Chapter Seventeen
It was hard to deny how good it felt to hunt beside Reyes, who walked beside her through the forest like a wraith, silent and quick and deadly.
Not even the creatures of the night heard them or suspected a threat.
They carried on from tree to tree and bush to bush, glowing eyes and flapping wings and scuttling underbrush. All was normal, until it wasn’t.
Reyes hissed and came to an abrupt stop.
Solana whipped her head to him and found him staring down at the dagger lying flat in his palm, the stones in the pommel glowing faintly like fresh blood in firelight.
She whirled around and slowly eyed the dark, inspecting every shift of shadow, every whisper of movement.
It was the chirp of insects that told her all she needed to know.
Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. The forest fell deadly silent and then a black blur darted from one tree to the next.
At her back, Solana felt Reyes shift into a defensive position, the tendrils of his gift soothing and cooling the ball of impatient energy that fluttered beneath her chest. Later, she’d need to ask him about it, but for now, she drank it in and braced herself for a fight.
It came at them like a rabid animal, teeth and talons bared, a snarl echoing in its wake.
Solana ducked and, without thinking, struck out with Reyes’s dagger.
She caught its side and grimaced when it screeched with fury.
Now it was angrier than before, if that were possible.
It skidded to a halt, muscles rippling, before turning its head only in a slow circle, like an undead owl in the shape of an oversized human, its bulging eyes all-seeing and wild.
“Fuck,” Solana breathed. Moonlight struck half of its face, and Solana saw that its teeth weren’t bared—the skin was simply missing.
There were only muscles and tendons and decaying bone.
A tongue shaped like a snake’s licked the air as if tasting them, and then it charged again, running backward, limbs and joints popping in and out of place and propelling it forward as if it were on strings.
“Reyes,” Solana warned.
The demon jumped, unlike anything she had ever seen, and flew over them, landing directly behind so that they were forced to spin around to keep it in their sights. And then it burst forward in a flurry of shadows and mist.
An arm swiped out and knocked Solana onto her back.
Before she hit the ground, the thing collided with Reyes, sending them both sprawling into a jumbled mass of limbs.
They rolled to a stop with the demon on top, and it paused with Reyes pinned beneath its arms. It leaned in, its mouth a gaping maw.
Solana was too far—it would rip Reyes’s neck open by the time she got there. She scrambled to her knees, reached inside of her to that place of surrender and power that allowed her to yank the tether she felt flapping wildly about, and stuck out a mental hand.
The demon’s head snapped to the side. Its fathomless eyes latched onto her.
The holes that were its nose flared, its tongue slipping past its missing cheek and tasting the air in her direction.
The familiarity in its eyes was both terrifying and enthralling, drawing her in until she felt the overwhelming urge to call it closer.
And then the moment shattered with a roar, violently shoving Solana back to awareness as Reyes swung the dagger into the base of the muki’s neck. Chest heaving, she held its gaze, watched the life drained from its eyes, its body and unbridled fury softening and slumping into a heap of death.
Breath held, Solana waited for the tide of sorrow to pull her under.
It flooded in with the force of churning waters, disorienting and unfamiliar, breaking down every barrier in its path.
Instead of bracing herself against it, Solana became the water.
She ebbed and flowed, tossed and turned.
The burning rage, the sharp relief, the unyielding torment, she absorbed all of it with hands and heart wide open.
It came and it went like a held breath released with a sharp exhale.
The forest came back to life slowly. A moth with white wings warily hovered over Solana’s cheek before it landed and clung to a lock of her hair.
Reyes shoved the demon to the side, slid his legs out from underneath its body, and scooted backward until his back was against a nearby tree.
Then he looked at her. “What was that?” he asked, shoulders heaving with ragged breaths.
“A monster,” Solana whispered, the tang of its fury still coating her mouth. The moth fluttered away and lost itself among the canopy of leaves. She kept her eyes on the demon as she edged closer to Reyes. “Did you feel any of that?”
He looked at her strangely. “No,” he answered. Elbows on bent knees, he inspected the dagger in his hand. “I felt nothing at all except—”
Through the trees, there was a crash and a sharp screech. The forest fell silent again. In Reyes’s hand, the red stone in the pommel of her dagger lit up like a small sun. He hissed and dropped it, but Solana was already lunging toward him and scooped it up.
“We need to run,” she said breathlessly.
Reyes shot to his feet and grabbed his dagger and her free hand.
“I know where we can go,” he said, and then he yanked her behind him, through the trees and up a steep incline, over gnarled roots and large rocks.
Solana’s hand burned, but her mind felt sharper and clearer than ever, her senses finely attuned to the muki giving chase.
If she had been in the city, surrounded by familiarity and with Sami at her side, she would have known exactly where to go. But as it was, the forest floor was unfamiliar, the trees an obstacle she didn’t know how to overcome, the muki somehow more terrible than the ones she knew.
Everything felt different and wrong.
Finally, Reyes pulled her over a rocky outcropping, into the mouth of a small cave that was wet with cold. What little light there was disappeared, but Reyes kept a tight hold of her hand, his steps steadfast as he guided her deeper and deeper.
She allowed herself to be led, to be pulled further into the dark and her trust in Reyes.
There had been a time when she would have wondered if he was planning to murder her and dispose of her body far from where anyone could find her, but that time had seemingly passed.
Instead, her hand in his felt safer than anything else. More natural than letting go.
Solana did exactly that, an old habit for self-preservation rearing its ugly head. Reyes won’t notice. Her hand in his was the least of his concerns at the moment.
But he paused, and she felt him searching the space between them for her once again.
“Solana?” He said her name as if he sensed the trail her thoughts had taken, and though it was dark, she could imagine the way his eyes glinted while they darted back and forth, searching for her. “We’re almost there.”
She wrapped her fingers around his waiting hand. “Sorry, I had an itch.”
The lie was hollow, but Reyes accepted it all the same and tugged her forward, grip tighter than before.
They turned a corner, and the space opened.
The chill in the air deepened and sent a shiver down her spine.
Reyes was the one to let go of her this time, but only for a moment before a small, circular light appeared above his palm.
It was a miniature version of the globe lights in the castle, and it sent a pale blue wash over their faces.
“You can manifest,” Solana said, lifting a finger to prod at it.
Supay’s magic was the most creative of all, in her opinion.
The ability to will something into existence.
She had never seen it up close. Could never have imagined that the results were so tangible.
And then there was Reyes, with not one gift, but two.
“Not very well,” he admitted easily. As if on cue, the small light sputtered and then solidified again. Shadows flickered over the space they were in, some sort of entrance where beyond she could sense an even larger space that bent away from the light and drifted into complete darkness.
“My father is—or was—from Supay, but my mother is from Achiq.”
Solana listened and hummed as something caught her attention. She stepped closer to the wall with eyes narrowed. “Your healing gift is from her?” she asked absentmindedly.
“It is. She doesn’t have it herself, but—”
Reyes’s voice faded, replaced by the whispering dark and the strangest urge to reach out and touch the wall.
Running through the dirt were veins of something darker, something iridescent and unknowable, a stone she had watched turn to a bloody red before her eyes.
It beckoned her closer, tempted her to touch and feel and take.
Solana had never been good at avoiding temptations, and when her fingers pressed against the veins of himaya, the longing she felt stirring in her belly sucked her under and wrapped a fist around her lungs until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
Couldn’t help but finally see.
Deep underneath the earth, far below the living and closer to the dead, was a room of stone.
A place where life and death met and swirled in a delicate balance, where the pulse of the heart of Supay could be felt through the ground and the air was perpetually cold.
The black stone spread like a spiderweb through the core of the land, the blood of their god solidified, invasive and consuming.
Two men kneeled in the center of the room, their palms pressed to the earth where the black stone was the thickest. One who believed he could use his blood to cure, one who intended to use his blood to command, their intentions swirling thick in the air.
They poured their gifts into the rock. One shone blue, the other red.
One with eyes like onyx, the other crystalline.
Both of them bent in supplication, in desperation.
A roar rent the air. The walls shivered.