“Once again, Esther Esme Salem,” Dayn says, his voice low and scorching, a draconic growl simmering beneath the words as they resonate through the very air of this realm, “you underestimate the power of your own blood.”
A strange sensation prickles the back of my neck, then. It starts as a subtle warmth, a phantom touch against my skin, just below my hairline. It’s so out of place in this sterile void that I almost think I’m imagining it. But it grows, spreading like sun-warmed honey, a steady, grounding heat.
For a flickering, impossible second, the gray void dissolves and I’m kneeling in Merlin’s chamber again, the scent of stone and candle wax sharp in my nose. And I can feel him. Dayn, standing behind me, his hand resting on the back of my neck, thumb stroking my skin with a possessive, gentle pressure. A jolt, hot and liquid, shoots through me at the thought, but then the sensation blurs, and I’m back in the gray void, my heart hammering against my ribs.
The bookshelf of my life shudders, glass panes rattling. Dayn’s golden light beats against Esther’s spectral storm, a sun trying to hold back a blizzard of black ice. He is a shield over my past, a furious, living wall between my grandmother and the memories she wants to excise.
“You have meddled for the last time,” Esther hisses, her form coalescing into a needle-sharp point of pure will. She drives herself at him, and the impact sends cracks spiderwebbing through the gray nothingness around us.
Dayn meets her charge, a low growl tearing from his throat. His power is raw, primal, a territorial fury I’ve never seen him unleash. It’s not just a shield anymore; it’s a weapon. Golden talons of light slash at her spectral form, and she’s forced to recoil with a silent scream that makes the memories on the shelf flicker and dim. They are tearing this place apart. They are fighting over the pieces of me.
I’m about to scream “STOP,” when another sound pierces the void.
It is faint at first, a high, thin wail from impossibly far away. And I somehow know it’s not part of the trial. It’s real. Thesound slices through the sterile space, followed by another, deeper and more guttural—a horn, its note long and desperate. The gray fabric of the void ripples, and I know we have taken too long.
The void shudders violently, and this time it’s not from their fight. Another sound echoes through. A roar, distant but very real. The sound of a city-sized beast bellowing its rage to the heavens. And then another. And another. An army. Annihilation. And they are close. Too close.
Dayn and Esther break apart, both turning toward the source of the disturbance. The screaming resolves into words, frantic, leaking into the construct from the outside world.
“—the weakest eastern boundary is down! I repeat: emergency breach response NOW!”
They’re here. The dragons are here. They’ve already breached Darkbirch. And we’re not ready.
Dayn’s head whips around, his eyes locking with mine across the void. The golden light of his spectral form wavers, his focus torn. The fight for my soul has just been brutally interrupted by the fight for our lives. The fury in his expression is replaced by a cold, terrible urgency. He has to go back. He has to protect our physical bodies, still kneeling and standing on the floor of that chamber.
His form begins to dissolve at the edges, turning translucent. He reaches for me, hand still firm and outstretched. “Esme, come with me. Now. I can pull you out.”
But Esther is faster.
“She finishes what she started,” my grandmother snarls, her form coalescing into a furious specter. Before I can react, before I can even think to take Dayn’s hand, she is on me. Icy tendrils of spirit energy wrap around my waist, my arms, my throat, pulling me back from him. The cold is absolute, seeping into my bones, paralyzing me.
“No, wait!” I grate out, struggling against her grip.
“Esther, don’t!” Dayn’s voice echoes, laced with a fury that transcends the boundaries between worlds.
But it’s too late. My grandmother yanks me backward, pulling me away from the bookshelf, away from the sounds of war, away from him. The gray void stretches, distorts, and I am dragged into a deeper, darker nothingness. The last thing I see is the furious, golden blaze of Dayn’s eyes before I am swallowed by the silence and the dead’s suffocating grip.
38
DAYN
Therecoil is like a physical violence. My consciousness slams back into my body with the force of a thunderclap, the sterile gray void replaced by the scent of stone and smoke. My hand is still on her neck. The skin is warm, the pulse beneath it steady, but the connection—the golden thread that let me follow her into that soul-rending abyss—is gone. I had no choice but to let go.
A curse, vile and ancient, coils in my gut.Esther.That meddling, power-hungry ghost. And Anees—that scheming, patient bastard—whose timing is so impeccably infuriating it could only be born of a millennium of treachery.
Blythe is staring at me, her face pale, her eyes wide with a nervousness that has nothing to do with the trial. The chamber is trembling, dust sifting from the ceiling. A distant, percussive rumbling vibrates through the floor, a sound I know in my bones. Dragonfire.
My thumb glides over the skin at Esme’s nape, and for just a moment the world contracts around the sensation. The give of her skin, the stuttering pulse beneath it... I want everything elseto fall silent. I want the void, the fire, the chaos above us to disappear until there’s only her, under my hands, breathing for me.
I want to scoop her up, carry her to the deepest, most fortified hole in this gods-forsaken institute and stand guard over it myself. But the chamber shudders again, and I know with sickening certainty that right now, the safest place for her physical body is here, in this magically shielded tomb, with the old warden. Up there is hell.
But I cannot leave her like this. Not to that ghost. Not while I go to war.
Before Blythe can react, I move. I snatch up the ceremonial dagger from the altar and draw it across the pad of my thumb. Blood, thick and dark and flecked with the gold of my bloodline, wells instantly.
“What are you doing?” Blythe’s voice is sharp, her body tensing to intervene.
I don’t look at her. I don’t need to. “Touch me, Warden,” I say, the words a low, lethal vibration in the trembling air, “and I will burn this chamber to slag with you in it.”
