We both bolted. My boots ghosted across the stone floor, and only the drum of blood in my ears broke the gasping silence. Again, we made it halfway before something slammed us back to where we’d started. My heart lurched, and dread curdled in my gut.
A frigid gust whipped through the hall, spiking the hair on myarms, carrying the cloying tang of soot. Shadows rippled across the wall beside me, morphing as they stretched. When they solidified, images wavered there before solidifying into me dressed in my masked ball gown and Lorant in his finest tunic and pants.
Gaping, I could not drag my eyes away.
His features were the same, yet wrong—too harsh, too cruel. His cold eyes pierced through the other me as he plunged a blade into my chest. Phantom pain rippled through me, stealing the air from my lungs.
Lorant snarled, and I glanced beyond him to the wall on his side of the corridor where another Reyla and Lorant circled each other, dressed in leathers, with their arms splayed wide. This version of me wielded my blades with savage precision, slashing them out at him. His foot caught on something on the floor and the other me laughed, a hollow, feral sound as she buried the weapons in his chest.
“No!” I staggered back. The images looped endlessly, and each strike of the phantom Lorant on the wall cut me while I stood stunned in the hallway. How could I fight something like this? Pain spiked across my right shoulder where a deep gash appeared, mirroring the cut dealt by the false Lorant in the wall. I bit back a scream, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw ached.
Lorant snarled as wounds also gouged across the exposed flesh of his body. On the wall, he was fighting me off, but she was much stronger than me. Faster. Vicious.
“It's feeding on our old emotions,” he cried out. “Heightening them, using them as weapons against us.”
It was cutting us apart with old wounds, cracks it suspected ran deeper than they truly did.
“Then let's show this fiend they're wrong,” I snarled.
Boots pounded in the distance, followed by the shouts of my guards, but I doubted they'd reach us in time.
“I believe in you. Lorant,” I said, slashing a blade near the shifting images. “I trust you.” Should I slay the fake Lorant? But that might injure or kill the real one behind me.
“Together in this and in everything, Wildfire,” he bellowed.
We pressed our backs against each other, our defenses fusing as one. Power surged around us as we both pulled it in.
When we lashed out, we’d do it together.
Light blazed at the opposite end of the hall, and the voices of my guards boomed through the air, the flashes and arcs of their magic searing into the warped corridor.
With a bitter shriek, the illusions on the walls cracked and splintered, shattering like shards of glass that dissolved into nothing.
The hallway brightened.
The walls solidified back into lifeless stone.
Lorant and I stood at the start of the quiet hallway again.
As my guards rushed toward us, we re-sheathed our blades.
“Did you say you trust me,sweetums?” Lorant asked, his lips quirking up on one corner.
I swallowed hard, forcing my lips into a smirk even as my muscles shook. “Always.”
28
Reyla
Iwoke before sunrise the next morning in my bed and stretched before rubbing my shoulder Lorant had healed.
I’d spent half the night thinking about what happened.Allthe things that had happened last night.
We’d only briefly discussed the incident in the hall and come to no conclusions other than that whoever was trying to kill me—and probably him—must be related to the curse. One person or many? That, we needed to find out before they struck again.
As for High Lord Zeiger, it wasn’t easy to take a life, but I’d done so in Lorant’s defense. I wouldn’t hesitate if I found myself in a similar situation again.
Farris yawned on the blankets beside me, his tail thumping.
