He scrambles toward her, calling her name again before he reaches her.
She stirs a moment before he pulls her into his arms and tilts his head to hers.
“Lucian?” Her voice is weak and barely audible above the raging wind that beats across the mouth of the cave behind us.
The freezing cold surface beneath my knees makes me shiver. Our pants and tunics are no match for the iciness of our surroundings.
Lucian’s voice is too soft for me to hear what he says as he murmurs to Anarchy, pressing his forehead to hers while her palm cups his cheek.
They formed a bond during our stay on the island where we spent the last month, and it shines through now in their relief.
On their other side, Anarchy’s brothers are also stirring, each one sitting up slowly, pressing their hands to their temples as if they’re as dizzy as I was when I first landed here.
I sink down onto my heels, incredibly relieved that they all appear okay, even if their faces are a little green.
But…
Where is Emil?
I was sure I sensed his hand on mine while we traveled here, but his intense presence doesn’t strike me instantly like it usually does.
I swing back to the mouth of the cave, finally locating him all the way back near its opening.
He, too, is kneeling on the black stone. He has remained in his silver-haired, green-eyed form, and his shoulders are slumped forward, his chest rising and falling slowly. I can’t hear his breathing—not over the shrieking wind—but the rise and fall of his chest indicates that it’s ragged.
What I see behind him makes me pause.
A storm of white particles rages across the cave mouth as thick as the mist that transported us here.
Because I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in a dark cell, there’s a lot about the world I’ve never seen or experienced. It was only a month ago that I felt sand beneath my feet. Touched leaves and grass. Ate pizza and hamburgers. Saw a butterfly for the first time.
My mother once described snow to me. A white, powdery substance that she said would fall from the sky in winter and settle like a blanket over the ground. She said it was beautiful, reflective,pretty.
What I see now is nothing like that, which makes me doubt if what I’m looking at is, indeed, snow.
It would certainly explain why it’s freezing cold here, but the white particles are raging with a fury that’s nothing like the calm powder my mother described.
Emil said he was taking us to hell, but my assumption was that hell was a fiery place, so our surroundings are disconcerting to me.
While my family members find their feet, I take a moment to consider Emil, narrowing my eyes at the way his head remains bowed and the misty transportation magic still clings to his form. It looks like fingers plucking at his sides. The mist has never taken this long to clear from around him before, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
Perhaps he’s preparing to leave us here—whereverhereactually is.
Then the fingers of hazy energy disperse and I don’t have time to consider him longer because the dark elves are racing toward me.
Strife is the first to reach me, leaping across the distance as surely as if he were in his panther form. Like his brothers, he has lilac-colored hair, pointed ears, and bright, blue eyes, but his chin is a little narrower. He is a little more elvish in his beauty. And his smile is far more mischievous than those of the other two.
Well, usually. Not right now.
I catch the fear in his eyes before he barrels into me, lifting me up, all the way from my knees into his arms.
The snarls on his lips are so savage that he really could be in his panther form. “Darkness!”
It’s their name for me.
A powerful name.
They’ve never called me anything else.
