25. A King’s Ultimatum #3
And then the ghost of her went completely still.
She stood frozen before the open box, her head tipped slightly, her eyes open and fixed on nothing at all.
The shadows began to gather at the edges of her like ink bleeding into water.
Around her translucent form, they thickened, coiling, closing in.
And still, she didn’t move. Didn’t so much as blink.
“What is happening to her?” My voice scraped raw. “Why is she just… standing there?”
“She has been seized.” Theron’s gaze never left the vision. “The darkness has her. It is forcing her to see something… to live it.” His jaw tightened. “Whatever it shows her, she cannot look away.”
“Then show us.” I rounded on him. “Why can’t we see what she sees?”
“Because the Mnemosyne doesn’t show the memories of the mind.” His eyes flicked to me, almost pitying. “It shows the memory of the room. Whatever she witnessed inside her own head died with the moment it passed. This…” he gestured to the shadowed shape of her “…is only what the room remembers.”
I looked back at her, helpless, as the shadows wound tighter.
And then she fought.
It was sudden and violent, the way a sleeper wakes from drowning.
Her ghostly form jerked, her arms flying up, and her hand struck the box, knocking it skidding across the pedestal, the lid clattering.
She staggered backward, away from it, her mouth opening on a scream I couldn’t hear, shaking her head, her whole body recoiling from whatever held her.
She made it two steps…but no more.
The shadows surged, and they caught her like a hand closing into a fist. I watched, frozen, useless, as the dark hurled the ghost of the woman I loved to the ground.
Her head met the stone, and even though it was silent, I felt the impact of it land somewhere behind my own eyes, and a sound left me that I did not recognize as my own.
And then came the heart.
Above the fallen shape of her, a heart rose from the box of its own accord, hanging in the dead air.
Its pulsing rhythm faltered. Slowed down to a deadly beat.
And as it slowed, it came apart, its edges fraying into vapor, then smoke, then shadow.
All before the whole of it unraveled into a dark and glittering mist that hung above her still form like a storm cloud waiting to break.
It broke.
The shadow poured down into her. Sank through the pale skin of her chest, straight into the heart beating beneath it. Soon vanishing into her as though she had drunk it down. The last of the mist slid into her and was… gone.
The vision then shuddered and frayed and fell apart into nothing, leaving only the four of us in a cold stone room.
For a long time, no one spoke, and it took me a moment to realize I was on my knees. I didn’t remember falling, one hand braced against the cold floor where the ghost of her had struck her head.
“Gods above,” Lazaros breathed somewhere behind me. Aster had gone gray and silent, his fists clenched at his sides.
“It went into her,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine at all. “The heart. The darkness. It is inside her. In her chest. In her heart.” I dragged my gaze up to Theron. “Take it out. You saw where it went. Take it back out of her and…”
“I cannot,” he said, cutting me off without cruelty, which somehow made it worse.
“What you saw is no ordinary curse, Atlas. That was not magic poured into a wound. That was a thing of pure shadow, ancient and aware. And it has made its home in the very core of her. I could no sooner cut it free than I could cut the dark out of a night sky.” He looked at the empty box.
“There is nothing in all my collection that so much as brushes a power like this. I am sorry to admit that it is beyond even me.”
The words dropped into me like stones down a deep well.
“No.” I shook my head. “No. You do not get to bring me down here, show me that, and tell me there is nothing…”
“I said it was beyond me.” Theron’s coppery eyes lifted, and there was something new in them now. Calculation. The faintest, dangerous edge of hope. “I didn’t say it was beyond everyone.”
I went completely still… my body frozen in a chamber of hope.
“There is one,” he said slowly, “one who might be strong enough to help. A power old enough and dark enough that the shadows cannot touch him. It runs in his blood, the way it now runs in hers, only, where it would devour any of us, he commands it. If anyone in either world can draw this thing out of your queen and let her live to tell of it…” He paused. “Then it is him.”
“Then we go to him.” I was already rising. “Now. Tonight. Whoever he is, we will demand his help!”
A grim smile touched the corner of Theron’s mouth.
“You don’t demand anything of him, he demands it of you.”
“Who would dare to…” My own question was cut off as realization hit me. I knew who he was talking about, and that spark of hope paled considerably. Especially when Theron looked back at the box and ended his own thoughts by confirming mine.
“None other but the infamous…”
“Shadow King.”