Those black eyes flickered with something that might have been amusement.
“Someone who’s been looking for you for a very long time.”
Before I could ask what that meant, he turned away, surveying the chamber. His companions had finished their work with brutal efficiency. The king was nowhere to be seen, fledthrough some hidden passage, most likely. The mages were dead. The guards had been reduced to bloody smears on the stone floor. The children were still bound in their restraints, their panicked cries echoing down the long halls of Blackstone Keep.
And I was free.
Sort of.
The man in black turned back to me, and I caught something in his expression that made my blood run cold. Not cruelty, exactly. Not the casual malice I’d seen in the king’s eyes or the calculating sadism of Master Thaddeus.
This was something else entirely. Something that looked at me and saw not a person, but a puzzle to be solved.
My fists tried to clench at the thought of becoming someone else’s tool, but the drugs were creeping deeper now, my powers ebbing with the last of the chaos.
Another cage. I was trading one master for another. The thought was a shard of ice in my gut.
“What do you want with me?” I whispered.
He smiled then, and it was like watching winter settle over a graveyard.
“Everything,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
DAEMON
The girl’s magic had tasted like wildfire and starlight.
Even now, with her unconscious form draped across Thane’s massive shoulder, I could feel the echo of her power singing in my blood. It called to the shadows that lived beneath my skin, recognizing something kindred in the darkness I carried. Twenty-eight years I’d walked this realm, and I’d never felt anything like the raw force that had exploded from her in that chamber.
Before we deciphered what that meant for our plans, we had to make sure the children were safe. Two sat on Kael’s left forearm, which he held close to his stomach. The other two were in my arms. The torment Thaddeus had put them through had rendered them silent. Only their eyes screamed fear.
She was everything the prophecy had promised.
And that terrified me more than facing down an army.
“Passage is clear,” Kael murmured from ahead, his twin daggers still wet with blood. My oldest friend and teacher moved like smoke through the tunnel’s darkness, checking every corner, every shadow that might hide an enemy. Fifteen years of running missions together had taught us to communicate without words, a tilt of his head meant guards ahead, a raised fistmeant stop, a gesture toward his belt meant someone needed to die quietly.
His relaxed shoulders told me we were safe.
For the moment.
“How much farther?” Thane asked, adjusting the girl’s weight with surprising gentleness for someone who could crush skulls with his bare hands. She’d fought us in the chamber, even drugged and weak, clawing at his face and trying to bite when he’d lifted her.
“Feisty little thing,” he rumbled with what might have been approval. “Thought she was going to take a chunk out of my throat.”
“Two more turns,” I replied, letting my shadows scout ahead. They slipped through cracks in the stone, tasting the air for threats, finding nothing but rats and decay. These passages had been forgotten for decades, built by paranoid kings who feared their own people enough to riddle their strongholds with escape routes. Ironic that those same tunnels would be used to steal away their greatest weapon.
Zephyr moved behind us, fingers dancing through the air as his wind magic erased every trace of our passage. Scents, sounds, even the warmth our bodies left behind, all of it swept clean as if we’d never existed. Though the boy was proficient with a crossbow, he was an artist with his power, turning something as simple as moving air into magic that could fool even the most talented trackers.
“What do we do?” he asked softly, his voice carrying that faint accent from the eastern provinces. “We didn’t prepare for four children with the target.”
“She’s bleeding through the bandages,” Zephyr added, his pale eyes cataloging every injury as we moved. “The iron burns are infected, and those targeting sigils they carved into her skinneed proper tending. Not to mention whatever poison they used to keep her compliant.”
I’d seen the marks when we cut her free, angry red welts where the metal had pressed against flesh, symbols burned into her arms and back with magical ink that still smoked. The king’s mages had treated her like parchment to be written on, not caring what permanent damage they inflicted in the process.
“She’ll live,” I said, because anything else wasn’t acceptable. Not when we’d come this far. Not when she was the key to everything.
