She cried out as the light yanked her backward toward the transport circle.
Her feet left the ground.
His shadows exploded outward.
But even as he moved, even as his power lashed out to shield her, he knew he was too late.
Her hands grasped at nothing.
She reached for him.
"BRYNN!"
The word tore from his throat.
He lunged forward, shadows grasping, straining, trying to wrap around her and anchor her to this realm. To him. His hand stretched toward hers across the shrinking distance.
Their fingers brushed for one heartbeat.
Then she was ripped away.
Light seared his vision. When it cleared, she was gone.
The silence that followed was broken only by the wail of emergency alarms and the distant sound of barriers failing throughout the realms.
Dante stood frozen, his hand still extended toward empty air. His shadows writhed around him in anguished chaos, stretching toward something that was no longer there.
LXIV.
BRYNN
Consciousness returned in fragments.
Golden light wrapping around her, Caelum grabbing her. Dante’s shadows exploding outward too late. The bone temple. The transport blazing beneath her feet. Their fingers brushing before?—
Then nothing but spinning darkness and the sensation of falling through layers of reality.
Pain lanced through her skull. Her head had struck something during landing. Everything hurt.
Her arms wouldn't respond—pulled overhead, wrists burning with what felt like acid and ice mixed together. Every instinct screamed to pull free, to run, but her body wouldn't obey.
She tried reaching for the ward-sense that had become second nature, the connection to death magic that hummed in her blood since she'd started training with Dante.
Pain exploded through her arms. White-hot, searing, making her gasp aloud.
The restraints were designed to neutralize her abilities.
The smell hit her next, forcing her eyes open despite the throbbing in her skull: hot metal and ash, with that sweet-rot smell of old meat that made her gag. Like the slaughter district in summer.
The sky above had blood-red clouds roiling across a dark purple expanse, lit from below by furnace fires that turned everything the color of old copper. Ash fell like snow, stinging where it touched exposed skin.
She was chained upright against a pillar of dark metal, arms stretched overhead, feet barely touching scorched ground. The metal pulsed with heat against her back, like standing against the chest of some massive beast.
Old instincts kicked in through the fear. Years of casing vaults had taught her to think when panic screamed at her to freeze.
Except what she saw made her stomach drop.
This wasn't a chamber. It was a factory floor stretching farther than she could see through haze and heat distortion. Massive furnaces lined what might have been streets, their iron doors glowing cherry-red.
