Chapter 66
Ivan slipped through shadow, and the darkness took him wrong. It tore at every open wound, dragged cold through his veins, then spat him out beside the entity with blood in his mouth and one knife already lifting toward that pale, perfect throat.
He never reached it.
A hand closed around his face, fingers settling over his jaw, his cheek, beneath one eye with obscene gentleness. Ivan drove the knife upward anyway, twisting hard for the throat, the ribs, anything that might bleed, but the blade cut through nothing but empty air.
The entity laughed.
Then Ivan was flying.
The Fold spun around him in violent streaks of starfire as he struck the river and rolled, pain detonating through his shoulder when the wound tore open again.
Blood flooded hot beneath his coat, his vision splitting, doubling, snapping back into place with Elara already running across the dark, the Wound of Light burning in her hand.
No.
The word tore through him without sound as she crossed the star-strewn floor, hair whipping around her face, terror and fury driving every step. The dagger flared brighter as she swung, gold power ripping through the Fold, but the entity only laughed and caught her by the throat.
He lifted her into the air.
Ivan’s hand slipped beneath him as he tried to rise, his blood smearing across the flowing stars while his body refused him for one brutal, sickening second.
By the time he forced himself upright, the entity had drawn Elara close, his lips brushing her ear.
One hand remained at her throat. The other settled against her chest.
Then the pale fingers sank through cloth, skin, and bone as though none of them existed.
Move.
Ivan’s fingers struck leather—a book lay beside him, open and flickering with letters he could not read, its pages turning without wind and its cover dark beneath his bloodied palm.
Elara’s book.
Ivan seized it, drawing it against his chest as the shadows rose before he called them, spilling up his arms in cold, eager threads. He stepped through darkness and came out behind the entity with the book crushed beneath one arm, then shoved every black thread into his mouth.
He had seen Osin wield darkness this way, forcing it into mouths, into lungs, into the softest places of a body until life became no more.
He had hated it then with a clarity so pure it felt almost clean.
Now he reached for that same cruelty because Elara was hanging from an monster’s hand, and hate was the only tool left to him.
The entity lurched, and for the first time, its terrible composure broke.
Its throat worked beneath skin gone translucent with pale light.
One hand clawed at its own throat while the stars nearest him recoiled.
Soul-fields scattered in frightened currents as the darkness forced its way deeper, disappearing past its teeth and into whatever passed for lungs inside it.
His hand opened around Elara’s throat, and she dropped hard to the floor, coughing as the dagger’s light burst wildly against her palm. Then her eyes lifted to Ivan’s hand, to the shadows still pouring from his fingers and coiling over his skin.
Horror flashed across her face before she could hide it, and Ivan felt it strike exactly where the entity had already named him empty.
Ivan did not give Elara time to decide what he had become. He ran, caught her around the waist, hauled her against him, and shoved the book inside his coat as the Fold buckled around them. She screamed his name, one hand closing hard around his lapel, but her eyes had gone past him.
The staff lay half-buried in the riverlight where Algernon had fallen, its wood casing split open and the runes around the quartz flickering weakly.
But the entity was already turning, shadows spilling from his mouth in black ribbons, pale eyes blazing with fury as the stars around him died one by one.
“Elara—”
She twisted in his grip and lifted the Wound of Light.
Power tore from the blade in a gold burst and struck the quartz at its heart, the runes igniting in a ring of white fire, spinning faster and faster until the light swallowed the staff, Algernon, and the current splitting beneath the Fold.
The entity screamed.
Ivan wrapped himself around Elara and found the seam of shadow beneath the rift.
The Late Note sang as he jumped.
Light erupted behind them with the force of a second dawn, hurling them through the torn opening as the Fold screamed itself apart.
Ivan felt the blast catch his back, felt Elara’s fingers lock around him, felt her book crushed between their bodies as darkness gave way to air, salt, and the impossible sight of the dark sea rushing up beneath them.
Cold struck like a fist.
The sea took them under, crashing over Ivan’s head and tearing the last of the Fold from his senses in a rush of black water and salt.
Pressure clamped around his ears. Light spun somewhere above him in broken, wavering shards, and for one sickening second he could not tell whether he was sinking or rising.
His arms were empty.
Ivan kicked hard, dragging himself toward the pale blur of the surface, every movement pulling fire through his torn shoulder.
Beneath him, far below the black water, the ley line hummed with that same patient vibration it had carried beneath the hull, a low, ancient reverberation pressing up through the sea and into whatever dark thing lived under his skin.
A hand closed around Ivan’s ankle.
He looked down and found the shade rising from the dark beneath him without a sound, one gray hand locked around his boot, its face lifting through the water with that awful emptiness he had learned on the deck.
Its grip tightened, cold driving through the leather and up his leg as it dragged him lower.
Ivan reached for the dark around him.
There was almost nothing to use. Moonlight cut down from the surface in thin, wavering shafts, breaking the water into bands of dim silver and black, and the shadows between them were narrow, restless things pulled apart by the movement of the sea.
He seized what he could and forced himself into it anyway.
The water fought him, dragging at his limbs, filling his mouth with salt as the world folded hard around his body.
He came out above and to the side of the shade, the grip torn from his ankle, and drove both boots into its head as he passed. The thing burst apart into black current.
Ivan surged upward and broke the surface with her name already in his mouth.
“Elara!”
The word ripped out of him before he had taken a full breath, before he had measured the shore, the ships, the dead, the living, the scope of ruin around him.
The sea had become a battlefield. Men thrashed in the water.
Shades moved between them in pale flashes beneath the surface, dragging bodies under and rising again.
The ships loomed too close, their hulls groaning, ropes snapped loose and slapping wetly against wood.
On the nearest stretch of dark rock, Vredians fought in broken clusters while the surf kept vomiting more corpses onto the shore.
Ivan spun in the water, searching.
“Elara!”
Then light bloomed below him.
Gold, faint and struggling.
He dove.
The cold closed over him again, and this time Ivan went willingly, cutting downward through the black until he found Elara ten feet below. Her hair drifted around her face, the Wound of Light blazing in one hand as two shades pressed in from either side.
She fought like someone running out of air.
Each swing of the dagger sent pale gold through the water, scattering pieces of them into smoke-dark ribbons, but the sea gave the shades back their bodies too quickly. They re-formed and closed in. Her strikes shortened. Bubbles slipped from her mouth as she kicked backward and found only depth.
Ivan shadow-jumped through the water.
The dark here did not gather in corners or beneath tables or behind closed doors.
It surrounded everything, pressed against everything, a living depth with no walls and no single direction.
It pulled at him with a familiarity intimate enough to turn his stomach, but he had no room left for disgust. He took it, used it, let it drag him apart and force him back together behind her.
One shade lunged.
Ivan caught Elara around the waist and hauled her back against him, his arm locking over the book between them as the dagger flared wildly in her hand.
She twisted once, fighting him on instinct, and then she knew him.
He felt it in the sudden change of her body, in the brief, terrible surrender of someone too exhausted to pretend she could survive alone.
Shore.
He fixed on the image with brutal focus: the black rise of rock beyond the surf, the line where water broke white against land, the smear of firelight and blood above it.
Then he gathered the darkness beneath them, compressed both their bodies into the seam between water and shadow, and forced them through.
They hit the rock hard.
Ivan struck first, pain flashing white through his shoulder as Elara slammed down beside him.
Seawater tore from her lungs in violent coughs.
She caught herself on both hands, soaked hair hanging around her face, while waves broke cold around their boots and dragged at them as if the sea regretted letting them go.
Ivan was already forcing himself upright when she looked at him.
Her eyes were too bright, and not with battle. Not even with fear. He knew that look because he had worn versions of it himself—the face of someone forcing grief back down with sheer fury because the alternative would split them open where they knelt.
“Why didn’t you tell me what he did to you?” Her voice cracked, then hardened around the break. “Why did I have to find out like this?”