“No!” I shout, unable to keep my magic contained anymore as I watch Lyre’s head sink towards the ocean floor, a trail of dark blue following behind it. I flick my gaze back to the queen’s, my anger a living,breathingthing inside of me. “I willneverdo anything you command of me again.”
The queen’s black braids float around her like venomous snakes posing to strike as she tilts her head, letting the now empty bag drop from her grasp. She holds her trident firmly, angling it in my direction. “You will. Iknowyou will because you’ve proven time and time again that when it comes down to it, you would rather kneel under the weight of my wrath than stand tall at the challenge of your convictions. You’re weak, Daughter! You always have been!” Her sharpened canines flash in a devious smile. “But I have use for you yet.” She moves quickly, swinging her trident out an angle that months ago I would not have been able to deflect.
Even now, as I watch it swinging towards me, I know that what I’ve learned with Myla isn’t enough to fight her off. Not yet. But physicality isn’t my only weapon, and it certainly isn’t mygreatestone. Opening my mouth, I finally release the full weight of my song on a harmonious wave. Ithurtsto sing like this, to expose my magic toherwhen I no longer view it as a defect but as somethingprecious.Just as Lyre was. As her unborn babe was. I duck to avoid my mother’s trident, bubbles swishing in the water right above my head as the faintest line of confusion settles between her brows. My magic is slow to grip on to her, maybe her age or strength to blame. She laughs, the sound relaying how pathetic she finds me as she closes the distance between us in two easy flicks of her tail. But just as she is poised to strike me again, I push my voice louder andfinallystart to see the hint of my power leaking into her. It begins with her eyes, their dark edges growing hazy. She jabs at me with her trident again, but her movements are slower, more inaccurate.
Perhaps there is a monster within me that’s been created in her likeness after all because I smile at the panic that widens her eyes as my magic freezes her body and she begins to sink towards the ocean floor. I let my song fade as my eyes lock on hers, the emotion visible past the haze of my song bolstering the confession I’ve longed to give her.
“Ihateyou,” I whisper through clenched teeth, my vision blurring with brief tears before they are swept into the ocean. “For what you did to Lyre. For what you did tome.” I curl my fingers, my talons sharp and gleaming as I position them at her neck, nails pressing into skin. “You willneverhurt another being again, and when you are dead, when you aren’t around to ensure that yourlegacyis one of power and fear, I will make sure everyone knows you for what you really are. A wicked female no better than the creatures that belong in Tula’s pit.” I try to ignore how my heart beats out of rhythm as I glance down at the softflesh of her neck. Myla would not hesitate to kill someone like my mother, and yet, despite how I know her death isearned, I have to gather enough confidence to do it. Or maybe it’s bravery. Either way, I know that the moment my hands end her life, my own will never be the same.
Gritting my teeth together, I press the tips of my talons into her, a strange feeling surging when I see the first trickles of her blood. Something jagged takes root next to that ember of resilience within me at the sight, and I’m so mesmerized by it that I make a fatal mistake. I don’t realize I’m in danger until her hand wraps around my arm, holding me in place when I try to jerk away. Queen Amari’s face takes up the entirety of my vision as she blinks away the last remnants of my magic. My song rushes up my throat, my lips parting as the first note enters the water, only to be cut off. Pain explodes at my midsection, radiating up my chest and down my arms and forcing my voice into a guttural scream instead. The queen drives me backwards on the end of her trident, her expression nothing short of feral as I try to claw at her with my free arm. The first few swipes miss, but then the next one lands, the ends of my talons digging into her cheek and splitting the skin as I drag them down. Her responding growl is petrifying, her dark eyes alighting with vicious revenge as she moves her grip farther down the trident so that she is now out of my reach.
She swims quickly, and I’m forced to abandon trying to hurt her in favor of getting myself free of the trident. But I’m skewered, those jagged diamond dips more than halfway into my body, and I can’t draw enough oxygen through my gills to try using my song. “The thing is, Aria, I welcome being called a monster. For it is only a monster who can do what needs to be done to reclaim what is hers.”
White flares in my vision as she jostles the trident, the sharp prongs digging deeper into my flesh. Panic seizes my chest whilemy tail snaps in the water as I try to slow her down, a trail of too much dark blue mixing with the water in front of me. But she continues driving me backwards, until we are in the layer of the Spell and then our heads are popping above the surface. She pushes me to the shore before she pulls the trident from my body, changing to her mortal form as I try to do the same. The process is excruciating, and the first breath I take through my mouth burns as it fills my lungs, but it isn’t deep enough to satisfy the need for more. My hands try to cover the three holes her weapon has left in my body as I roll over, water splashing up against my shoulders and face.
At first, I think my mother will leave me here to bleed out on the beach, but then she is at my side, gathering my curls in her hand. I scream as she tugs on my hair, my hands reaching up to grip her own as she begins to drag me the rest of the way out of the water. My heels try to catch in the sand, to slow her down, but she yanks me forward, strands of hair snapping as streaks of blue stain our path. “I hope you weren’t planning on living after revealing just how much of an abomination you are.” I wasn’t expecting to, but if the price was alsoherlife, it would have been worth it. “I was disappointed when I learned Rhea had escaped, considering she still had you and more of my legionaries to heal. But now I think it might have been fate,Daughter. Because your betrayal is one that can only be dealt with in the most painful of manners.”
Dizziness sweeps in and blurs my vision, my attempts to hit at her arm and to kick my feet growing sluggish. I try again to call up my song, needing just a few seconds to get her back under my sway, but I can’t hold it long enough before I start coughing and the salty metal taste of blood fills my mouth.
This is it. This is how I’m going to die.
Planting her trident in the sand, she finally releases my hair, and I whimper at the prickling sensation that floods my scalp.But any hope that my torture will end here is temporary when my gaze lifts and I find the iridescent wall of the Spell in front of me, the shadow cast by my mother painting the sand. Without hesitation, she pierces my shoulders with her talons as she grips my body and heaves it off the ground. My vision flashes black as my head rolls to the side, the sound of water dripping onto the sand matching the slow beat of my heart.
Not water, I think.Blood.
Between one drowsy breath and the next, she tosses me through the Spell and into the Fae Kingdom.
My body slams onto the beach, sand flying at the impact, but the pain is drowned beneath the pressure that blooms at my chest. As if something is trying to break free from behind my ribs, gripping the bones with uncompromising strength as it attempts to pry them apart. Queen Amari sends a kick into my back, pushing me the rest of the way through the Spell and dooming me to a brutal death.
“Goodbye, Aria.”
Through misty eyes, I watch her retreat back to the ocean as I writhe in pain, my screams deafened by the heavy thumping of my heart, each inhale shorter than the one before it. My grip on consciousness slips fully through my grasp, dragging me into darkness.
There is agony, unrelenting and unequivocalagony, and then there is nothing.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Four: Myla
Sittingonthecold,damp ground encased by black stone and a wall of iron bars, I cross one ankle over the other and try to figure out just how many days I’ve been trapped in the dungeons. I had awoken to the sound of other prisoners in the surrounding cells, one of the male guards bringing me a meager plate of stale bread and questionable meat while I stillblinked the bleariness from my eyes. I didn’t eat then, sure that it was only going to be a short wait before the king arrived to see the female who called herself the Shadow. The excitement of watching his eyes widen with realization, of staring at the daughter he felt was an abomination, had provided me with sustenance that food couldn’t touch.
Hours passed, and I thought it odd that, as guards came and gathered those in the cells around me to be brought to the dragon fields, the king had still not come. When a new plate of food arrived from a new guard, I paced my small cell, sure it wouldn’t be much longer before I would be rewarded with the shock I so desperately wanted to see spread across my father’s face. But then more prisoners arrived and more were taken out—guards changed and more plates of food came—time becoming something I could no longer measure the passing of other than the fact that it must have beendays. Yet no one deigned to visit the fucking Shadow in the dungeon.
I tilt my head back and fold my arms over my chest, looking up at the black stone and imagining I can see through it to the palace overhead. Where life is continuing on as normaldespitemy absence. Then again, with the exception of Navin, would anyone even notice that I’m gone?At least Sunis has. Though I don’t know if that is such a good thing. With our bond so new, I am still learning how to decipher her thoughts and feelings and how to send her an accurate representation of my own. When I said I was trapped, I felt her fear unravel over me. It took quite a while to calm her down, so I decided to treat our conversations delicately until I could figure out how to get the fuck out of the dungeons.
Something that has eluded me thus far.
My body aches from sleeping on the stone floor, and I would kill the next person within arm’s reach if it meant I could shower with even the iciest of waters. A long bout of time passes, longenough that my eyelids grow heavy and my head lolls to the side as sleep once more wraps her arms around me, when the echo of footsteps travels down the hallway separating the cells. I jerk my head back up, my hands reaching for the sheaths at my thighs out of instinct, only to be reminded that I’ve been stripped of my weapons. My legs shake as I force myself up, keeping my back against the wall.
The light of a single torch down the hall casts the incoming figure in amber light, and I narrow my eyes against the surrounding darkness as I try to make out their features. But they are cloaked, their face obscured by dark fabric as their boots beat against the stone. The firelight dances on a bronze dragon insignia at their shoulder, and despite my circumstances, anger crackles low in my gut at the sight.They’re fucking dressed like me.
“Fucking gods above,finally.” Even without seeing his face, the sarcastic lilt to his voice is one I would recognize anywhere. Navin steps in front of my cell, metal jingling in his hands as he searches for the right key. “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to figure out where you were?”
“At least a couple of days,” I guess, peeling myself away from the wall to walk towards him.
“Tryfive. I didn’t realize you were missing until like a day in”—he slides a key into the lock, only to curse when it doesn’t turn—“which I know sounds terrible, but you can’t blame me when you disappear for long hours in the night to go to Khargis.”
“I definitely can blame you and plan to.” Folding my arms over my chest, I watch him fumble with a new key. Only for it to not work either. “Navin, hurry up.”
“Helpful, Myla.” Mumbling something else under his breath, he tries another key, and this time, we both sag with relief when it turns and clicks, and the door holding the iron bars slides open. “Anyways, I thought you had likely died in Khargis, so Ibegan searching the streets until I overheard one of the guards say they caught a female who called herself the Shadow.”
