Chapter 22
Icharge forward—to do what I’m uncertain—but Raina flings her arms wide, blocking me like a shield. I try to step around her—I’m not the one who’s weaponless—but she shoves me back, eyes wild and commanding.
She pounds a sign against my chest, hard enough to bruise. I cover her hand with mine, feeling the shape.
Obey.
It takes everything in me to listen and keep my feet rooted where I stand.
Shadow wraiths are part of Tiressia’s ancient history that no longer belongs in our world.
Wraiths haven’t roamed our lands for centuries, the connection to the Shadow World severed by Urdin, God of the Western Drifts.
Yet one is here, doing the bidding of a dangerous man.
I glance around. How did the prince know we were in the forest? Did his magick sense us?
“My prince says that I’m not meant to kill you, pretty Raina. Your time to die is not now. I am to take you to my lord.” The thing points Helena’s dagger at me instead. “But I get to kill him if I must.” It takes a step, raising Helena’s angled brow over her cat-like gaze. “And I must.”
Raina looks at me from the corner of her eyes and flutters her fingers.
Instinctively, I know what she’s asking for.
My sword.
There’s only one way to destroy a wraith. One of us has to kill Helena—quick and precise—to trap the wraith within. If we fail, if the girl clings to life a moment too long, the wraith could slip inside one of us instead.
The last thing I need is something else inside me.
There are no Old Elikesh words to whisper to send this demon back to the Nether Reaches of the Shadow World, so I relent and hand Raina my weapon. This is something I must let her face. It’s her friend’s life. This wraith is hers to kill.
But though she readies the blade and prepares her stance, I still fear she won’t be able to do what must be done. The wraith doubts her, too. It laughs, a vile sound echoing through the wood.
“You’ll never do it,” the thing says, the lamp light illuminating Helena in a way that makes her look gaunt and grim. “You’ll never kill your dear, young friend.”
It tilts Helena’s head at an abnormal slant, and the stare coming from the girl’s eyes changes. The white storm hovering over her pupils dissipates, and her irises darken to their normal state.
But sweet gods, her face. It changes, contorting on the edge of a rising scream while the rest of her body remains stiff and still as ice. Her brow crumples with cold fear, and terror flashes across her features, widening her eyes, trembling in her chin.
When her scream tears loose, rupturing the frosty air of the quiet forest, it’s Helena. The sound—disturbing as it is agonizing—is wholly her, aware and present, echoing without a hint of the perverse possession living inside.
“Raina, please! Help me!”
Tears slide hot and fast down the girl’s dark cheeks as she strains, struggling against the thing keeping her imprisoned. She bristles, and her shoulders jerk violently, her feet moving her body forward with lumbering steps, like maybe she’s winning the fight.
Or maybe the wraith is taunting us. Taunting Raina. Letting her glimpse enough of her friend to make the necessary end more difficult.
Raina flexes her fingers around the hilt, chest rising and falling fast with rapid breaths. I can sense her indecision. Her uncertainty. The impossibility of the moment.
She doesn’t succumb to the lure. Instead, she shifts her weight from foot to foot as Helena inches closer.
This wraith won’t let me escape easily, and it won’t let Raina walk away. It will use Helena to achieve its goal, whatever that may be. The Prince of the East clearly wants the threat of my existence removed, but he has plans for Raina, too, it seems.
And that will not do.
While the wraith has given up a bit of its hold, I bend down, going for the curved knife in my boot. If Raina can’t stop this thing, I will.
But I don’t get the chance.
The wraith sweeps Helena’s arm through the air and, with so little effort, knocks Raina out of the way, sending her tumbling along the snowy path.
The horses spook and take off in the same direction while the wraith rushes me like it did at the lake. It sheathes its knife and grabs my blanket, managing to fist my tunic, too, and slings me through the air like I’m no more than an annoying branch under its feet.
I slam into a tree at the path’s edge, pain zipping up my spine and ringing my skull before I collapse face-first in the snow.
There isn’t even time to lift my head before I’m flipped over, my wrists pinned to the ground. Helena’s face stares down at me, lips drawn back in a hungry snarl. She’s not a small girl—built to be a fighter, not a waif—but she isn’t this strong.
Shadows bleed from her, filling her eye sockets and nostrils and mouth with red smoke. Those scarlet shadows wriggle and squirm, coiling and spiraling toward me.
I press the back of my head into the snow and jerk my hips to buck her off me, but there’s nowhere to go, and she doesn’t budge.
Instead, she leans close and kisses me deeply.
At first, I gag around her invading tongue, her nipping teeth, even her soft but hungry lips.
She smells and tastes of pungent death and the bowels of the Nether Reaches.
But something inside me changes. The smell burning my nose and searing my throat vanishes, and my disgust and fury slip away, leaving me filled with wanting.
Helena lets go of my wrists and grasps my face, bearing down on me harder. I don’t fight her anymore. I can’t—because I don’t want to.
Need builds inside me, a need to inhale her, to let her flood me, filling my every cell with her presence.
Wanting more, I slide my hands up her body and thread my fingers into the black curtain of her hair.
I fist the silkiness and crush her to me, my own hunger taking over, craving something dark and carnal only she can give.
I’m thirsting, and her mouth is a fount, my only relief.
She drags her teeth across my lower lip, easily bringing blood from the wound Raina gave me at the stream. Drawing back, she licks crimson from her mouth, and in that small expanse of time, I’m left with an ache inside my chest but also a moment of realization.
“Oh, it is you,” the thing says. “I wasn’t sure. Didn’t believe. But I taste the ancient shade within you, sorcerer.”
The wraith’s spirit spreads out in a cloud and folds around me like a nebulous hand.
When it uses Helena to kiss me again, I’m helpless to fight, even though I feel its oily presence pouring into me, crawling and curling beneath my skin, obscuring all the light until I fall, plunging into a bottomless abyss.
It’s no abyss, though. I’m tumbling backward through the years, a long lifetime of memories passing by as illusory as ever.
The falling slows, and there, in this place of nothingness, I’m met with the darkest parts of myself. They’re illuminated in bold and breathtaking light, the moments of my life that will surely one day see me bound to the pits of the Shadow World, along with all the other monsters.
I try to fight it, to claw my way free.
I can’t endure this.
That thing gives me no choice, forcing me to watch as every life I’ve ever taken slips from existence—including the woman who once held my heart so completely, and the son she bore in my name.
It’s like I’m there all over again, standing knee-deep in midsummer crops, hearing their screams chase over the vale. I run, sickle in hand, desperation clenching my heart while the hot sun beats down upon my back.
I see the slice of the blades before I can reach them, the bloody slits smiling at their throats, their empty eyes watching a blue sky for the last time. I feel my love’s auburn hair in my hands, my son’s tiny body cradled in my arms.
I didn’t save them. I’m the reason they were killed at all.
A man with magick who wanted to be a nobody farmer yet tangled with the wrong king.
Over time, I’ve forgotten the details of their precious faces, but now, in this infernal creation of a shadow wraith, they stare back at me with excruciating clarity.
Evie and Quinn.
Misery washes through me, intense and violent. The shadow folds around the deepest part of me, the part I must keep locked away at all costs. There’s a prison inside me, and the shadow rattles the cage, agitating the thing my magick has held captive for so long.
No. No, no, no.
Don’t stir him, I plead. Don’t weaken me. Nephele, please. I beg you. Where are you?
From somewhere beyond, I sense pain, knowing inherently that it isn’t mine. It’s only mingled with my consciousness. Suddenly, I’m falling again, this time toward a dim but present light surrounded by shadow.
I open my eyes to find Helena still atop me. A grimace of disbelief twists her face, and her hand is raised, her bleeding palm folded around the edge of my sword like she caught it mid-swing.
Because she did.
Raina stands above us, hands tight around the hilt, rage hot in her eyes.
With the taste of the Shadow World still thick in my mouth, I rise on my elbows, but before any of us can make another move, the earth quakes, and the wood beyond the shadow wraith shifts.
I squint into the ghostly wood, unsure what I’m seeing. Even the shadow wraith turns a glance over Helena’s shoulder. Raina looks, too.
The dense tree line opens, one tree after another unfurling from the tangle, creaking back to where it belongs. A groan fills the night, the sound of wood waking, followed by unnatural sighs whispering through the air on a hushed moan.
The earth shakes again, so hard the wraith tumbles off me. Raina’s knees give, and she falls at my side. I curl my arm around her waist, pull her close, and hold tight as deep drifts of snow dislodge, the vibrations causing the dense layers to break apart and settle, scattering through the wood.