I squeezed my eyes shut, searching for the tether that connected me to Draven. A memory hit me all at once of standing outside of my father’s door, the images he had thrown my way.
Time after time, he had convinced me that I was something more than what I felt capable of being.
You have never once been weak, Morta Mea.
I squared my shoulders, but it turned out that all of my inner debate was unnecessary.
Cries of alarm rose from the courtyard—too sharp, too distant for any Seelie to hear through layers of stone and frosted glass. But my Unseelie hearing caught every frantic syllable, just like my uncle knew it would.
I was already moving toward the balcony window, despite Lumen’s low whine of protest, when Vaerin’s voice reached me through the glass.
“Time to come out, Little Niece.”
I froze mid-step.
There was victory threaded through his tone, a satisfaction that bordered on glee. Something else had gone his way… and that couldn’t possibly bode well for me, or anyone I loved.
My feet went numb as I forced myself toward the balcony, dread pooling heavy and sick in my gut. A thousand terrible possibilities tore through my mind before I even reached the glass.
My ring was steady, but still, I reached out for Draven. He was still fighting. Still all right.
Which only left?—
Vaerin’s voice rang out again just as I stopped at the window. “Unless you want your sister to die more painfully than she already will.”
Wynnie.
My vision tunneled, my eyes searching frantically through the steadily amassing army.
It didn’t take me long to find him, even from several stories above. Vaerin stood just beyond the wards, at the head of the Unseelie army. And secured in the grasp of his deadly midnight shadows was the trembling form of my sister.
Chapter 47
Everly
For an endless fraction of a moment, I froze. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Then a shadow flickered across the ground, unnaturally large against the glare of the setting sun.
My mother glided down from wherever the hells she had gone when she left my rooms, stopping just in front of my uncle.
“Enough, Vaerin.” Her voice was somewhere between a warning and a plea, softer than his, but it carried all the same.
He didn’t move to attack her, but neither did he release my sister. For a single fraction of a moment, I believed that he might listen to her. And that I would have the chance to talk to them, to end this war without bloodshed, to save my sister without damning my kingdom.
But my uncle let out a soft sound of disbelief.
“Your failure to retrieve her left me no choice. What will it be, Everly? Your sister or?—”
Before he could finish his sentence, a blast of mana racked into the ground, the air warping around my mother enough to bring the warriors closest to her to their knees. And yet, my uncle was faster.
Shadows lashed outward, wrapping around my mother’s torso and her throat, muffling her voice and locking her limbs in place. Her emerald eyes widened in disbelief and fury, because his shadows were more than just binding to the body, they could also suppress mana.
My heart dropped into my stomach, Batty’s warmth against my neck doing little to thaw the ice in my bones.
I had wondered, so many times, why she didn’t just find a way to stop him, thinking it all came down to loyalty. It never occurred to me that she couldn’t... That he was stronger than she was, faster, more ruthless.
Would he hurt her now? Could he?
Panic ran rampant in my mind, Draven’s horror braided so tightly with mine that I couldn’t tell which emotion belonged to which of us anymore.
