Because I don’t belong here.
I knowit.
The souls know it.
Thisplaceknows it.
A wraithlike being in a red cloak ushers souls through the gate. Some go left. Some go right. Some go straight through. Then he looks up with two glowing orbs for eyes and spies me.
Trespasser.
I try to get up, to run, but everything is all wrong. It’s like I’m moving through water, my motions dragged down by some invisible weight.
I turn. Nephele and Colden are behind me, on their sides, still secured by crimson shadows. Both wear expressions of panic. I want to go to them, but a shadow loops around my middle, holding me tight. It’s struggling, because I’m tethered elsewhere, a tremendous pressure on my insides, in my chest—around myheart.Like something’s pulling the organ in two.
More crimson shadows glide across the ground in bright tendrils. I sit back and jerk my hands away as one creeps over my shoulder.
Then comes that chilling, jaw-clenching laughter, slipping in with the shadows, curling up and over and into my ears.
The Prince of the East looms like a jailer, like someone whodoesbelong here, God Knife strapped to his hip.
“Welcome to the Shadow World, you three,” he says, the seeping gash in his face a reminder that this is not a dream. “We can’t stay long. This place likes to keep interlopers, so I only use it when I absolutely must. The question is, where to go from here?”
Colden jerks up like a snake and strikes out at the prince. The shadows holding the king bound coil tighter and tighter until he cries out, his body flung back to the hard ground.
“Try that again, handsome,” the prince says, “and you’ll wish you were next in line with the dead. I have to keep you alive, but I don’t have to make it a comfortable existence. You would do well to remember that.”
I close my eyes, trying to steady my thundering heart, but something happens. Something strange. I might as well be one of the souls hovering over Frostwater Wood, because suddenly, I’m there. I can see the bloody path, a red slit cleaving the white forest.
Swooping like the prince’s crows, I move closer, a bird’s eye view. My body is there, on Winter Road. And yet…I’m here. In the Shadow World.
Alexus sits in the snow, his wounded leg outstretched. I’m lying before him, my head resting in his lap. Hel and Rhonin kneel at my sides. The look on Hel’s face is one of conflict and desperation as she hands Alexus a dagger—Rhonin’s dagger. The blade I threw at the prince.
With the steadiest of hands, Alexus presses the sharp tip to the thick muscle of his chest, a smooth patch of skin next to the runes I’d so eagerly dragged my teeth across the night we almost took one another, runes I’d touched with tender fingers in the cave.
He carves a sign into his skin, two bleeding, parallel grooves with a single dot in the middle, joined by a V-shaped line.
Lowering the dagger, he pushes my hair away from my neck and runs his hand over the swell of my breast. Then he cuts me, just under my collarbone, making the same mark. Thin rivulets of blood spill from the wound.
He gets to his knees, wincing from the pain in his leg. Reverently, he threads our fingers together and lowers his forehead to mine, rocking gently, a similar ritual to the one he performed that night in the wood, when he killed all those men. He’s pleading—or praying. I can’t tell which, but I feel him so wholly.
He’s trying to bring me back to the other side.
I open my eyes, my heart pounding harder. But I’m still in the Shadow World.
The prince stares at me, runs his eyes over me, his smug smile falling. “Un Drallag never gives up, does he? Well, two can play at this game.”
He walks away, flicking a hand over his shoulder. His shadows writhe, and me, Nephele, and Colden are drawn upon once more, being bled from the earth—through the Shadow World toward some great divide, fading further from the Northlands. Further from safety. Further from home.
This realm is only a stop. A path. A portal.
A risk, but still a way for a man made of shadows, souls, and sins to escape with what he wants.
But where is he taking us?
One of the tiny darknesses inside my chest hums and churns and sparks, a little lightning storm fluttering around my heart. It’s strange, that connection, that reaching out of energies, but I cling to it.
Cling tohim. Alexus.
