on the ground. She was so alone. And all I wanted was for her to know that I was still here, that I would never truly leave.

I couldn’t be cursed to simply watch over her from this moment on, never able to pass through The Veil which divided us, never able to hold her in my arms again.

“Roxy is-” he started, sweeping toward me with passion in his eyes, but I cut over him in a baritone voice. “I believe she prefers her friends to call her Tory.” His jaw tightened. “I think I know what my wife prefers. And I am no mere friend.”

My gaze strayed to Darius whose attention was now on her too, his hands tight around the railing as he stared at her, the power of his emotions undeniable, the need in him to return to her palpable. But that wasn’t a fate they could claim, no matter how desperately they may have wished for it.

“Gwendalina,” I called to her, aching for her to hear me through the space between realms, to think of me and draw me close so that I might remind her she was not alone. Oh to hold her in my arms now, to promise everything would be alright.

“When one falls to the dark, the other shall be their guiding light,” Merissa murmured with a frown, those words familiar to me. “What is it?” I asked in concern, laying my hand on her knee. “When they were born, those words were whispered to me by the stars,” she said. “Yes, I remember now,” I said, nodding slowly. “It must mean they balance one another. A harmony forged of fire and ice. Between is where they find true peace.” “If they cannot find their way back to one another, I fear what will happen. The balance starts with them, but it does not end there,”

In all honesty, I had no further interest in my Acrux heritage. I was happy to leave all claims to it behind in the taking of my wife’s name. I was a Vega now.

“If we’re swapping stories about whose life that motherfucker ruined more then I’m pretty sure I win,”

flashes of beatings, Dark Coercion, what Lionel had done to Roxy and finally my own death at his hand surrounding us until we were drowning in the horribly tragic reality of my life.

“My obsession doesn’t lie with the man who sired me,” I dismissed, my heart aching for all I’d lost. “If I end up trapped here, that won’t be what I’m stood here watching.”

Even as the words left my lips, they cost me something, the admittance that I might be stood here in twenty years’ time watching someone at all. The idea that I wouldn’t find a way back from this fate was a wound I couldn’t let fester.

And even then, unless fate is kind and sends them soon, they won’t miss you the way you ache for them. Time heals and grief fades. People move on. Your pretty bride will likely find a new husband in time and when she passes over, she won’t be looking for you anymore.”

“I don’t need to. I’ve seen it in my wife’s eyes. And I can tell you now, that nothing in their world or this one will ever stand in the way of those twins.

“That time is done,” I replied firmly. “But the time of the Phoenixes is beginning now. They will rise to power. And I will be there to help see it come to pass.”

I thought of her, my heart aching for the night we should have had together, celebrating our wedding, consolidating our union. I wanted to hold her in my arms and have our first dance, but instead I found the butterflies twisting themselves into her shape, burning wings beating hard on her back.

revealing my queen standing among a pile of ash beyond it, panting, wounded and utterly devastating.

I stared at the beauty of the woman who had claimed me for her own, my soul thrashing with the desperate need for her to see me too, to turn my way and meet my gaze with the blazing fire in her eyes.

No. I wouldn’t accept that fate. I’d find my way back to them. Whatever it took, I’d do it.

I only cared about figuring out how I was going to keep my promise to his daughter.

“The one where I swore to love and protect your daughter with all that I was for all the time I had in that world and the next. The one that I joined her in when she vowed to change our fate at the cost of the stars if that was what it required. She has sworn to defy destiny in the matter of my death, and I have sworn to do all I can to defy it too. So will you help me, or would you rather allow your distaste for me to leave her grieving and alone for the rest of her life?” I demanded.

“I’d have killed him if I didn’t know Roxy would have castrated me for it. She deserves her own chance to kick his ass one day if she wants it.”

“Regardless of who might like to kick whose ass, it’s safe to say that Roxanya’s taste in men leaves a lot to be desired,”