Page 153 of Incoronate
I stepped back from them and turned toward the center of the room. The rain hammered against the windows now, hard enough to drown out the rest of the house. The lights flickered once, briefly, as the sky outside split with another long roll of thunder.
For one suspended breath, I let myself stand there as the girl I had been.The one who had spent every year of her life paying the price of admission into a destiny she had never wanted. Apologizing for the blood in her veins. Translating herself into something the Order could live with. Asking permission to exist in a world that had already decided what she was supposed to be.
She had loved fiercely and fought harder and held a line on her own darkness for so long it had nearly hollowed her out.
But she didn’t have to anymore.
The girl who walked out of the dome on the other side of this wasn’t going to ask for permission. Wasn’t going to apologize. Wasn’t going to keep paying admission to a world that had charged her everything and given her nothing back.
I let her go like a held breath. Then I closed my eyes and reached down inside myself. All the way down to the part I’d spent years pretending wasn’t there. The part that had always been waiting. The part that had risen to meet me in Sanguinarium and asked, quite plainly, why I’d kept it locked up for so long.
It was already moving toward me before I’d finished reaching and this time, I let it come.
“Per sanguinem patris mei,” I said, the incantation shaping itself in my mouth like it had always belonged there, “thronum vindico.”
The world stopped.
The rain stopped. The thunder stopped. Every sound in the house dropped away as though someone had reached up and unplugged the air itself.
And then the magic answered.
It didn’t crash in. It didn’t lash or burn or roar. It rose out of me, unhurried and absolute, the way deep water rose when a tide came in. Black smoke poured up from my skin, thick and silent, threaded through with veins of gold so bright they hurt to look at. It twisted around my legs first, then my waist, then my chest, climbing my body like something that knew the shape of me intimately. Like something that had been waiting a very long time to come home.
I heard Trace move. Heard the sharp intake of his breath.
“Jemma—”
“Don’t touch her.” Dominic’s voice, low and hard. “She has to do this alone.”
The black and gold curled higher, sealing around me until I could feel it pressed against every inch of my skin like a second heartbeat. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hot. It just was. Vast and ancient and entirely mine.
The runes on my arms ignited beneath my sleeves, blazing brighter than they ever had. My back burned in two long, parallel lines as my wings tore free of the skin, unfurling without my asking, blacker than the smoke around me, the tips of them brushing the corners of the room.
The talisman at the back of my neck pulsed once, hot enough to make me gasp.
And then the dome closed over me.
Through the swirl of black and gold I could see Trace lunge forward and Dominic catch his arm, pulling him back as the magic sealed itself around me from floor to ceiling. Their voices came through muffled and far away. Trace was saying my name. Dominic was telling him to wait, to hold.
Inside the dome, everything went very quiet.
I stood at the center of it with my eyes wide open and let it move through me.
And it moved.
Through my marrow first. Through the spaces between my ribs. Through the soles of my feet and out into the floor, then up through the walls, then past the walls, then past the house, then past Hollow Hills entirely, threading down into the earth and through the cracks beneath it and into the deeper places no living person was meant to reach. I felt every one of them open to me like doors that had always known my name. I felt the pull of something on the other side of those doors. Hot and patient and waiting.
A throne.
Mythrone.
I didn’t sit on it so much as recognize it. Recognize that it had been mine the entire time. That every life I’d ever lived had been a long, slow walk back to this exact moment.
I claimed it.
The dome shattered.
Smoke and gold light burst outward in a silent, soundless ring that passed through Trace and Dominic without touching them and kept going, out through the walls, out into the storm, out into the far places I could now feel like extensions of my own skin.
