So that, in their next lives, Lì’líng and Tán’mù won’t spend half their lives in a halfling show pen.
Yù’chén swallows. He reaches out to brush a strand of my hair behind my ears. His fingers linger on my cheek.
“Forget about me, Àn’ying,” he repeats gently, and that is when the moon shifts, and everything in the room glows as though there is magic spinning in the air.
It’s a sign, for me: that it’s time to go.
I press my palm to his hand, leaning into his touch for the last time. Then I turn around and slide open the doors to exit.
The problem is, there is someone on the other side.
27
I am frozen in time, fallen back into an old, familiar nightmare. The woman standing in front of me is a ghost in the moonlight, shadows parting around her to reveal black hair and white skin and…red. Red lips, curved in that same smile; gleaming red eyes and that red, red garnet at her throat. The world blurs around me, and I see her face from nine years ago, looking up from my father’s open chest, his blood staining her chin and her teeth as she beams at me.
An illusion,I think.The same one you’ve seen for nine years.
But this is nothing like the blurred hallucinations. She stands before me, clear in the moonlight, larger than life. The raw fear coursing through my veins tells me that this time, it’s real.
I should scream, I should attack with all the fury and grief of the past nine years, I should drive my crescent blades into that chest of hers where her demon’s core sits. But somehow, at the sight of her, I cannot move, my years of training and fighter’s instincts dissipating like ashes. Before her, I am, onceagain, the helpless child of nine years past, kneeling on my kitchen floor and watching as she eats my father’s heart and drinks my mother’s soul.
It lasts only one moment. In the next, I am moving to palm Striker and Fleet, my arm lashing out in a slicing cut—
—which she easily sidesteps. I turn, but she is gone again, and that’s when I feel her arms wrap around me from behind, the soft purr of her laughter as she drags me against her.
“Be still, little flower,”she murmurs, and the power in her voice is unlike any I have experienced. All the other mó’s magic feels like rivers, whereas hers is an ocean, crashing down upon me and wiping out any possibility of resistance. I instantly go limp. My blades clatter to the floor. She holds me, caressing a hand across my face and neck. “There’s a good girl.”
Terror claws its way into a scream that’s trapped inside me, but there is nothing I can do.
The Higher One who killed my parents is here.
She is in the Kingdom of Sky.
Yù’chén has gone completely motionless, in that unnatural way of his that comes from his mó essence. A muscle pulses in his jaw. “Let her go,” he growls, and I have never heard such a voice coming from him: feral and unrestrained, dangerous enough to remind me of what he is, what powers live inside him.
“Why?” The Higher One’s voice is as melodic as I remember it. I can imagine the curves of her beautiful lips, the twisted sparkle in eyes that enchant so wholly and absolutely. “Do you plan to bring her along, too? As your plaything?”
My body is frozen, but now it is as if my mind locks up aswell at her words. I don’t understand. I can’t. But I’m looking at Yù’chén’s face as he stands directly across from me, his entire body tensed as though about to fight.
“Don’t,” he snarls at her.
“I would gladly give you all that you desire, Yù’chén,” the Higher One continues. “You know that.” The hands lift from my throat, and her voice commands in my ear,“Go to him.”
My limbs obey; I haven’t a choice not to. I straighten and begin walking to Yù’chén. He stands across from us, frozen; the wrath on his face shifts as another emotion penetrates it.
Fear.
His eyes flicker between me and the Higher One behind me, darkening with fury. When I reach him, he pulls me against him, but his muscles are taut, and I feel his heart pounding in his chest.
“Let her go,” he says, and his voice hitches, his defenses breaking. “Please.”
“But I already have,” the Higher One replies, the false confusion in her voice perfectly pitched to be mocking. “You want her, don’t you? I know you do; I saw what you saw in the forest, Yù’chén. After all, I was the one who led you to her when the huà’pí cornered her.”
The Forest of Nightmares, where Yù’chén confessed he had seen me dying in the arms of a mó. I recall now that I sawher,too, standing between the parasol trees, watching me through that gap between the realms. I thought her a ghost come to haunt me in the spike of my fear.
I was the one who led you to her.
Had she truly been there?
