Restless Stars (Zodiac Academy, #9)

by Caroline Peckham

“First rule of Cardinal Magic,” I murmured. “Do not be a fucking idiot.”

there was always grief in the thievery of time.

If there was one thing time couldn’t ravish, it was love.

“The stars told me we’re Nebula Allies,” Darius said. “I’m your number one Nebula Ally, apparently. There was someone called Gabe who came in at like number three or something.”

Something had been missing from my heart while he’d been dead, a piece which had been jagged and raw and never could have healed without him in my life. If his return to this battle wasn’t an omen of victory, then I didn’t know what was.

“Hey husband,” Tory said, stepping up to the gate and reaching for Darius through it. “You can feel my heart beating, can’t you?” He smiled roguishly, taking her hand. “It’s them,” he confirmed to the others.

But then again, I wasn’t some prim and proper princess, brought up to be benevolent and just – I was a ruthless girl who had fought with tooth and claw to claim this savage crown in the image of my father. And if that meant I gloated like a smug bitch while my once-enemy bowed at my feet, then so be it.

This creature of mine. This dream I had claimed. The beautiful thief of my heart.

Of course it was Darcy. She knew me now, almost as deeply as the Heirs knew me, and in some ways she knew me more. Because she had known the cruelty in me, the vicious streak that painted my heart black. How far we’d come from being enemies, walking these paths, me stalking her like prey and her despising me with all the ire she had to give. Now, I couldn’t imagine my life without her, a friend I treasured to the moon and back.

“It was too damn easy to fall in love with you when I already loved everything about you, Cal,” I said, my voice rough with those words which had tortured me for so long.

“We’re all going?” I confirmed, glancing between the others. “It’s a cursed city where all who enter are known to die,” Tory said with a shrug. “Of course we’re all going.”

“I love you, Darius Vega,” Roxy said, her eyes falling closed as she settled herself against my chest where the pounding of my heart thumped against her ear. “I loved you first,” I told her, tightening my arm around her and letting my eyes shut too.

That sound was why I would fight to death and beyond for this war. Her. My queen. Who deserved so many more days of laughter to come.

Her brow creased, her hand lowering to rest against my heart. “I used to lay dreaming of places like this. I’d read about it in books and hear it in my favourite songs. I’d see it in the storm and feel it in the raindrops against my cheeks. I always belonged elsewhere, in a world full of fantasy and endless possibilities. I just knew I’d been born in the wrong place. My soul lost, forever searching for this. So no, Lance, there’s not one part of me that would have chosen to give up this life for the sake of safety. If I die in this war, then hell, at least I will have lived. I’ve known you, I’ve found a home, a family. If I can only have that for this short time, then I’ll take it over never having had it at all.”

I simply let myself fall into the purity of her love for our found family, bathing in the relief of her company after such a close call with the end.

“I wish to belong to you in every way a person can belong to someone. The stars mated us, they wove our fates together long ago before our souls were cast inside our bodies. They may have marked you as mine and me as yours, but I want us to choose each other regardless of what the sky might think of it. Because if we hadn’t been mated, I would still love you like this, like the world begins and ends with you. I would have walked just as willingly into the depths of Darkmore, I would have destroyed myself to have a single taste of you. And if this is it, if our final sunrise crests on tomorrow’s horizon, then I need to know that you would have chosen me too. In a time when you weren’t a queen and I was nothing but a broken man, and together we denied the impossibility of us. I want a chance to do so again in the face of our downfall. So Darcy Vega, sovereign of my heart, will you defy all fates that deal our deaths and promise to marry me?”

“Death doesn’t seem so terrifying with you by my side,” I told him.

Everything from the air, to the rock, to my own body burned. Everything, except her. And as Roxanya Vega’s sword slammed straight into my chest, piercing my heart and ripping my soul from the confines of my living body, her final words to me rang like a death toll throughout my skull. “So much for the reign of the great Dragon King.”

I looked to my sister with an utterly liberated smile on my face which she returned just as brightly, and I knew that though nothing would ever be the same for us as it had once been, we would forever be at home in Solaria.

It was the fiercest form of magic, I realised. This love between us all, these bonds that would never falter. Nothing in this realm compared, no Elements, no power, no crowns, or thrones. Just us. Family. And a love that would never die.

It was too perfect, all of this. The life we’d forged together and made our own. This was where living really happened. Between the layers of havoc and sweetness of all the love we shared. And I couldn’t have imagined up any better dream for myself, than this. Simply, purely, this.