No. No. No.

I couldn’t breathe as his wild, dilated eyes met mine. This isn’t happening. Those words repeated themselves over and over in my mind as I bent over, clutching his cheeks with shaking hands. I cried out at the feeling of his too-cold skin. Nothing alive felt this cold. Oh, gods, his skin didn’t even feel like flesh anymore.

“Poppy, I…” he gasped out as he reached for me. A gray film crept across the whites of his eyes and then the irises, dulling the vivid amber.

He went still, his gaze fixed on some point beyond me. His chest didn’t move.

“Casteel,” I whispered, trying to shake him, but his skin—his entire body—had…it had hardened like stone. He was frozen, his back arched and one leg curled, an arm lifted toward me. “Casteel.”

There was no answer.

I opened my senses wide to him, desperately seeking any hint of emotion, anything. But there was nothing. It was like he had entered the deepest level of sleep or was…

No. No. No. He couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t be dead.

Only a handful of seconds had passed from the time Alastir had issued his initial command to Casteel lying before me, his body drained of the vibrancy of life.

I quickly looked over my shoulder. Neither Jasper nor Kieran moved, and their skin had deepened to a dark gray color, the hue of iron.

Panic-fueled agony flooded me, entrenching itself in the area around my pounding heart as I slid my hands to Casteel’s chest, feeling for a heartbeat. “Please. Please,” I whispered, tears gathering in my eyes. “Please. Don’t do this to me. Please.”

Nothing.

I felt nothing in him, Kieran, or Jasper. A hum whirred within the very core of my being as I stared down at Casteel—at my husband. My heartmate. My everything.

He was lost to me.

My skin began to vibrate as a dark and oily, soul-deep rage rose within me. It had a tang like metal in the back of my throat and burned like fire in my veins. It tasted like death. And not the kind that occurred here—the final kind.

Fury swelled and expanded until I could no longer contain it. I didn’t even try to stop it as tears tracked down my cheeks and fell on Casteel’s iron-colored skin. The rage lashed out, pounding the air and seeping into the stone. Under me, I felt the Temple begin to faintly tremble once more. Someone shouted, but I was past hearing words.

Leaning over Casteel, I picked up his fallen sword as I brushed my lips over his still, stone-cold lips. That ancient thing inside me pulsed and throbbed as it had done before as I rose above my husband and turned. A sharp wind whipped across the Temple floor, extinguishing the fire of the torches. The leaves of the blood tree rattled like dry bones as my grip on the short sword tightened. I didn’t see Casteel’s parents. I didn’t even see Alastir.