“Kori,” Adria gasps, catching me as I fall forward.
I sag into the support as we both realize that Adria’s hands are wrapped securely around my bare arms. Our skin-to-skin touch feels like lightning, almost as strong as the planet’s grip on my unveiled body. Her own gathered power spears through me so sharply that my vision flashes white, but there’s something else, too, a hot tension that I know we both feel at our proximity.
“I can’t fight like this,” I pant, leaning further into her muscly arms for support. “We have to get somewhere safe—you, me, Aspect—before another sun serpent realizes where we are.”
“I can still fight,” Adria protests, hauling me back up to a standing position. “My soldiers need me—”
“Alive,” I finish the sentence for her, recovering my posture as I speak. “If their queen gets snake strangled, that’s the end. All your fight, all your sacrifice … for nothing. You can’t let that happen.”
Adria’s brow furrows. “The fortress is in dire need of repairs. The serpents are tearing it apart, just barreling through walls and floors like they’re paper. I don’t know where to hide you. I don’t know how to keep you safe—”
I raise a hand for silence. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Listen.”
In the distance, the scattered battle clamor grows louder, closer, then proceeds to recede back toward the Passage. Slithering bodies, snapping jaws, the hellish hissing of forked tongues. Damaged pillars crash, crack, and collapse all around us, but the area we’re in, decimated though it may be, seems to hold. The serpents make a combined exit.
Quiet, unbroken, blankets the Shadowlands again.
“If they came looking for me,” I realize aloud, “a desperately armored, wasting girl who was as good as dead already, then their target no longer exists. This thing that’s happening to me …” Shudders rack my frame at the gravity of what’s just happened. “Stars, I should be dead. I should …” I stare at my naked hands, still slightly sparking with planetary power. My eyes, faintly reflected in Aspect, are brown again, but with a dim crackle of pure blue. “I’m so confused.”
Adria is still kneeling, so even as I stand, we’re eye to eye. “We’ll figure it out,” she insists, moving both hands to my shoulders, grounding me. “You were impossible from the moment you crashed into the shadows. Whatever you are, I know who you are. Kori, Kori …”
She takes my face in her big hands, claws carefully not breaking me, the pads of her fingers instead wiping away tears I didn’t realize werefalling. She looks at me like a star fell into her open palm. She looks at me like I’m the sun.
“I’m not afraid of you, Kori. Not anymore. And you’ve never been afraid of anything.” She leans her forehead forward, pressing it ever so gently to mine, and I let my eyes drift shut, listening to the combined huffs of our breathing. “Not even me, the worst monster of them all.”
“Not a monster,” I sigh, overcome by the palpable heat of her breath on my face, trembling. “Never a monster, even when you tried.”
We stay like that, a mere exhale apart, eyes closed, fingers tangled in each other’s ruined hair, for a seemingly interminable moment. At last she draws back, lifts my chin with the blunt side of a claw, and breathes, “I could kiss you.”
Her lips, gently parted, are red as blood. Her violet eyes hold mine through a sheen of fresh tears, slowly blinking to clear the haze, never looking away from me. She’s the planet’s most brutally designed mutant. She’s my rival royal. She’s my azure torch amidst the dark, my reason to keep fighting for the light. My enemy, my equal, maker of the greatest memories I have.
“Then fucking kiss me,” I say.
She shouldn’t. But while she may not be a monster, in this moment she’s only a girl, breathing as hard as I am, stained with dust and blood and stray serpent scales, fingers shivering against the curve of my cheek, voice swallowed by need, so she does.
I don’t know how to kiss her. The press of her lips to my lips turns my brain to static, my blood to a spiking pulse. She tastes like salt and rust and sweat and want. We both hardly move, testing each other’s limits, Adria terribly aware of her own strength and keeping it tightly leashed. But when her tongue slides just barely forward, tasting my mouth, a little groan breaks from me, and I dig my fingers into her ragged, overgrown curls, one hand wrapped around a well-hewn horn, pulling her closer, deepening the kiss, knowing nothing will be close enough.
Her body is on my body everywhere. And it’s more than the planet’s unholy power passing between us, a live electric current. I may know less about myself than I ever thought, fueled as I am by the energies that should’ve killed it, but I know I was made for this. I know that no matter what brought me here, no matter where we go next, I was meant to kiss Adria, queen of the nightfolk, shadow of my own aspirations, echo of my own loneliness, answer to a question I’d never even had the words to ask.
Even if I had been born when days and nights still tracked time, all sense of it would elude me with her mouth on my mouth, her hands woven into my disheveled hair, her cold blue-white skin faintly warm with blood flush—cradling me when she could break me, craving me when she could crush me, my heart fluttering so hard against my ribs, I’m almost afraid it’ll burst.
When the kiss ends, it’s only so we can both catch our breath. Adria holds my gaze through fluttering dark lashes. “What’s happening to you … I’m afraid the lies may go deeper than you know.” Her eyes fall to the floor. “Deeper than you could bear to know.”
I cradle her strong jaw with an open hand, lift her face so her gaze meets mine again. “After all I’ve already survived, I’m not afraid of the truth. So don’t mince words now. What do you know, Adria?”
Her words spill out in a panicked flood. “The snakes were explicitly sent foryou.Your presence imprinted on them like a brand. Not to destabilize my army, not even to threaten me, but to retrieveyou.Who would do that, Kori? Certainly not my uncle. Even if he could manipulate sun serpents, he would’ve used them to overthrow my rule altogether, not simply go after a valuable prisoner. So who else knows you’re here? Who else would’ve been so invested in snatching you out of the shadows?”
My head feels like it’s doing pirouettes. Struggling for balance, I shift my hand down to Adria’s shoulder, gripping hard at the muscle underneath. “You think my mother sent the serpents.”
“If not her, then who?”
“They could’ve killed me.”
“It seems that would’ve been a more acceptable outcome,” Adria says through her teeth, “than your continued presence here. But as soon as this …power… overtook you, they stopped trying to retrieve you. They didn’t even try to kill you. They all retreated from whence they came. Almost as if they knew it was game over.”
