After a moment that lasted an eternity, he looked away.
“Are you ready?”
She nodded, and they stepped into the darkened passageway together.
The air grew colder. Francine pulled her coat more closely around herself. Tiny lights glimmered on the ceiling, just enough to see their breath swirl in white clouds as they ventured further and further down.
At last they reached another door.
Julian took a deep breath.
“Here is the reason my family has lived here for centuries,” he said. His voice was rough, a ragged anchor in the darkness. “The shadow dragons have a duty that is greater than any one of us alone. We swore, hundreds of years ago, to protect all shifterkind against the greatest threat we ever faced.”
He touched one hand to the door, and it swung open.
The room beyond was enormous. Cold frosted against Francine’s face, and she pushed one hand deep into her coat’sfur-lined pocket; the other stayed in Julian’s, white-knuckled with tension.
She stepped forward. The room was more like a cavern, with smoothly rounded walls and a ceiling that rose like a cathedral. The walls here weren’t stone, they were ice. Ice so clear it looked blue-green, and then, deeper, faded to inky black. She couldn’t see any source of light, and yet the cavern was lit with a cool white glow that pulled facets of turquoise and emerald from the walls and ceiling.
A huge column of ice filled the center of the room. Francine’s lioness raised its hackles beneath her skin, and her shoulders rose, defensive before she even saw what was trapped inside it. A twisted shadow that loomed twice her height.
It’s a trick of the light,she told herself. But something pulled her forward. Her lioness let out a warning growl.
Nothing living was that shape. Her brain couldn’t process it, all wrong broken angles and textures that didn’t fit, strange splinters of half-recognized body parts.
And then she saw its eye.
“My god,” she gasped, and froze in place.
Her lioness would have reacted better. It would have made her find somewhere to hide and watch, until she knew whether this thing in front of her was predator or prey; it would have scented the air, pulled information from the creature’s smell, the way it moved, even the way it breathed, so quickly she would not have even known it was doing it.
But she was in human form, and her human side was terrified.
“This is it?” she whispered.
“The greatest danger shifters have ever faced.” Julian let go of her hand, and her heart leaped to her throat, but he quickly moved beside her and wrapped one arm around her. She was too frozen to sag against him, but she pressed herself against hisside, as though his presence would help ward off the utter terror she felt when faced with this … thing.
She needed to control herself. Julian would not be simply standing beside her if this thing was an immediate threat.
Even as she repeated the words to herself, she felt the tension in his arm, and the way his breath became shallow as he stared across the room.
She refused to make a fool out of herself and back down from a threat that he was brave enough to face.
Francine steeled herself against the ice that gripped her bones and stepped forward. Out of the warmth and presumed safety of Julian’s arm. Into the light.
The terror didn’t fade, but she could handle it. She was a Delacourt; she could handle anything. Her reason for coming here had turned out to be a lie, but maybe this could be her new reason. Her new way of making up for everything she’d done.
As she got closer, the formless shape within the ice became clearer.
“Wait,” she said, uncertain. Her confident steps dragged. “That’s…”
Julian moved to her side. This time, he didn’t put his arm around her. “The Soul-Eater steals shifters’ inner creatures and takes them for himself,” he said. “He is a chimera. The more shapes he steals, the more powerful he becomes—the more his monstrous nature reveals itself.”
Francine had to remind herself to breathe. The creature—person? Demon? God?—trapped in the ice was a hideous mixture of more animals than she could name. The chimera she was familiar with was a three-headed Frankenstein creature, part goat, part lion, part snake. Not this.
Scales twisted into ragged fur, into bare flesh and thorn-like spikes, over limbs that had too many joints and too many claws.
“My ancestors and the kraken lured it here, using the last Weaver of Souls as bait. She stood where we are standing now as he raged towards her.”
