Pain zapped down my spine and I gasped. Someone just grazed my hair.
Okay. Stay calm.
On shaky legs, I moved to the outside of the crowded area, the jolts of agony ripping through my body like a current.
In this moment I hated my curse, more than I normally did. Whoever did this to me…they deserved to live with the same curse. I was trying to help a friend and I couldn’t even search for her properly now because I was in so much pain.
My hands shook as I did a body assessment. I wasn’t laid out on the ground, I didn’t feel like I was going to pass out. It was just a stray hair, a light graze. I was going to be fine. Sweat had broken out on my upper lip from the intense wave of pain, so I wiped it with the back of my glove and screamed Eden’s name again.
“Fallon!” she called back then, and I snapped my head in the direction of the noise. The crowd had thinned considerably and there were only about a dozen people left. It was a mass exodus to leave the space as students climbed over walls and trampled bushes to get out. Eden ran towards me, but I barely looked at her. I was staring at Ayden. He stood in the middle of his yard and held a fae blade aloft, ignited with orange fire as he chased down a Nightling, who zipped around him faster than I could track.
He was fighting them?
Rumor had it that the Nightlings were undead. Fae, once human in nature, who had crossed over to the Realm of Eternity and came back somehow. They fed on blood and became shadow, at one with darkness. They were evil and the highlight of every horror story told to me as a child. I wasn’t even sure how to kill one, or if you could. All I knew was that according to Master Clarke, I was destined to become one.
House of Ash and Shadow.
Might as well call it House of Nightling.
Eden reached me, eyes wide with panic and I stretched out my arms to give her hand a comforting squeeze.
There were so many shadows zooming around I couldn’t count how many there were until they stopped and materialized.
Dread sank into my stomach when I counted five bloodsuckers standing on Ayden’s lawn, circling around him like hunters about to take down prey. A few were women and the rest men, but I didn’t linger on them, instead I looked at Eden.
“Run for help. Get the Royal Guard,” I whispered to her, flinching as a wave of remnant pain washed over me.
She looked at me panicked, shaking her head.
“Go!” I snarled and pushed her, just as Ariyon burst into the garden from the back door of his house, wielding his sword. He must have gone inside for it.
I knew he was a healer by nature but from the looks of it, he had other training as well. He lunged for the nearest Nightling but it zoomed out of the way, laughing as it transformed into shadows. Where was that guard that had been posted at the gate?
Dead?
I found myself wishing I had brought a blade of my own.
‘How do you kill something made of shadows?’I thought as Yanric flew from the branches of a nearby tree and landed on my shoulder.
‘With the undying fire,’he said cryptically.
I craned my neck to look at the bird. ‘And that is?’
‘The purple flames you carry. They are technically dark magic—fight fire with fire, so to speak.’
Eden screamed from somewhere deeper in the backyard and I spun, running in that direction, only to have her burst from the trees, beelining for me. A Nightling was chasing her. A tall and lanky fae with alabaster skin and black eyes. Eden reached behind her, throwing orange fireballs, but they did nothing to the creature, splashing over his skin and dissipating.
No way in the Light was I letting anything happen to my new friend.
Eden had been there for me since day one, when I’d been desperate to save my father.
Pulling off my gloves, I reached for the rage that was boiling just beneath the surface of my skin. It was a palpable inferno, dying to be unleashed.
“Fallon!” Ayden screamed in terror, and I pivoted just in time to see a female Nightling with long black hair rushing towards me.
My heart faltered at the sight of her, and chills raced down my spine. It was like looking in the mirror: she was barely twenty, frozen in the age that she died, but there was no doubt about it. I was looking at my birth mother.
Marissa Bane.
