Chapter 44
ISLA
Isla was in the Wilds. She recognized the feel of the rotting earth beneath her feet, the ghastly odor, and the lingering essence of dark, destructive magic seeping from every pore. But again, she knew she was dreaming.
She wasn’t only dreaming; she was in a memory.
Donning not her warrior’s uniform but her crimson ballgown from the night of the feast when she first met Kai, she lifted her leg over a decaying log as she pushed through the brush. Thorns scratched her arms and face, snagging on her dress as she fought through them.
A tug came—a pulse from deep inside her.
When she felt the thick forest would never end, she stumbled into a clearing, and there, in the distance, she watched herself with Kai.
They’d been shifted, and he loomed over her, a bak dead on the ground behind him—the one he’d killed to save her life. They moved around each other like a dance, doing all they could not to touch when the desire to do so had been so rooted within them.
“You were always meant to return to our greatest failure.”
Isla sucked in a breath, whipping around to seek the woman with violet eyes.
But there was nothing, just the endless horror of the cursed woodland.
When she turned back, she and Kai had vanished, but the bak still lay there.
“Where are you?” Isla called, her voice hollow in this place that was not a place.
“Everywhere,” the woman said, a resounding echo in Isla’s mind. “I always have been.”
Isla’s nostrils flared. That’s not an answer.
“Are you me?”
Silence greeted her, and she stepped forward. Her feet were bare, sinking deep into the muddied earth, the beautiful dress she’d remember forever torn in the thorns.
“We are the same.” The words came from beside her.
Isla turned.
Nothing.
“Cursed with the same burden.”
She felt an icy breath against her cheek, gasped, and turned, only to catch a flash of white hair before she was pushed.
The world shifted, and Isla tilted, faltered, then fell to her hands and knees somewhere new—somewhere she never had been. But it tugged, tugged.
A palace of crumbled stone towered before her, a phantom peering from the shadows. Its seeing eye opened wide—a window left vacant in the wake of shattered stained glass.
Tug, tug.
Her heart pounded in her throat.
She fought to her feet. “What is our burden?”
Steeling herself, Isla pressed forward, but no matter how many steps she took, she never got any closer to what she suspected to be Phobos’s Pack Hall.
It was a haunting shell of its former beauty, an alarming echo of a dwelling she now called home.
The full moon shone behind it, accentuating the shadows.
“Come to me, and I will show you.” Isla didn’t turn at the breath on her neck that shot shivers up her spine.
She didn’t need to ask where to go. She knew.
The Pack Hall reached out to her with clawed hands, calling her as she had always felt the Wilds did. It wailed for another bid at her blood, one she could never resist answering. One that may have been destined.
“Why can’t you just say it? End these games and tell me.”
Though she couldn’t see her, she felt the violet-eyed woman bristle. “Because it is not enough to speak it. I already tried, and ignorance cost us everything. You must see, Warrior Heart. You both must.”
Both?
Before Isla could ask the question, the woman trilled, “Two souls bound by secrets and blood. They’ve all been watching. Waiting.”
Isla furrowed her brows, spinning. “Who?”
Wind blasted by her.
Isla threw up an arm.
It meant nothing when the gale had been strong enough to bring her to her knees. A violent crack of thunder sent her hands to her ears, the ground shuddering beneath her. Then the rain, icy, skin-tearing droplets, began as lightning cleaved the world.
Another memory—but Isla didn’t have Kai to shield her from the storm this time. Not again, when that familiar solemn aria played, slithering around her mind and body, coiling and crushing her.
She did know them. Knew this woman, knew this melody, but…
Isla cried out when the dagger sank straight through her chest, piercing her heart. She lifted her head, the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, to find the violet-eyed woman stoic. Behind her, the moon had vanished.
“Come now, Warrior Heart. You’re running out of time.”