My hands glow faintly as my chest heaves. I can feel every frantic beat of my heart in my ribs. Serenya stares at me wide-eyed, hair plastered to her face with water and sweat.
The largest hound roars, and they charge again.
Serenya whirls, slicing into one with a ribbon of shadow, tangling it by the limbs, holding it. “I’ll bind them. Koen, can you do that again?”
Panic surges, but I shove it down. I don’t know what I did, but I reachfor it anyway. That warmth. That needto protect.
Light surges outward, much smaller this time but enough to stagger the hound. It screeches and falters.
Dimitri is instantly there, daggers flashing as he rips intoits throat. The beast crashes down in the water, hissing, still at last.
Chapter 22
?---- Serenya ? ----?
Tearing my gaze away from Koen, I lift my hands and the shadows obey, but something is different. They respond faster and swifter than they have in years. They shimmer faintly around my wrists, almost gleeful. Like they recognize something. Like they got something back they had missed.
A snarl fills the air as another hound lunges. I jump to the left and sweep my arm low, and the shadows respond like waves, smashing into the beast’s side and flinging it into a rotted tree with a crunch. I blink. That should have only slowed it, but the shadows had cracked its ribs.
What is happening?
A deep growl comes from behind me.
I spin and throw up a wall of black mist just in time to stop another hound’s snapping jaws. My shadows curl tighter around me in a need to protect me.
“Serenya, get down!” Koen calls out from behind me.
Without hesitation, I drop low just as his sword swings right above my head, clean through the neck of another hound.Hot steaming blood splashes across my shoulder.
We fight back-to-back, with Dimitri dancing in and out like smoke, his blades flashing and his blond hair stained red. "I thought you said this route wasclear," he calls.
"It was," I snapback. “They weren’t here when my shadows passed before.”
The hounds keep coming from the trees, the fog, and the water.
My shadows grow wilder. I can feel them reaching farther, pulling from the corners of the marsh, weaving traps I didn’t cast. I’m not sure if that should terrify me or not.
Koen grunts beside me, sweat slicking his brow as he drives his blade into a beast’s heart. His magic flickers again, a faint glimmer lighting under his skin, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
…Or maybe he is trying not to.
I watch him for a heartbeat longer than I should. He moves like a warrior—not refined, but instinctive and reckless and fierce.
The biggest of the hounds, a brute with bone spines jutting from its back, charges straight through Dimitri's dagger like it’s nothing. Dimitri disappears before it reaches him, reappearing near me. “They’re getting stronger.”
I fling my shadows at an advancing hound. My breath comes in sharp gasps, my limbs ache, my magic thins, but the beasts just keep coming.
“This doesn’t end until we find the summoner,” Dimitri snarls from somewhere to my left, driving his dagger into a hound’s throat before vanishing again into mist.
He’s right. There are too many of them, too coordinated, too relentless. Hellhounds don’t behave like this without someone feeding them commands.
I reach with my shadows, trying to trace the thread of dark magic back to its source, andI hit a wall of something old and twisted, cloaked in layers of wards.
“Do you feel that?” I shout toward Koen, but he doesn’t answer.
I glance over my shoulder at him. He’s…glowing.
Well, not entirely. It flickers, pulsing from beneath his skin like his very blood is fighting to contain it. Golden cracks run down his arms like streaks of lightning. His sword shakes in his grip, and his breath hitches like he is choking on power he doesn’t understand.
