Chapter 41
Iplummet until I can’t see even a pinprick of light. I’m surrounded by darkness, like I’m falling through a void. Fear claws within me, but I choke it down. Slow the fall. Slow the fall.
I untether my clothes and pull up as hard as I can. The seams of my gambeson split, but the whoosh of air around me slows. I grunt as my back hits the ground. Then I roll onto my stomach.
If I had panicked, I’d be dead.
Auri’s lightning flashes into the chasm, the bright pulse revealing three rows of teeth that encircle the beast’s eager, gnashing mouth. Its tendrils snake toward me, ready to pull me closer. I back away, horror lodged in my throat and making it hard to breathe. The knives I dropped—where are they?
I see something gray on the ground as another fork of lightning strikes. I grab it, then cry out in horror. A bone.
The next flash reveals that I’m surrounded by them. Hundreds of bones, the tentacles twisting between them. Bile coats my mouth.
The beast grabs my legs and tugs, knocking me down. It drags me toward the maw as a desperate scream rips from my throat. I have to escape. I kick, flaring my magic, but all I find are bones. So I throw them, but the beast crunches every one between its teeth like they’re just sticks.
It clicks and hisses like it’s laughing.
Then lightning hits the maw in a burst of sparks. It writhes, and another flash reveals something I can’t believe I’m seeing.
The bones are moving, and not by my magic. They’re stacking atop each other like they’ve come alive.
The beast pauses as a pulse of dark energy washes over us. It gives me a vital second to find a sharp rock amongst the bones. I slash at the tendrils, breaking free.
“Cynthia!” Auri yells, throwing a torch down the ravine. My magic catches it and swings it around to light the chasm. I see them, and dread freezes every muscle in my body.
That dark magic brought the bones to life.
An army of skeletons stares at me. Goblins, rats, orcs, humans—all bound by necrotic magic.
Some hold the rusted weapons that they died with, and others flex their fingers like claws.
They prowl toward me, ignoring everything else in their paths.
Even as tendrils smack and burst them apart, they reassemble as if nothing will stop them.
This is unreal. I have to survive. For Desmond. For Evie. For my parents. I have to see them again. I promised myself. I have to survive and travel the continent, just as I’ve always dreamed. I have to fight.
A skeleton reaches for me with its sword. I slash with the rock, separating the bones for only seconds. It extends the sword again, with the hilt facing me—an offering. I drop the rock and take it. This doesn’t make sense. Are they helping me?
From behind, a tendril smacks around my leg. Another ensnares my wrist, holding the torch. “Get off me!” I shout, but before I can cut them, they pin me down. They pull, and I’m moving too quickly, closer and closer to the beast’s waiting mouth.
“Help!” I scream, twisting futilely to break free. My boot scrapes over the beast’s first row of teeth. “Desmond!” I yell, kicking desperately, but I don’t hear my own voice over the blood pounding in my ears and the monster’s infernal, chortling laughter.
A goblin skeleton raises its sword over my foot and swings. I yelp at the sound of sliced flesh, but the tendril around my ankle falls limp. More skeletons surround me, cutting and pulling at my restraints until I can scramble free.
I don’t understand. Is this Osian’s power? Why has the god of death taken pity on me?
The creature rages. Tentacles rip through the skeletons as quickly as they reform.
Two of them swing their battle axes into the maw, and it shrieks in rage.
More skeletons flank me like guards, wrestling with any part of the beast that nears me.
Whatever’s happening, none of it matters as long as I survive.
I run to the chasm wall and slam my palms against it. There’s a ledge only three inches above my reach. If I can just lift my boots with my Gift—yet as soon as I try, my mind throbs with blinding pain in protest. I’m running out of magic.
So I turn, clenching the sword I’ve somehow managed to hold onto. “You want a fight?” I yell at the beast. “I’ll give you a fight!”
Then rubble rolls down as Desmond descends toward me, sliding from ledge to ledge. He lands beside me. “You already have,” he says. “No one has evaded this beast until you.” Cuts mar his clothing, and blood drips from a laceration across his shoulder, but he’s alive. And he came for me.
He kisses my cheek, his stubble grazing my skin. I blink in shock and forget the pain, just for a second. I reach for him, but he’s already striding toward the beast.
“What are you doing?” I shout at him.
He doesn’t look back. “Get her out of here.”
The skeletons swivel toward me. Three brace themselves against the chasm wall, then another three climb them and stand atop their shoulders.
Three more climb them. One stares at me, jaw clacking as if it’s trying to speak.
Another thrusts me toward the ever-growing pile.
Gods, they’re making a ladder. They want me to climb them.
Why did they obey Desmond when clearly Osian—
No.
“They call him ‘the Prince of Death’ for a reason,” Rune had said.
The violet magic in Desmond’s veins.
His paranoia that we’re always being watched. His warnings about ghosts, that the dead are still haunting this plane—he can speak to them.
I know what he is now. And I know why he didn’t tell me.
The skeletons grow insistent. They shove me toward the ladder, but I wrench out of their grip. I have to stay. I have to know if I’m right.
Desmond seizes a whipping tendril. It blackens and shrivels into a lifeless husk.
He wrestles with another, then yells as he channels his Gift. I slacken in shock as the desiccation travels from the tendril to the beast’s core. It screams, the tendrils quivering in tandem. They smack at him, weaker with every strike, and Desmond stands his ground.
The air turns cold with that dark magic, a shiver across my skin. The screeches die to a pained whine, and each tendril withers until they fall still.
No spirit medium could do what he just did.
There’s only one term for that kind of magic.
Necrotic energy. If the legends are true, Desmond can glimpse between planes, kill with just a touch, and control the undead.
That rare power, so lethal and dangerous, is why all necromancers in Avedor are put to death.
And as little as I know of the Hollowlands, there has never been a single tale of a fae necromancer.
Such a thing goes against everything the fae stand for.
He’s a walking master of death and hid it so I wouldn’t be terrified of him. And gods, just for a second, I am.
Desmond turns and looks at me with unhidden, raw vulnerability, as though every secret has been cleaved from his chest, and he’s afraid of what I’ll think. He races toward me. Hands that have the power to drain the life from my body cradle my head, too warm to be the touch of death.
“Climb,” he orders, and then he kisses me. It’s urgent, heated, and desperate, all tongue and teeth until he pulls away just as suddenly as he grabbed me.
“You should’ve trusted me,” I whisper.
He swallows. “And are you afraid?”
I’m warring between the urge to shove him back or pull him into another kiss. “Of course I am! I was almost devoured alive by a giant monster, and then you killed it with your bare hands!”
Desmond flinches. Despair carves into me through the bond. It consumes him from the sag of his shoulders to the sudden hollowness in his gaze, the look of someone who holds incomprehensible power and loathes it with all his being.
I feel my heart cave for him. Nothing has ever filled me with so much sorrow.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I tell him. “I was afraid of dying. I’m not afraid of you.” Gently, I caress his jaw. He hesitates before leaning into my touch.
“I wouldn’t regret it, even if you were,” he says.
“There’s no price I wouldn’t pay, no army I wouldn’t raise to protect you.
” Then he pulls away, swallowing like a thousand words are on the tip of his tongue.
He shakes his head, dismissing them, and points at the ladder.
“Climb, Cynthia. Or I’ll tell them to carry you up. ”
The skeletons clack their jaws, their empty skulls watching me.
For once, I obey without question—because gods help me, I still trust him. Yet a voice deep inside me warns that if I were smart, I’d climb up the other side of the chasm and run.