Chapter 18
Eighteen
OTHERNESS
No.
What?
How could this man have possibly known that?
Gregory was visibly overwhelmed. “What on Wünder are you even talking about?”
The rogue’s triumph over my capture overwhelmed his other intentions. “It’s nothing you ought to be concerned about, Your Highness. All you need to know is that we have to take her away now.”
“Are you sure it’s her, Tannis?” one of the other villagers asked.
Tannis. He was one of the men who had abducted me the other day.
Swallowing hard, I tried to turn to see his face, but the angle in which he gripped me strained my movement. I supposed it was nearly impossible for me to recognize him anyway, since I couldn’t even remember anything from my real life.
Did I know this man before? Was he from my world too? Was anyone else from my world here?
The machine howled louder.
“Are we interrupting?”
The king appeared first, his dark presence filling the doorway as though the space itself recoiled to make room for him. Sophie was close behind, pale and wind-flushed, her gaze finding me at once.
Tannis jerked the knife tighter against my throat.
“Back off,” he barked, fear bolstered by adrenaline. “All of you. One more step and I cut her.” His hands shook, the blade scratching the skin of my neck. I didn’t imagine they planned to encounter the Wicked King in their tiny village.
Sophie froze.
The king did not.
His expression was unreadable, almost bored, though I knew him well enough to sense the sharpened attention beneath it. His gaze slid to mine, narrowing ever so slightly at the point of the knife against my neck.
The armed villagers surrounding us did not seem to trouble him in the slightest.
A darkness stirred at his feet.
His shadows spilled outward in slow, silent tendrils across the warehouse, creeping between crates and under floorboards, winding closer to the men inch by inch with patient intent. The villagers noticed too late, horror on their faces as the blackness reached their boots.
But before anyone could blink, a vast spiral of searing, blinding light burst to life before us with a sharp pop and a furious crackle, unfurling in the center of the warehouse like a wound torn through the world.
The whirling maelstrom phenomenon screamed to life.
Wind rushed inward, dragging snow and loose debris into its spinning glow, while the air filled with the scent of ozone and scorched metal.
The first shout had barely left anyone’s throat when several villagers broke ranks in panic, shoving past one another as they lunged for the maelstrom to escape, their silhouettes swallowed whole by the blinding whirl one after another.
Gregory moved before I fully understood what I was seeing.
His steel flashed from its sheath in one smooth motion, and suddenly the warehouse rang with the sharp, brutal music of combat.
His blade turned aside a pickaxe strike before driving the attacker backward into a rack of tools.
Another rushed him from the side, only to be met with a pivot so swift it seemed effortless.
Tannis wrenched backward, the knife scraping deep enough to break skin.
I cried out as he attempted to drag me with him—but black shadows had already coiled around his legs and torso, locking him in place.
A sharp tug yanked him away, his knife clattering to the floor amid a carpet of shadows already receding.
With another yelp, I fell to the floor with a thump.
The king moved through the melee like a force of nature, his shadows binding several men in writhing darkness while he struck down two more with his bare hands, wielding violence on every front.
Sophie held her own. She darted low across the buckling floor toward the far corner, skirts gathered in one hand.
But when a man lunged to catch her, she twisted with startling speed and dragged a small dagger across his forearm.
He yelped, blood splattering the ground, and she slipped free to the shelter of overturned crates.
Ignoring the bleeding cut on my neck, I scrambled to straighten up.
My fingers flew to the inner pocket of my coat, fumbling past herbs and tools until they found the small glass vials. I yanked one free, then another, cracking them together with shaking hands. Powder hissed and sparked in my palm.
I threw it.
The flash detonated in a burst of white brilliance that filled the shed like lightning trapped indoors. Several villagers cried out, clutching their faces, stumbling blindly into one another as Gregory cut through the opening I had made.
As if in response, light burst through the glass chambers of the fantastical contraption in violent pulses, and the air inside the shed convulsed.
The walls bent inward and outward at once, timber stretching like wax before snapping back.
Tools hanging from hooks multiplied, blurred, then spun in impossible directions.
The floor lurched beneath my feet as though it had forgotten how to remain level.
Gregory grabbed Sophie as the doorway warped sideways.
I reached for the frame and found my hand passing through the splintered wood that suddenly wasn’t where it should be.
“What’s happening?” Gregory’s eyes narrowed.
The villagers didn’t seem the least bit shocked by the anomalies occurring all around us. Most of them were too busy trying to jump into the maelstrom to flee.
There were too many things happening at once—shouting, steel and splintering wood, the machine’s shriek, the walls bending in and out. I backed away on instinct, my pulse thundering.
I looked down.
My hands were fading.
No—flickering.
One heartbeat, they were solid—flesh and blood, trembling fingers dusted with powder. The next, they turned pale and translucent, the warped boards visible through them, before disappearing again. My arms followed, then my torso, my whole body phasing in and out of existence in jagged pulses.
Phasing back to normal, I stumbled back with a strangled gasp.
The fighting faltered, shock cutting through fury as faces turned toward me. Even the villagers recoiled. Sophie stared, her face white as frost. Gregory lowered his blade. Nobody else was losing their hold on existence.
“It is her,” one of the villagers cried out with a wild gesture of his arm toward me. “She’s the one the general was talking about. He says this is all her doing. They say she barely even felt anything when they crossed through the maelstrom at the river.”
“Shut up!” Tannis hissed. “Let’s get out of here.” With a shove, he leaped into the swirling mouth of the anomaly, disappearing into thin air.
But dread skittered across my skin at his words.
I was the what…?
Who the hell was this general? How could he possibly have known me?
They must have had someone monitoring the riverbanks for anyone who used their incredible machine. There was no other way anyone could possibly have known its effects on me—or rather, its ineffectiveness.
But what else did he know?
Did he actually know me?
And what fault could he possibly have been accusing me of?
Despite the alarm turning my stomach, my curiosity burned.
The light around us twisted. Shadows detached themselves from their owners.
Gregory seemed suddenly twice as far away, then close enough to touch.
A fallen man rose halfway through the floorboards before dropping back down as though gravity had changed its mind.
With another howl, large translucent spheres bloomed into existence, shimmering with that familiar iridescent sheen.
“Those spheres.” Sophie’s eyes widened in revelation. “Like the ones from the kingdom this morning. They were created by this machine.”
Somehow, my energy drained, my knees buckling.
“Allie—” The king caught me. I hadn’t even realized he had returned to my side. With a wave of his hand, a shield of shadow and fog covered my entire body.
Bewildered, I looked up to meet his gaze. “Rabb, what is it?”
“Some type of strange aura.” His face twitched—his shadows flickering too.
Whatever this energy was, it was strong.
Strong enough to make the most powerful tyrant king on Wünder struggle.
He lifted his hand as if to command his shadows to swallow the wild machine itself, but he grunted. “We have to get you away from here.”
Gregory waved Sophie over, and the four of us raced out of the warehouse just as a sudden wave of energy kicked back from the machine. Its hum changed frequency as the sound slowed down, before the sound got louder.
The maelstrom’s swirling was growing faster and faster, the machine’s flashing lights pulsing harder and harder—before the entire contraption exploded in bright sparks. With violent hissing, shards of metal flew outward, and debris whistled past us as we ran for cover.
Narrowly missing getting impaled, we burst out of the warehouse into a blizzard, stumbling through the lane as shouts erupted behind us.
Several of the villagers had been caught up in the explosion.
The entire image of the warehouse seemed to weave in and out of reality, blurring into the mountainside.
Snow kicked up beneath our boots, the cold air knifing into my lungs.
The king’s hand wrapped firmly around mine, his face set with grim focus. He shot Gregory the darkest of looks. “I leave her in your care for a moment, and she ends up bleeding, held hostage, and almost abducted again?”
Even as he ran, Gregory sneered back, “I was going to reason with the villagers before you stepped in and forced their hand.”
The king barked a mocking laugh. “So this is my fault?”
Sophie hissed chidingly. “None of us could have foreseen that.”
An odd roar grew from behind.
I cast a puzzled glance over my shoulder.
What had been a sleepy, quiet village had transformed into a war zone as every able-bodied villager had emerged. They poured out through doorways, from alleys, from behind fences and carts. Frenzied men and women charged after us with axes, sticks, blades, and tools turned into weapons.
Eyes wide, my mouth dropped open. “Are they chasing us?”