Thinking of Meredy, holding her light in my mind, I claw back against the edges of the darkness that’s beginning to cover everything.
I can’t go like this. I have to get back to her, but my arms don’t seem to understand. My efforts to break Karston’s fingers are becoming weaker. More than ever, I want tolive. I just need one breath... then I can fight...
Down the hallway, a door opens, a sound as distant as the sea far below the palace.
Something with claws gives a deafening roar as it bounds down the hallway, forcing Karston—Hadrien, I remind my foggy brain—to release me and flee.
I crumple to the ground, too light-headed to stand.
Coughing and rubbing my throat, I glance up through streaming eyes in time to see the blurry shape of Lysander tearing after Karston, and Meredy running toward me.
“No, no, no,” Meredy sobs, dropping to her knees beside me. “We’ll get you a healer, just hang on—”
“I’m all right,” I insist, though the words don’t come out too clearly. “But Karston isn’t. Hadrien’s spirit is inside him somehow.”
“What?How is that possible?” Meredy demands.
I shake my head, unable to explain. I know nothing of whatever magic let Hadrien’s spirit inhabit a living person’s skin. When necromancers bring back a spirit from the Deadlands, we return them to their own shrouded bodies. Always. I don’t understand how a spirit could inhabit a living body with another soul already inside it.
Still, I can’t believe I didn’t see it before, now that so many things make sense: the time Karston snapped at me for singing his favorite song, the brief moments at night when his eyes would turn a deep brown instead of their usual violet, how out of it he seemed when I met him in the hallway earlier with Nipper. What if the poisoning at the wedding wasn’t the work of unhappy citizens, but Hadrien, acting through Karston somehow?
Meredy wraps her arms around me and helps me sit up, drawing me from my thoughts.
Together, we gently inspect my throat. I’m sure I’ll have a garden of bruises blooming there within hours, but I don’t care. I’m just glad to be drawing breath after greedy breath, filling my lungs so the burning in my chest will subside.
“I don’t know. A living person with another spirit inside them—it’s never happened before, but I’m sure it was him,” I say, my voice rough, but stronger. “Karston might still be in there, too, though.” If he is, I have to try to save him. “We have to go after him before he hurts someone else—or himself.”
Climbing to my feet is harder than I anticipated when I’m still light-headed, but I manage with Meredy’s help.
“Wait.” Meredy tightens her grip on my hand, as if afraid I’ll rush off without her.
I squeeze hers to let her know I won’t do any such thing.
“Let me check on Lysander first. He should have caught him for us by now.” As she frowns in concentration, her eyes flash a brighter,iridescent shade of green that means she’s magically joined her mind with the grizzly’s. She’s seeing through his eyes now. “He got away. Lysander’s coming back,” she says in the dreamy voice that seems to come with looking into another’s mind.
She blinks, and the ethereal green light fades from her eyes.
“We’d better hurry then. I don’t want Karston—Hadrien,” I correct myself yet again, “going anywhere near Valoria. He said something about an army, too,” I add, shaking off another wave of dread as we run back to our rooms for proper clothes and weapons.
My necromancer’s uniform and belt donned, my sword and daggers at my side, I’m about to rush out the door when I spot the double sapphire pin that’s been sitting on a table since we returned to Karthia.
Meredy smiles softly in approval as I pause just long enough to fasten it on my tunic.
It finally feels like it belongs there, not weighing me down in the slightest as it clings to the fabric over my heart. Maybe that’s because Hadrien somehow found his way back to our world, and while I can’t explain it, there’s one thing I’m sure of when it comes to spirits: I’m Odessa of Grenwyr, and the dead answer to me.
XXIX
A commotion echoes sharply from some other part of the palace, drawing my gaze.
Hadrien, I can’t help but think right away.
It sounds like someone banging pots and pans together in the kitchen, only the noise is coming from much farther away—the dungeons, I realize as we race toward the sound. We’re joined on one of the lower staircases by Lysander.
“Where’s Nipper?” Meredy asks as we run.
“With Simeon,” I pant. I’m glad I left him and the students with some scaly protection after what we’ve just discovered.
The three of us dash into the dark, windowless part of the palace belowground to find the doors of the metal soldiers’ prison unchained and flung wide open. Valoria and several guards, Danial and Jax among them, stand with their weapons drawn, gazing disbelievingly at something inside the open chamber.
