“I called to you.” Skul Drek pointed to the place over my heart where the golden rope burned bright and heavy between us.
“Release me! I am not yours to summon or chain or—”
I cried out when the phantom reared over me as he’d done before, his flashing, cruel eyes a hairsbreadth from mine. “Soul to soul, I called you. If you desire to die, then do so.”
Soul to soul?
By the gods. My lips parted. “You are not a man?”
A cruel, thick, heavy laugh danced a shudder up my arms. “I am he, we are we.” Skul Drek placed an open palm over my heart. I shuddered beneath the frost of his touch. “But you brighten the dark.”
I swallowed, dropping my gaze to the hazy skeins of darkness billowing off his long fingers against my breast. “My soul…calls to you?”
“Yes.”
All gods. “That’s what happens? I speak to you,seeyou, in my soul?”
A low, haggard sort of hum was his only response. After a drawn-out pause, the assassin stepped back, dropping his hand. “I brought the warning. Stay away.”
For the first time, through the fissures breaking away bits of my own terror, I saw a flash of something in his eyes, something like his own worry. One breath, two, three, then I nodded briskly.
His palm slid away painfully slow. Skul Drek braced on his elbow, merely studying me from beneath his cowl.
I swallowed. “Why are you here?”Howwas he here?
Skul Drek’s head canted to one side, then back. He was studying me, absorbing me, as though trying to puzzle through a riddle. “You brighten the dark, and I do not want it to stop. No matter what you hear, do not chase it. Stay quiet. Stay back.”
The assassin touched my jaw. My skin hummed with a strange heat. He had me vulnerable, could apparently draw me into the mirror without my control, and still his touch stirred something like unbidden desire in my blood.
Gods, what was the matter with me? He was a trickster, a killer who’d nearly sent Prince Thane to Salur, and had caught me in his snare.
This close I could see the rage buried in the crimson of his eyes, the haunting flecks of black and copper. Otherwordly eyes.
I did not know what he was—a demon, a man, a dream.
Whatever he was, there was a disconcerting draw tethering me to a killer, and I did not know how to break it.
“You’ve come to attack,” I said, voice steady even when the realization struck. The only reason Skul Drek would be here was to draw blood, and he did not want me to be in the middle of it. “You don’t need to do this. We…we were working together, I thought. We were going to find the scattered bones of the Wanderer.”
“Not all is as it seems.” There was a bite to his tone, the cruel assassin was bleeding through the somber, curious creature he’d been.
“People I love are in these walls,” I bit back. “Good people. You take them from me, and I will never help you. I will not stop until Stonegate hunts you down.”
Skul Drek leaned closer until we were brow to brow. His skin was cold, like bathing in a frosted lake, but his breath was warm like the scent on his clothes—cloves and pine and dying embers. “I will say for a final time—stay out of sight.”
A rattle echoed in the room, like a pick worked against a lock. A fist pounded at the door.
Skul Drek reared back. At full height he was enormous, a looming shadow that drew in light until it blotted out.
The harrowing blare of a ram’s horn sounded from the distant towers. Sound was muffled at first, but with each breath grew clearer and clearer. The shadows of the mirror faded across the room, but for the first time, Skul Drek did not go with them. He remained, dark and harrowing, more solid than before.
How was he here if the dark realm faded?
In a rush, he made it to the window at the same moment the door crashed open.
Roark stumbled into the room, breathless and with a dark hate in his eyes when he saw the assassin. He cast a look at me, ensuring I was breathing, then swifter than a spark of a flame, Roark ripped one of two twin daggers from the sheaths on his thigh.
“Roark, no!” Strange as it was to feel drawn to the brutality and villainy of Skul Drek, I could not stomach the thought of Roark being harmed.
