“I don’t understand.” Katerina’s voice broke as the hope that had drained from her ever since they saw the gaping gate dwindled to nothingness. Her last, best prayer of saving Niko and the kingdom, gone. “How could the Guard possibly have gotten here before we did?”
Her friends had come to stand beside her. Together, they stared down at Dimi Novikova’s crumpled body.
“The forest protected us.” Sofi’s hands trembled as she signed. “It must have forced them to go another way, a shorter but more dangerous one. And when they arrived?—”
Katerina’s gaze swept the corpses at their feet, her eyes snagging on two of the Grigori that lay, half-shifted between forms. One had long, flowing red hair beneath a spiked crown of horns; another’s green-hued face was bisected by the same scar that ran from Niko’s temple to his jawline. They’d died as they always did, wearing borrowed faces and stolen bodies, intermixed with their natural shapes. But to take these in particular?—
The answer dawned on all of them at once. Alexei was the one to speak it. “The Grigori must have impersonated us. Perhaps the Druzhina believed they were pursuing us across the bridge. And then when the Guard arrived… Some of the demons already waited here, in ambush. Some emerged from hiding on the other side, and blocked any hope of retreat. The Druzhina came here to reclaim us. And they died here, knowing they had been played for fools.”
Katerina wanted to deny his assessment. But how could she, knowing he was likely right?
She and her friends had been the cause of this, at least in part. The Guard had pursued them, after all; having given its blessing to Katerina, the forest must have led the Druzhina’s Dimis and Shadows astray. But for the demons to cross the bridge in the first place?—
The magical protections here were the strongest in all of Iriska. Even far above the water, separated from it by hundreds of feet atop rune-engraved limestone, the Grigori shouldn’t have been able to cross.
“The fortress’s wards are down,” Katerina said, her stomach churning. “They must be.”
She turned without another word and headed deeper into the library, down one book-lined corridor after another, following the faint hum of residual power that led her onward. Half the shelves were toppled, their contents strewn across the marble floors. The corridors were windowless—which made sense, she supposed, given the need to protect the books from sunlight—but added to the disturbing ambiance. “Lux,” she whispered, and cupped the small flame carefully in her hand, so as not to set an accidental spark free.
Footsteps sounded on the marble behind her: her companions, following. There were more bodies here, as if this corner of the Magiya concealed something that the Dimis and Shadows who guarded the library were desperate to protect. Here and there, she stepped over the brown-clad corpse of a scribe, a tome clutched in their stiffening fingers, as if they’d died rather than relinquishing the books they were sworn to protect. The smell was indescribable—the sickly-sweet reek of demon blood, overlaid with the throat-closing stench of rot, and beneath it all, the incongruous, musty aroma of ancient books.
She fought the urge to gag and lost. Doubling over, her hands on her knees, she retched. A hand descended on her back, the touch tentative, and for a moment she thought it was her Shadow. But no; he would never dare to touch her so casually, not anymore. The hand on her back was not Niko’s. It was Damien, rubbing in small, careful circles the way he had after Ana’s attack at their campsite, pulling her hair back from her face with blunt, callused fingers.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
From the hallway behind them came a low, warning growl, so vicious every hair on Katerina’s body stood up in warning. Damien went rigid, then slowly, carefully stepped away from her, palms raised to show he meant no harm.
She straightened, wiping a hand across her lips, and turned to see her Shadow leaning against one of the half-toppled shelves, arms folded across his chest, his expression inscrutable. One of his dark eyebrows arched as he regarded the two of them. I may not be able to touch her, that expression said, but you certainly cannot either, not if you wish to keep your limbs.
Katerina had no interest in being fought over like a piece of meat, especially not now, with a pile of corpses at their feet and the answers they’d hoped so desperately to find snatched from their reach. Her heart ached, and her Shadow’s remote expression, devoid of warmth as he regarded Damien, didn’t do much to make her feel better.
Surely he knew Damien harbored no romantic interest in her. Had the Darkness distorted his view that much, where his territorial Shadow nature had tipped sideways into outright suspicion of his friends? If so, then it was eating away at his soul, bit by bit, just as he claimed. She’d argued with him every time, but here, in front of her, was the proof. The Niko she knew would never have growled at Damien for comforting her. He would’ve been grateful that another Shadow was looking after her; it was an unspoken promise within a pack to care for each other’s Dimis and protect them. For him to treat Damien this way meant only one thing: he was not himself.
She wanted so badly to be wrong about this. To continue believing that the Darkness wasn’t changing him. But the coldness on his face…the harshness of his growl…
What if the pieces of his soul that the Darkness had taken were gone forever? What if, even if they vanquished it, she would never truly have her Shadow back again?
The possibility was an ache inside her. Tears stung her eyes, and Niko’s shoulders slumped in shame. “That was out of line,” he muttered, gaze flicking in Damien’s direction. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Damien cleared his throat. “It’s okay.”
“No. It’s not. I?—”
Katerina couldn’t bear to listen to the rest of his explanation. She turned away, winding her way down the corridor, in search of the origin of that trickle of power.
After a moment, boots thudded behind her: her Shadow, following. He caught up with her, taking his accustomed position at her side.
“I’m sorry,” he said, low enough so that only she could hear.
“For what?”
“Everything, Katya. I know you’d pinned all your hopes on this. And for snarling at Damien. I trust him, and you. I know he meant no harm. I won’t make excuses for it. I saw his hands on you and I just…”
His voice trailed off as they came to a bend in the corridor. Here, a towering pile of books blocked the way, nearly reaching the ceiling, as if they’d been placed here deliberately. Katerina waved a hand, summoning a hint of her witchwind, and the tower crumbled, revealing five Grigori corpses and the bodies of two Shadows, blessed blades still gripped in their hands. On the other side lay a fallen Dimi, her mouth a frozen rictus and her eyes wide with horror.
“They made their last stand here.” It was Ana, who’d come up behind them. “But why?”
So many questions. Not nearly enough answers. And even if the ones Katerina and Niko sought were here, after all, there was no way to find them in this desecrated heap of volumes, not without the help of a scribe and likely not with one, either.
