Chapter 36
T hrough the tether, Alora ran, despite that steely darkness clouding it. Despite the screaming warning—the pain, anger, the rage—she didn’t stop following it. Down those mountain paths and through the castle to the place she knew she would find him.
I’m coming, Alora shouted, but Garrik didn’t respond. The castle only shuddered and groaned.
Wood cracked—split and fractured.
Servants screamed, fleeing the halls. She barely saw their faces. Barely saw anything but that silver. Barely felt anything but him there until she ran across that bridge to the raven doors and found worry dulling Thalon’s eyes.
“How is he?” she panicked, lungs burning.
Thalon leaned against the doors, arms crossed. An unbreakable pillar of a male that couldn’t be moved. There was no warmth—no sunlight—when he carefully warned, “It’s bad.”
Something spine-splitting exploded behind the doors, pressing into Thalon’s back and shadow, knocking him off balance.
A wave of unease crossed his features, and he slammed that muscular back into them with a wince. “ Her magic,” he gritted out when another explosion beveled the doors. “It has fully consumed him. He barely made it back before…” Thalon shook his head. “We can’t reach his mind when he’s like this.”
She’d never seen Garrik fully succumb to what the magic-washing left inside. Only ever hovering that thin line, never quite falling over the edge.
Urgency burned through Alora as she marched forward, embers igniting in her eyes, determined to open that door no matter what lay behind it. “I can help him.”
He shook his head and fiercely said, “No, Alora?—”
“ He’s done it for me. ” She suffered a breath and repeated in more of a plea than anything, “He’s done it for me.” Tears welled in her eyes.
“He’ll never forgive himself if he hurts you.”
“I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t go in there.”
The floor trembled, knocking dust and stones from above. Branches of lightning surged around Thalon’s arms, and she knew he was prepared to portal them away if that ceiling of stone crashed down on them.
Thalon dug his boots into the ground, gnashing his teeth as the doors behind him threatened to burst. Pressing into his back, into that incredible shadow that expanded and clung to the door like it, too, secured it from rupturing. A frost began to crackle and spread under the threshold. Their swords-master slipped on it and called on his impressive storm of powers, settling a portal beneath his feet of solid dirt, anchoring him there.
If one as strong and powerful as her Guardian could barely hold that door …
How did she believe she could survive whatever was on the other side of it?
Still, she desperately cried, unafraid, “He needs me.” It didn’t matter the danger. Garrik had been there at her worst. When she’d burned him with starfire, he’d still run to her. “He. Needs. Me.” She fisted her hands by her side and anchored her boots. Either on that bridge or inside that foyer, she would not surrender. Would not yield.
Unmistakable turmoil tightened his features. Thalon brushed those incredible, tattooed hands down his face, and she didn’t have to question it—he didn’t know what to do. Stuck between protecting her and the very real fact that their friend was lost behind that door, gold met the stones above them like he pleaded to Maker of the Skies for an answer.
The air around them shifted.
The threat of winter spreading across the bridge reversed, misting through the doorway, thawing frost in its wake. And that constant rumble, the trembling and groaning of the entire castle, died until nothing but piles of dirt and pebbles remained.
Alora met Thalon’s gaze with a silent question.
He barely had time to move before she thrust open one of the doors?—
Darkness . A solid wall of pure, unending darkness.
A warm palm loosely clasped her forearm before she could step further. Alora warily glanced over her shoulder as Thalon cautioned, “You must remind him what’s in here.” With his middle finger, Thalon tapped his chest—his heart—twice. “Remind him who he is. Who he’s not.”
Alora squeezed his palm and nodded. Without a word, she turned and focused on the darkness as Thalon reluctantly closed the door.
The room was utterly freezing when shadows swallowed her.
Starlight rippled down her body, making her a walking flame. Those beautiful shadows, heavy with pain and wrath and humiliation, danced like they were the night sky and she was the star it had called its own. Every brush against her stars and flames like a plea, an answer to something they had so desperately longed for, for so long, that only their powers could break.
Smokeshadows led her forward over the wooden floor teeming with broken things. A wall of shadows stopped her path when she stumbled, only opening for her in one direction when she moved on. Through the star-kissed glow of her flames, she recognized shattered pieces of marble, crystal, bloody shards that were once statues of Magnelis.
Was that the staircase? It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Chunks of it were scattered around, along with the silver railings.
She imagined this to be what battlefields looked like, only, instead of blood, it was memories slain.
The watery slap of her boot crunched broken glass.
Unless the windows had been blasted out on the level above and hurled across the foyer, she was at the fountain below. And by her next step into a pool of water, she realized she was and waded through the shin-high pool to where she felt Garrik’s presence reaching for her.
She willed her starlight brighter. The shadows opened …
Alora sunk to her knees like she’d been struck by a critical blow, soaking her leathers.
Garrik’s face …
He was under there somewhere. He had to be . The magic consuming him… Under the black veins marbling his skin so terribly that he was nearly covered in black. Soulless eyes didn’t move—didn’t flinch—as she raised her hands and cupped his cheeks.
“Sweetheart.” Barely recognizing her voice.
But he didn’t move. Just stared at a shred of canvas soaked in the pool in front of them.
A shadow gathered beside him, taking the form she had met in her tent. A coil of it formed a hand and brushed his face. They were attempting to stir him, too. To get his focus to leave that horrible picture of Magnelis staring up at him with as little heart and soul as what captured Garrik’s eyes. On the wall in front of him, Garrik’s mother was perfectly preserved and untouched. The faeling in her arms … nowhere to be found.
Turning to the shadow, Alora couldn’t see its eyes but knew its attention was fixed on her as she pleaded, “Get him out of here.”
She didn’t question how smoke felt solid. How shadow and ash and clouds whorling could grab hold of her.
Darkness unfurled and climbed up their legs. And before it carried them away, she saw the foyer engulfed, returned to everything it was before. Not a trace of devastation remained.
The moment the shadow closed the door behind them, Garrik slid to the ground. Still in a rage daze, he stared, unblinking, propped against the wall. As if he wasn’t seeing the couches, the fireplace, not even the rain pelting the window of Alora’s rooms.
Garrik’s hands were shaking, though. Fisted tightly on the floor beside him—which was bad because they were bruised and bleeding. One looked broken as if he’d punched stone over and over. By the blood-covered marble in the foyer, she didn’t doubt that’s exactly what he’d done.
Alora willed her heart to calm and ran to the bathroom. Shuffling through drawers and cabinets until she found cloth and oils scented like myrrh, lavender, and rosemary.
He was still staring when she knelt beside him and placed a bowl of warm water and oils by his leg. His skin was so frighteningly cold, but the overwhelming blackness marbling his flesh had diminished enough to reveal moon-white skin. She held onto the hope that he was returning to himself. That the effects of that bitch’s magic were settling and she would soon see ink leave his eyes.
Alora hadn’t realized how much she needed to feel him when the cloth dipped in the water and she took his shackle-scarred wrist. Where she imagined he’d wince or stir from discomfort or pain, he only sat there rigid, stiff.
Alora brushed the cloth over his hand in gentle strokes. Indeed, careful of broken bones and swelling, until not a trace of blood remained.
The shadow lingering at her balcony doors moved closer, and she turned to ask, “Can you heal it?”
It shook its head, slow and precise.
So, she splinted it, surrendered to the healing qualities of Garrik’s High Fae blood to do the rest, and continued on to his other hand. The trembling had stopped now, but how much longer would it be until he returned?
She reeled in every bit of courage to keep from sobbing and tenderly whispered to those vacant eyes, “Take as long as you need in there. When you’re ready … I’ll be right here when you come home. Just, please … come home. Come back to me.”
Clasping his face, Alora stroked a thumb over his cheekbone, pulsing warmth there. The other fell to his heart on the star-shaped scar and sent her warmth there too. That maybe … maybe her starfire could reach him there, if not in his mind. To touch him where he was still himself. Where the serpent couldn’t control him.
Daring to scan his body for injury, Alora found none. None other than his shirt sliced open from the princeling’s sword. It was only his hands. Those powerful hands that had laid into every surface resembling that awful male to blame for all this pain.
When she found his eyes again, the darkness consuming them had yielded to specks of silver. Alora’s shoulders loosened. Her heart threatened to stop in an uncomfortable ache.
A blink . That … that was a blink! And that was his lips parting, drawing a ragged breath.
Another blink. More silver. Another slow, shuddering breath.
There you are. Tears lined her traitorous eyes. “Hello, mighty prince,” Alora said quietly and stroked his cheek.
He studied her. Studied those words, those tears dripping off her chin. Silver narrowed, then unfocused as if he were fighting—clawing—out of his mind. Despite it, Garrik held her stare, head unsteady against the wall before the chill of his hand lightly grasped hers at his heart.
Then Garrik said the only thing capable of turning her taut nerves to liquid. The only thing that could give her life.
Some vital piece in her pulled her forward to rest her brow on his.
Garrik slurred, “Hello, clever girl.”