I run.
Faster. Gasping for air as I do. But he disappears into the mist. Another shape takes his place. Gold light, the flash of tails, and fanged grin.
“Raiden!” I cry.
He’s there, just for a heartbeat. Laughing like he always does when he’s about to tease me. But then he too fades into the thickening mist, the sound of his name dying on my tongue.
“Kael,” I whisper. “If you’re here...please?—”
A flicker of motion. A shadow coalescing into something tall and still. I can feel his presence like gravity. But when I reach for him—he vanishes like smoke. And I’m alone again.
I spin. The trees shift. The mist thickens even more. The stars blink out, one by one.
A pulse shudders beneath my feet. It's coming from me. I can feel it in my bones.
A voice speaks, low and layered, like a chorus of shadows:
“You are the key.
You are the lock.
You are the door left open too long.”
The sky above me splits again, and this time I scream, but there’s no sound.
No escape.
Just light and shadow.
And then—black.
THIRTY
KAEL
The world comes backin pieces.
Searing light behind my eyelids. The stench of scorched stone and grass in my nose. The iron tang of blood on my tongue.
Voices blur at the edges of my consciousness, muffled and urgent. I try to move, but my limbs feel like they’ve been carved from mud. My chest aches, deep and hollow. Something’s missing.
Then I remember, the veil bleeding, fighting, and Lindsay’s power.
I shove upright, the bed under me groaning. Shadows flare instinctively at my fingertips, unsteady and raw. My vision clears, heart pounding too fast.
I’m not outside anymore. I’m in the infirmary. The old wing. Ward runes glow faintly along the walls. Across the room, Raiden lies sprawled on a cot, tails twitching weakly as a healer murmurs over him. Nolan is unmoving on another cot, his hands wrapped in gauze, and a cut on his cheek.
But they don’t matter, not really. I skip my gaze over them, my eyes landing on Lindsay. She’s prone on the bed, the shadow silk of the dress I got her hanging off the sides. I stumble to my feet by sheer will. She’s too still as I move toward her.
Her skin pale against the white sheets, unnatural. The bright blue of her hair spread across her pillow like an unruly ocean. Magic cocoons her. The spell-scar on her skin glows on the edges, it’s growing, snaking further up her arm and across her collarbone. It looks beautiful on her, even if it is from the magic overload.
I cross to her before anyone can stop me. I don’t know how I’m moving. My knees threaten to give. My shadow lashes out around me like it’s frantic and confused. I reach out, but a barrier flickers in warning. Protective magic. Strong and ancient.
“She hasn’t woken,” Matron Isolde Cray says as she comes up next to me. “It’s a suspend spell, not one we cast.”
“What happened…after?” I swallow, my throat hurts.
“She overloaded,” Matron Cray says. “Whatever she did...it saved everyone. Sealed the breach. Stopped the attack, for now. But she didn’t come back with her magic.” She hesitates. “She’s in a magically-induced coma. One I’m not sure she cast on herself.”
