Chapter 2
Two
Pyrite
Brielle turns her attention back to Daimon, her eyes filled with hate. Her brows pull together tightly the longer she looks at him. She tries to speak, but it comes out strangled. Spit dribbles from the corner of her mouth, and a vein in her temple pops out.
Sweat trickles down my back as the life begins to drain from Brielle’s eyes, the blood leaking from her face as he strangles her.
I yank against my restraints, desperate to do something.
Brielle is the piece that holds our wyvern fleet together, the stitch that weaves into each of us and cinches us tightly together. We can’t find the missing souls without her to guide us.
My hands tremble as I try to figure out a way to help her, hopeless as she stands against the Lord of Shadows.
But panic doesn’t overtake Brielle. Instead, the challenge ignites her. Her gaze sparks with determination, a fierceness I imagine she took into battle time and time again. There’s a warrior within her, lying just beneath the surface and begging to be released.
There’s a similar call within me, stirring under my flesh and itching to sink its teeth into something…or someone.
The grasp around my throat lessens, just enough that I can greedily sip more air.
“So this is where you’ve been?” Brielle spits out. I jolt at venom in her voice—the familiarity. “You just up and left us? We were your family.”
Family? Her tone may be sharp, but her words are uneven. Broken.
Daimon growls, and the chains of darkness tighten around our throats once again.
This time, the corners of my vision blur with haziness and my head grows light. If Brielle’s plan was to piss Daimon off, it’s going wonderfully.
“Ah, Brielle the righteous,” Daimon muses. He strides past me, stopping directly in front of Brielle. “Tell me, how did you fare without having me to follow around?”
He leans closer to her, his face obscured from where I’m trapped—stuck watching this exchange between Brielle and a man I’ve just met. A man Brielle seems to know in a way I can’t begin to understand.
Brielle jerks against her invisible bindings, rasping unintelligible words, garbled by the chains around her throat.
“What was that?” He holds a hand up to his ear.
She gasps, sucking in air.
Her chest heaves as her eyes meet his, and she says, “I fared fine. Evelina? Not so much.” His body goes deathly still, and Brielle huffs a laugh.
My breath stutters, recognizing their banter is far too familiar to be their first time meeting.
She nods in my direction, and I brace myself for what’s coming.
“And certainly not Lunaria—kidnapped to another realm with her magic suppressed her entire life.”
My skin turns to ice at her words. She’s trying to get a rise out of him. To distract him? I can’t be sure what her motive is, but my muscles tense in preparation for whatever happens next.
Daimon slowly turns his head toward me, his body still positioned in front of Brielle as he twists to look at me. If he feels anything from her words, he doesn’t show it. His eyes are cold and dark, his mouth pressed into a line.
“Lunaria.” My name leaves his mouth in a whisper—not soft, and certainly not kind. The sort of rasp that leaves a chill deep within my bones.
His gaze bores into mine, looking for something I’m not sure he wants to find. The magic binding me slips just a fraction. A flicker of my Essence builds within my chest, as if it were a candle that had just been lit. Not yet a roaring fire, but enough to hold onto.
It was the opening Brielle was looking for.
A wall of fire smacks into Daimon, separating him and Brielle. At the same time, a pillar of light encircles him, pushing in from his left. It has to be Leda; no other fae among our company could wield light.
Daimon meets the magic with his own, cocooning himself in a flurry of shadows. Through the darkness, his gaze stays on me. His eyes widen and his brows flick up.
A sound resembling thunder rolls into the air, crackling with strikes of lightning at each wave of magic that rams into Daimon’s shield of shadows.
Brielle shouts, her words muffled by the clashing of Essence. The wall of fire and light blocks me from seeing my friends, leaving me on the same side as Daimon.
Zephyr strains against her bindings beside me, her jaw snapping at the Lord of Shadows. His head snaps toward her, and she growls in response.
It’s just enough to distract him; his hold on me slips.
Magic coils in my veins, humming through me with a force so strong that I couldn’t keep it in anymore even if I tried. I want Daimon gone. If he won’t help us, he’s only in my way.
My turn.
This man could’ve been our salvation—our hope. He could’ve chosen to help us, to help me, his daughter. But instead, he took one look at me and decided I wasn’t worth hearing out. He thinks we’re foolish for trying to help the innocent, and that says all I need to know about him.
The only thing we share is blood, because this man is not my father.
With an ocean’s worth of fury, I reach down into the well of magic inside of me and yank.
If my magic is going to consume me, it’s at least taking Daimon down with me.
A scream erupts from my mouth at the same moment a torrent of shadows aims at Daimon.
Anything to buy my friends enough time to get away.
Brielle and Leda are still pressing their magic in on him, but he’s holding it with ease. When my magic reaches him, the chains around me falter.
The sound of wings flapping and Brielle shouting fills the air. Trees sway and bend as dirt flies all around us. It’s working—they’re getting away.
Tendrils of fire and shadow surround Daimon, pushing against his vile darkness and shrouding him from view.
His hold on me slips further, and my knees crash into the dirt as the bindings dissolve around me. Zephyr is still struggling against hers, but is able to move far more than she could a few moments ago. I force my Essence to push harder, now blocking Daimon in from all sides.
My magic flares, not showing any signs of emptying. I grin and look up.
His shadows wrap around my fire, snuffing it out and sending a plume of smoke into the air. But my shadows are here to stay.
They war with his, a likeness in each clash. The difference between him and me? I am not alone.
Smoke clears, so all that remains between us are our shadows.
The moment my eyes meet his, my smile fades. He’s turned toward me completely now, watching with curiosity. It’s then that my magic feels…stronger. There should be resistance where it’s meeting Daimon’s, but instead it feels familiar. Like home.
I’ve never used this much of my magic—power that I thought would weaken now that I didn’t get to finish my trial. But maybe it wasn’t what everyone thought; maybe not finishing my trial doesn’t have to mean a life with no magic.
A spark of hope fills my chest. Seeing his power before, I thought there was no hope of beating him in a fight. But now… It might not be a shot in the dark that I could do something to help us.
Daimon takes a step forward, a whirring of magic raging behind him, though he doesn’t seem to be fazed by it.
“Are you going to help us?” I shout over the rumble in the air.
He tilts his head to the side and pauses. “With?”
A growl rips from my chest, and I shove myself to my feet, my arms trembling as I aim my magic straight at him. He knows what we need help with.
“To release souls from the Vale that shouldn’t be there,” I snarl.
A slow smile spreads across his face. He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to.
He’s playing with me—likely laughing internally at the stupidity of the notion that we thought we could ask for his help.
There was a part of me hoping to bargain with him, find something he needs or wants and then do what I needed to do to give it to him.
He was never going to help us out of the kindness in his cold, dark heart, but everyone wants something.
Everyone but Daimon, that is.
He won’t help us—he’s nothing but a monster lurking within this evil domain.
The ground beneath me trembles, nearly sending me to my knees once more. Fear that my magic won’t hold grips my heart, but I shove the feeling away. Graylen needs me, and panic won’t help me get him back.
My gaze narrows on Daimon as my body tenses for whatever magic he’s about to unleash on me.
But his eyes widen—just slightly—and his shadows race for me, almost desperate in their need to get to me.
Tendrils of darkness snake around my body, and I realize he allowed my magic to push him away, because this grip is unrelenting.
Suffocating. Is he toying with me again?
Giving me a false hope only to prove to me how weak my magic is against his?
His nostrils flare, and he strides toward me, shadows billowing off of him as his shield remains in place at his back.
The ground groans so loudly that I hear it over the warring magic behind him. It splinters, and, like the realm is cracking in two, a split forms between us. In the same breath, a wall of rock, grass, and clay shoots up between us.
Daimon’s magic is severed as he disappears behind the solid mass of earth.
Zeph leaps to my side, her scales burning hot as she shoves me back with one of her wings. I jump on her back in one swift movement, watching as my friends do the same in my peripheral vision. My shoulders loosen slightly as we take each other in.
We need to leave before Daimon breaks through. I don’t think he’ll be asking any more questions this time.
The skies are dark above us, but it’s light enough that I can still make out the forest.
“We have to go,” I scream over my shoulder, seeing nothing but sheer determination mirrored in everyone’s faces.
I don’t know where the wall came from, but we’re not sticking around to find out. Dirt flies into the air as the force of a hurricane slams into it. Daimon is trying to get out, and it’s clear we won’t have long.
“Now!” I pat Zephyr’s neck, but instead of stretching out her wings, she simply looks up at the sky.
A growl rumbles from her chest as a massive, dark shape emerges from above.
My heart thrashes against my chest, each thump slamming against my ribs in a painful beat. We need to get out of here. Fast.
The air around us shifts, and a clicking noise pierces through the roar of Daimon’s shouting. With each shout, his magic rams harder against the barrier, causing the ground beneath us to rumble. Rocks pelt my face and my back as another punishing wave rolls into the wall.
Zephyr bolts into the air—straight toward the massive figure waiting there.
I hold on for dear life, the wind knocked out of me by the sudden velocity.
My eyes adjust as Zephyr stops her ascent to hover, her wings beating slowly as the rest of my fleet joins us.
But we aren’t alone.
In front of Zeph and me, another creature awaits. Soft, light blue scales shimmer through the darkness, framing black eyes and a spiked head.
The wall beneath us explodes, sending debris blasting in all directions.
“Brace yourself,” a smooth and unfamiliar feminine voice commands.
The night sky shrouds the face that belongs to the voice, and I don’t have time to think, because the voice belongs to a Rider atop her wyvern’s back. Moonlight catches on her torn green cloak, illuminating thick leather straps around her waist and wrists.
The Rider flies her beast alongside Zeph, their wings nearly touching as she leans toward us.
She’s unlike any fae I’ve ever seen, her features wild and unruly.
Her face is smudged with charcoal across her eyes and temples, and her hair is woven into a five-strand braid.
The fae’s cloak connects to a frayed hood covering half of her face, though her bright green eyes shimmer as if the sun were beaming directly on them.
Her hand raises in the air, signaling something to her wyvern that I can’t decipher, and I catch a glimpse of a white scar across the center of her palm. It had to have been a deep cut to not heal on a fae. I shiver at the thought, trying to figure out who the hell this woman is.
But it’s Calix who asks from my left, “Who—”
A burst of wind blasts my hair back as something flies past us.
Zephyr tenses beneath me as the strange woman smiles.
Wings beat in the air, and I realize the woman isn’t alone. There’s another wyvern.
Blur after blur crosses from up above, swooping into a nosedive toward the ground.
There’s not just one wyvern with her. There are too many to count…
And they’re all aimed at Daimon.