kiss finally shared without fear. Only that kiss wouldn’t be with Val, and that family would be far away from Ari—if she even survived.
Merlin had made this mistake before. He’d taken Nin’s bargain, and let Arthur die.
He might not have started the cycle, but if he wanted to end it, he was going to have to stop making the same mistakes. It wasn’t just a question of plodding through the steps, again and again and again.
Merlin had to change the story.
“Let me go, Nin,” he said, the depths of his commanding old-man voice returning for a single moment. He had one card left to play, and he would throw it down. Nin had brought him here twice, and both times she’d bargained with him to stay as if he did have the power to get himself out if he wanted to. Merlin pointed his magic straight at her. A song came to him: he hummed the sprightly tune to that old Camelot musical.
“What are you doing?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Using the power you’ve already given me,” Merlin said, her doubt encouraging him. After all, Nin had only started bargaining when Merlin looked for a way out of the cave. If he was truly trapped here, she would not have offered a deal.
“Do you believe you can touch me with magic?” Nin asked, her voice fading into the air as her form vanished.
“It’s like you said before, this isn’t a battle.” The first sparks flew out of Merlin’s hands and hit the cave wall, crumbling a section, letting in the blinding light of pure time. “This is a prison break. Fortunately, I have some practice with those.”
More magic flew out, and another great chunk of the wall fell, rocks hitting water with a great crash. He didn’t need to give Nin a body, like he had with Morgana, if he wanted to use his magic on her. The cave was her body—it was her physical creation.
All he needed was a way out.
“Stop that,” Nin said, her voice shaking the ground.
“Let me go!” Merlin cried.
The cave blasted white as all of his magic came out of him at once.
Merlin returned to a room filled with medical equipment and Mercer associates, all of them scattered in a rough, broken circle. The ground was covered with jagged white scorch marks.
So the explosion had done more than release him from Nin’s cave.
When Merlin stood, his body weighed several thousand pounds, and his brain might as well have been a briny pickle in a delicate glass jar. “I’ve been heavily sedated,” he said, but it came out more like, “I’be en hemily sebated.”
He hated the thought that Mercer had been taking his blood and running tests, but he didn’t have time to destroy whatever evidence of his magic they’d collected. He needed to get to Ari before Mercer killed one of his friends.
Merlin gave himself a tremendous smack, which succeeded in shocking away the worst of the sedative. He began to stumble out of the medical facility, but one of the bodies on the floor caught his eye. This one had been locked to a chair—and taken down along with it. Scorch marks had fileted her skin with white burns. Merlin pushed the black hair back from her face and whispered her name, “Morgana?”
Nothing.
In a moment that melted the color from the body, Morgana materialized beside him, freed from Merlin’s corporeal gift—and no small amount pissed.
“That is the last time you kill me, old man.”
“Apologies,” Merlin said. “Truly, it was collateral damage.”
“There are worse ways to die, I suppose,” Morgana admitted. “Those people,” she cast dirty glances at the dead associates around them, “would have taken apart our cells, if allowed. I locked several of them in the asylum of their worst memories, but more just kept coming.”
Merlin wanted to tell Morgana about his run-in with Nin, but there was no time. He asked the only question that mattered. “Where are the others?”
“They were speaking of a ceremony.” Morgana’s body faded back to its familiar transparent state. “This way.”
Merlin chased after her, stumbling out of the medical facility, into… a mall, of all places. The white lights made him blink while the sterilized air left a dead taste in his mouth. At first he spun around in the hall, but then he caught the sounds of a great, cheering crowd. He followed it to a huge set of double doors just as a great roar went up from behind them. Were they cheering on Ari—or