“We should get moving,” Adriel rumbled, casting his gaze skyward. “We’re too exposed.”
Exposed because we were on demon lands in plain view of any who might be patrolling the skies. A chill shivered down my spine at the thought, and I drew my witchwood dagger.
Adriel started walking, shoulders tense, though I had no idea how he knew the way. The sun shone weakly behindthe thick blanket of clouds and dust, though in Dorthus, it never rose completely.
We walked for hours with only the crunch of our boots and the steady huff of our breath to break the silence. All of us were still soaked from our dive beneath the Tower of Souls, and I shivered as the wind howled across the planes.
My throat itched.
I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d had a drink of water, and after battling vampires, vikkarni, and the in-between, I was thoroughly parched.
To distract myself, I tried to picture the emaciated vampire who had ripped off his own foot to save my life.
Though I had no idea who he was, he seemed to know me. Or maybe he’d simply gone mad from being confined in the Tower of Souls with no mortals to feed on, drowning beneath those icy waves time and time again.
He’d said I was the only one who could kill Semphrys. But how could he possibly have known that?
Eventually, a few sparse trees appeared through the gloom, and my heart sank. We’d reached the edge of the Demon Woods — a forest inhabited by creatures so foul not even the demon court would have them.
Though I’d known of Adriel’s plan to seek out the Scolendra in the hope of procuring their blood, it felt wrong to be traveling away from the Dark Palace. Away from Kaden.
The back of my neck prickled as we entered the forest. Here the trees were old and gnarled, their roots unfurling from the earth like serpents as their branches intertwined to form impenetrable thickets that seemed to herd us along the path.
The canopy thickened the farther we walked, darknessclosing in as the trees above us snuffed out the muted sunshine. Sorsha summoned her ball of faelight again, though it did little to chase away the gloom.
Every so often, a shriek would echo from the branches above, sending a jolt of panic through me. A series of high-pitched cries would follow — the keening voices of monsters I couldn’t begin to imagine — which halted abruptly when those beasts became prey for something worse.
As we walked, soft, malicious whispers began to brush the edges of my awareness, but I hastily fortified the wall of thorns that formed my mental shields.
I knew all too well what could happen if I allowed those voices to burrow into my mind. Kaden had told me once that the creatures who inhabited these woods were made of the same stuff as thought — that the things whispering from the shadows would reflect my darkest thoughts back to me, twisted and distorted.
At the moment, my own thoughts were twisted enough. I shuddered to think what those demonic voices would say.
The longer we walked, the more my thirst and exhaustion began to take their toll. My stomach roiled painfully, and soon that gnawing, parched feeling became all I could think about.
We had no provisions — just the swords pilfered from the ship graveyard, a few of our own daggers, and the bundle containing the Death Bringer’s hands, which I kept securely fastened to my bandolier.
As the last of the daylight faded, my mood turned bleak. Darkness pressed in along the edges of my vision, and even with my enhanced hunter sight, I couldn’t makeout anything outside the glow of Sorsha’s little sphere of light.
Several times I tripped on an exposed tree root, stumbling into Adriel’s back.
“We’ll stop here and rest,” he said the fifth or sixth time this happened. “There’s a stream just through those trees. I’ll go hunt.”
Straining my ears, I could just make out the sound of running water. Relief coursed through me as I stumbled through the thicket of branches, dropping to my knees beside a narrow brook and dipping my hand into the frigid stream.
Kaden had warned me against the dangers of drinking from sources of still water in the Ravenous Woods, though he’d said that streams and rivers were usually safe. Even if my whole body recoiled at the thought of ingesting anything from the Demon Woods, I didn’t have a choice.
Bringing my cupped palm to my lips, I nearly groaned with pleasure as the cool water hit my tongue. Sorsha dropped down beside me a second later, and we both drank our fill.
Without the gnawing, brittle feeling in my throat, my mind felt sharper. My fatigue lighter. The two of us gathered as much firewood as we could carry and slowly made our way back to the clearing.
Sorsha was strangely quiet as I arranged the sticks and tucked some smaller dead branches into the center for kindling. She still looked frighteningly pale and wore a haunted expression.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, nodding at her left hand, which was pressed over the vampire bite.
With her preternatural fae healing, the wounds shouldhave closed, but I knew from experience that thefeelingof being fed on was often worse than the physical aftermath.
“No.” She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I was just thinking . . . After everything Kaden sacrificed for me all these years, I wasn’t there to protect him when it mattered.”
