Sorrow and Starlight (Zodiac Academy, #8)

by Caroline Peckham

I might have gotten a tattoo to express my love for him, but I didn’t need some grisly scar to accompany it, branding myself as his possession.

I managed to look at her, a lump in my throat burning deep, but the words on my lips fizzled out of existence as I found her silver rings glinting at me from green, green eyes. “Darcy,” I gasped, looking down at her body, no sign of the shadows clinging to her at all. She was naked, drenched in blood, but wholly Fae.

“Because I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t give them enough, couldn’t keep them safe. They all left me because I’m toxic, poison, the last choice.”

“I had a sister,” she breathed. “But in the end, she didn’t pick me either. Because she knows, she sees it.”

“How empty I am inside. How worthless.”

“No one will ever truly choose me,” she hissed. “They can see my broken edges. They can taste my easy lies. They know me when they look at me, no matter how hard I try to hide the truth.”

“That I’m not worthy of the faith they wish to put in me. That I’m a selfish, stubborn creature who cannot and will not ever put the needs of others above her own. I stopped anyone from choosing my sister until my sister was forced to stop choosing me. She had to, to be free.”

I’d been a burden on her for our entire lives, I’d made it harder for her to make friends, meet boyfriends. My lack of trust in the world had forced her to hold herself back too. And when we’d come here, to the land which was always intended to be ours, I’d kept holding her back, shielding her from the world whenever I could and fighting it off whenever I had to. Would she have suffered half the things the Heirs had put her through without me there antagonising them at every turn? Or would she have found a way to peace so much sooner?

“A burden. Unwanted. Selfish. Alone.”

A soul connected to mine through love and death and grief and hope. My other half. My reason for fighting as hard as I did. “It’s you and me, Tor. No matter what, wherever we are.”

They were nothing, insubstantial, the petulant insecurities of a child, but they weren’t even close to the truth of the woman I’d become.

“My love for her is selfish,” I snarled in agreement. “And I’m no hero. Perhaps if I was, I would sacrifice myself here and now, lay down my life in the hopes that it might buy her the freedom you claim it would. That it might leave her free to rule without me, to love without me, to just fucking be without me. But my death would be the destruction of the beauty in her soul. My end would be the ruin of all the light in her world. So no, I won’t sacrifice myself so that the world can have more of her. I’d rather sacrifice the world itself, just so that I can be there to make sure I see her when she rises up to claim it. By her side, where I belong. Two halves of one fucking whole. And if you don’t know that much about me, then you aren’t me at all.”

I’d felt distant from the mortals who surrounded us for my entire childhood, always secretly hoping for a love that might surpass my difficulties and see beyond them. But we never would have fit in that place, even if I’d worked harder to play nice, had smiled more or tried to make friends with people who didn’t understand me. Because our home was here, in Solaria. And that was where I’d found my place at last, with Darcy right there beside me.

reminding me of all the pain I’d caused him when I’d refused to love him beneath the stars, hissing at me that I should have seen what Lionel had been doing to him long before I had. I should have seen and been the lifeline he’d so desperately needed. But instead, I’d become the weight which hung from his shoulders and dragged him beneath the surface. I’d added to his pain and his burdens, and I’d given him even more to hurt over in the short time he’d been gifted in this life.

“I’m coming,” I told him,

The flame and the Dragon. All I needed in this world and any other.

How could anyone believe that someone capable of such violence could be worthy of a crown? How could anyone believe that a monster made of a wicked fury like that could be deserving of love?

I was merciless, vengeful, furious. And those parts of me had only festered since that battle. Any softness I had once been able to lay claim to had been burned away by the flames which had coated my body that day. By the loss of…

“Get up, Roxy,” the wind snarled, and my chin lifted higher at that name. That fucking name.

“Love makes a monster of me,”

“I have tasted the depths of love born from the embers of hate and I have lived through every emotion between the two. I have sobbed and raged and begged and cursed the stars themselves, but none of that made the slightest bit of difference. So I let that love turn to vengeance, I let it fester and blaze inside of me, and I found a way to defy the stars themselves. You’re standing in the way of that path, which means you must have been hoping to meet with this monster yourself.”

“I have sacrificed!” I shouted and the flames which lit my body blazed like a beacon for all to see. “I have given everything I was and everything I am to this fight. I have cried and raged and pleaded for the heavens to favour us just once, but they turned their games on us instead and took all I had to offer. I never promised to give them any of this. I never agreed to the price they chose, so let my love be unbreakable and brutal and cruel and endless, the harbinger of war and the summoner of violence. Let it be all those things and more because I am done sacrificing myself for the stars and their entertainment. I am done being a puppet in their games. They took from me too many times and now they will have to face the monster they made when they incited me because I. Have. Had. Enough!”

I may have been a monster, but I had never claimed not to be.

For a moment I was paralysed there, caught in that memory, in the pain which had carved out a piece of me ever since. In some ways, I was still there, on that battlefield, holding his cold hand in mine and begging fate to change its mind.

I hadn’t left him. Not for one moment. I hadn’t released his hand even when I’d taken the dagger which had killed him and sliced my own flesh open with it. I hadn’t let go. And as that scar tingled along my palm, and the scent of smoke and cedar seemed to billow around me and my own vow to him buzzed through the air, I knew I never would.

He was the destroyer of me. The ruination of the girl I’d been and the creator of the woman I had become. He was my one true love, without any help or hinderance from the stars. He was more than my Elysian Mate. He was more than my equal. He was my end. ...

“Damn,” Orion breathed. “Do not get a boner over my sister while I’m touching you,” I warned. “Too late,”

cutting my arm open with the very dagger that had stolen the man I loved from this world.

The man I had chosen for myself, despite every reason I’d had to reject him, despite the stars pushing and pulling at us, despite the Veil which had closed between us. He was mine and I was his and I had come here to return him to my side.

My soul shook as that beautiful, powerful, unstoppable mate of mine stepped through the barrier between life and death like it was any other door which she refused to leave closed. She was here.

Because death was eternal. And there was no coming back from it.

I waited here like a coward, knowing I could never give her what she needed, never fulfil that yearning in her shattered heart.

I’d seen it all, every moment of suffering and heartache she had endured. I’d watched her become the creature she needed to be to make this journey, watched her bleed for every sacrifice and felt the agony she had taken upon herself in this pointless hunt.

To steal a moment in her arms, to hold her close and know how fleeting it would be. Because she couldn’t stay here, no matter how selfish I wanted to be over that desire, I knew it couldn’t be. She had a world waiting for her and a destiny so great that even the stars weren’t certain of it yet. She’d been born to topple mountains and make the stars quake; she’d been born to ruin and rise.

the man I was when I was hers, burning bright and hot and full of life, and the one I had been in all the years before her, festering in a need for vengeance, drowning in my own failures.

She was mine, my one good thing, the keeper of my heart and the shackles surrounding my soul.

Yet here she was, striding through the barriers of death itself to come for me. Her. Only ever her.

this beautiful, broken, queen of mine.

my knee hit the ground and I clasped the pommel of my sword as I bowed my head before her, my limbs trembling with the magnitude of this action, of what I had known and should have admitted for a long time now. “I pledge myself and all that I am to you, my Queen,”

“I would be your sword to fight your enemies, your shield to protect your people, your monster to own and to wield. I would be yours in any and all of the ways I could be, and I should have told you that a long, long time ago. I am your creature, your servant…yours.”

My girl.

“You’re Darius Vega now. And you weren’t built to bow to anyone.”

My hands came around her waist as my lips parted for her and I drew every piece of her flush against me, the world fading to less than nothing beyond us as she claimed me right there, in the heart of death, like it meant nothing at all that she had ripped her way into this place to come for me. She didn’t release her hold on my shirt as she pulled me against her, kissing me like everything that made up the entire universe began and ended with the two of us.

That kiss was hello and goodbye, a bittersweet reunion, and a promise of everything we should have had. It was a breath of life into the silent cavity of my chest, a wordless plea for me to return to her, for the world to somehow make sense again purely because we were together.

Until I found you by Stephen Sanchez started playing at little more than a thought from me and I offered her my hand. One more song. The wedding dance we should have had. The beginning we’d been denied.

One song. A few minutes stolen before it would be over. Before we had to face this goodbye and I would go back to waiting for her while she returned to the life she still needed to live.

I was gifted a moment reliving that unreal memory when she had given herself to me entirely, beyond all reason, utterly mine, no matter how little I had deserved it.

“From the first moment I called you by that name, you looked at me and you knew me. You knew yourself. We just spent too long lying about the truth of that destiny.”

there was no after. The song would end and so would this, the two of us slipping apart like grains of sand divided by an ocean. There was no power on earth – even one as great as hers – which could deny the laws of all.

I’m yours, Roxy, heart and soul and everything beyond, I’m yours.