Chapter 47
LYRA
I woke with Vareena’s blood beneath my fingernails.
For several seconds, that was the only thing my mind would hold.
Not where I was, how long I had been unconscious, or the pounding behind my eyes and the deep ache buried in my right shoulder.
Only the blood packed beneath my nails and dried into the lines of my palms. More of it had stiffened across my forearms and the ruined midnight fabric of my Solstice dress where I had knelt, pressed both hands into the hole beneath Vareena’s ribs, and begged a dead body to breathe.
The memory came before I could stop it: cream and gold against white stone, Raiden’s hands red to the wrists, Calis lowering hers when there was nothing left for her Light to repair.
Vareena’s fingers going slack inside mine.
Her pale ribbon sliding from my bloody fingertips while a brutal pull dragged me backward through the pool beneath her body.
She’s dead, Lyra.
My stomach seized. “No.”
The word scraped out of a throat torn raw from screaming and came back to me from somewhere beyond the dark.
An echo. I opened my eyes. Black stone stretched beneath my feet, farther away than it should have been.
I stared at it through a blur, trying to understand why I wasn’t standing properly, then shifted my weight and heard metal scrape high above me.
Pain tore through both shoulders hard enough to rip a cry from my throat.
My arms had been hauled high and wide, each wrist locked inside a thick black-glass cuff attached to a chain disappearing into the darkness overhead.
My toes barely brushed the floor. If I forced myself onto them, I could take some of my weight off my shoulders, but my legs were already trembling.
The instant one heel slipped, the chains caught me and the cuffs dug deeper into skin rubbed raw beneath them.
I fought for the floor again and forced myself to look around.
Polished black walls reflected warped strips of torchlight.
A vaulted ceiling disappeared into Shadow.
There were no windows and no visible door, only a narrow table along one wall and a single chair several paces in front of me.
Directly beneath my feet was a drain. The floor around it had been scrubbed.
Not well enough. Brown-black stains remained in the seams between the stones.
My pulse climbed. I pulled against the chains, and the cuffs flashed once.
Pain shot from my wrists through both arms, locking my fingers.
My knees folded. My weight dropped into my shoulders, and the right one screamed with a white-hot pain that made the chamber tilt.
By the time I found my toes again, I was panting.
I reached for Light. Nothing answered. The emptiness behind my sternum was so wrong that for a heartbeat I thought I had reached in the wrong direction, as though magic might hide somewhere else when frightened.
I tried again and found the same hollow place.
No warmth. No silver-gold pressure. No familiar pulse beneath my ribs.
My Shadow was silent too. The blood cuffs.
I remembered the first locking around my ankle in the Solstice Hall, the way Starlight had stumbled inside me.
The second closing around my wrist. A man’s arm around my throat.
Kieran reaching through the breach while an unseen grip on the other side dragged me away.
His fingers touching mine. Then slipping.
My chest tightened around his name. Kieran.
His face returned with horrible clarity—blood down one cheek, fear stripping away every trace of his usual control while his Shadow wound around my forearm and he shouted at me to hold on. I had tried. Gods, I had tried.
Was he alive? Had the Sanctum fallen after I was taken?
Had Halos held the wards? Damon? Calis? Rhovan and Kaiz?
Raiden had still been on the floor with Vareena.
Lidia, Dax, Emrin, Eiryx—any of them could have joined her by now.
Neseryn. The thought of another body, another name, twisted my stomach.
I reached for Light again despite knowing what the cuffs would do.
Pain snapped up both arms immediately, precise enough to warn me away. Fine. I had one other place to reach.
Codex?
Silence.
My breathing stopped.
Codex.
For months, I had wanted the damned thing out of my head. I had cursed it when it woke me, threatened it when it answered questions with riddles, hated the way its presence could slip between one thought and the next as if my mind belonged partly to it. Now the silence was unbearable.
Where are you? Please. Answer me.
A presence stirred at the farthest edge of my thoughts, so faint I nearly mistook it for hope. A pressure. A familiar brush against my mind. Then—
Ly—
Pain exploded behind my eyes. The cuffs flashed black.
My body arched against the restraints, and for several seconds there was no room in me for anything except agony.
It punched through my skull and down my spine, locking every muscle until a scream tore itself out of me.
When awareness returned, I was hanging entirely from my wrists.
I fought my way back onto my toes as warmth slid over my upper lip.
I tasted iron before the first drop of blood fell from my nose and struck the floor.
Then footsteps sounded beyond the dark. They held no urgency at all.
A seam appeared in the far wall. Shadow peeled away from it, revealing a doorway I hadn’t known existed.
Two men entered first in black armor without insignia, not a flicker of emotion disturbing features that might have been carved from the same stone surrounding us.
The man who followed them needed no introduction.
My body recognized him before my mind supplied the name, not because he looked exactly like Kieran—he didn’t—but because he looked enough like him.
Nearly Kieran’s height. The same dark hair, though silver touched the temples.
Kieran lingered in the severe line of his cheekbones and the shape of his mouth.
Kieran’s face could soften when he forgot himself.
I had seen it when he smiled for real, when exhaustion stripped away his guard, when he looked at me as though wanting me frightened him more than blood ever could.
This man had inherited none of that softness.
He wore black without ornament, and a narrow crown of dark metal rested almost casually against his hair.
Shadow followed him through the doorway.
Not Kieran’s Shadow. Kieran’s magic moved with him.
It reacted. It gathered when he was angry, curled toward me when he was distracted, sharpened when he sensed danger.
This Shadow crawled. It spread across the walls like damp seeping through stone, pooled at his boots, then sent thin tendrils forward until one reached my bare foot.
I jerked back. The chain above me rattled.
His gaze dropped to the movement before returning to my face. “Kieran never did tell you who I was.”
My blood went cold. “Kaelros.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. Kaelros Nyxara dismissed the guards with a flick of two fingers.
They left without a word, and the opening sealed behind them as Shadow slid back across the stone.
Then we were alone. The Shadow King looked me over slowly, not with desire but appraisal.
His attention caught on the torn left side of my dress where my Shadow rune had burned visibly through the fabric in the Solstice Hall.
“There you are.”
I forced my feet more firmly beneath me. “Where is Kieran?” I hated myself the instant I asked. Of every question I could have chosen, I had given him that one first.
“Alive, then,” Kaelros murmured.
“What?”
“The feeling.” His gaze sharpened. “I wondered how far he had managed to take it.”
“Where is he?”
“I heard you.”
“Did he survive?”
Kaelros moved closer, studying me with a patience that made the chains feel tighter.
“You watched a friend bleed out in your hands. You revealed forbidden magic before half the governing powers of Alareth. You were dragged from the Arcane Sanctum and brought across the realms in restraints designed to strip the magic from your bones.” His eyes moved briefly toward my wrists. “And your first concern is my son.”
“Screw you.”
“There she is.”
Shadow curled around my ankle. I kicked at it, but it wound tighter and climbed beneath the torn fabric at my hip. “Don’t touch me.”
“I’m not.” The darkness brushed across the Shadow rune. Pain flared so violently my teeth clicked together. Kaelros watched every twitch of my face before letting the magic withdraw. “That distinction will matter.”
Cold remained after it disappeared. He crossed to the chair and sat. Only then did I understand what the chair was for. Not me. Him. He had somewhere comfortable to sit while I hung.
“You have what I want.”
“You’ll have to narrow that down. Apparently I have a lot of things a lot of people want.”
His mouth shifted, almost amused. “Kieran taught you that.”
“Taught me what?”
“To put insolence between yourself and fear.”
I said nothing.
“It works better when your knees aren’t shaking.”
I forced them still.
“Better.”
“I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Your Shadow disagrees.”
“My Shadow belongs to me.”
“For now.”
My stomach tightened. Kaelros noticed, then reached into his coat and drew out a strip of pale gold silk. For one second, my mind refused to understand what I was seeing. Then I saw the frayed edge and the blood dried into one end. Vareena’s ribbon. My breath stopped.
“Why do you have that?”
Kaelros let the silk run slowly through his fingers. The last time I had touched it, I had been reaching across the Solstice floor while a chain dragged me away from Vareena’s body.
“Give me that.”
“Such an ordinary thing.”
“Give it back.”