You damn your own granddaughter to death.
Only blood of your blood can find this house.
“Ameirah,” Kamaal hissed as I ducked around his outstretched arm and stormed through the aisle of bookcases until I could lay eyes on the piece of shit who tortured me and led me here—and the woman he addressed. I recognised her from the paintings in the atrium, the same black haired, seventy-something woman who had smiled out at us from several portraits, but her eyes… I recognised them from the mirror. From my own eyes.
Nothing else was familiar, beyond a slight similarity in our features, but those eyes, as rich and colourful as a violet. I blinked my mismatched eyes at the woman and struggled to keep breathing as the implications hit. She covered her mouthwith a trembling hand, sunlight shuddering from the many rings she wore, from the tears that lined her eyes.
“What the fuck,” I snarled, rounding on Kaazhim, “are you playing at?”
His next smile was loathsome. The smile of a man who knew he’d won, who’d finally accomplished his goal.
“You couldn’t find the journal without me,” I spat, holding up the book I still held onto. “Because you neededmy bloodto find it. Convenient how you left that part out.”
“Daughter of my daughter,” the woman, Mingyue, said as she stumbled three steps forward, silver-lined eyes on me and a dark stone pendant dancing at her neck. A tight pain cut through my chest, wrecking my rage with emotion I couldn’t put into words.
Kaazhim glanced between us, a wyvern who’d caught a goat and was content to play with it before he delivered the killing bite. “I don’t care about the book,” he said, shaking his head at me like I was slow. “Neither does the king. We simply needed you to open the gate again, to lead us here, to the hidden seat of power. So I could destroy it.”
“And by seat of power,” Mingyue said in a rough voice, those violet eyes blazing, “you mean you wish to slaughter my entire family.”
“Oh no,” Kaazhim said with a smooth step forward. I jumped when a shadow fell over me, but it was only Kamaal, watching the gentry with a look that bordered hatred. “Not your entire family. I’m only here for the Matriarch.”
She stood taller, her chin high with pride even as her eyes shone with a hatred so deep, he had to have personally wounded her. She had to be powerful judging by how the air had shuddered, and to have this house and be dressed in the finest silk, she must have status. Yet Kaazhim spoke to her as if she was dirt. And if she really was my grandmother… a kernel of rage bloomed in my chest.
“The journal was just a ruse to get you here,” Kaazhim said with a glance at me. “To open the doors for me. I apologise for lying.”
“Oh, don’t apologise for a job well done,” a new voice intruded, a voice alive with power that made every drop of death in me scream and recoil. I flinched back a step, then two, and Kamaal retreated with me, his eyes wide as Mingyue whirled around, revealing another woman.
If I shared any features with this woman they were hidden by the helm she wore of metal so black it devoured the light around her, sucking the dust-spotted sunlight into its dark, shining surface. My hands shook as I saw the crown atop that helmet. Not silver or gold butstone.The same stone crown I’d just beheld…
With shaking hands, I lifted the journal, opened it to the page I’d last seen. There it was, the crown of glittering onyx stone sitting on the head of the Zalaam queen, the creator and queen of all Zalaam warriors, the dark ruler who almost enslaved all of Ithanys and Kalder.
It was her.
The Zalaam queen was here.
CHAPTER 27
AMEIRAH
Mingyue surrendered five steps until she stood close enough to me to whisper, “There’s a secret exit behind the glass case on the wall. When she attacks, run.”
“She won’t be able to move quickly enough,” the Zalaam queen said, as if Mingyue spoke toher.My grandmother? I didn’t have the space in my head or in my aching chest to process that, to even wonder. All available room was taken up by sheer, screaming terror. “Hand me the journal, Ameirah.”
Her voicevibrated,groaning through the air like a rockslide. Monstrous and deep.
My pulse thrummed in my throat, my breath turning sharp as pressure bowed my bones, straining my skin, pressing against my magic until it wilted inside me. The sheer amount ofpowerthis queen had… I’d never felt anything like it.
“Come here and give me the journal.”
“No,” I rasped, blinking a tear free as the sharp edge of pain built. I hid the journal behind my back, my hands shaking as the pressure swelled when the queen turned to face me. She was cloaked in darkness that writhed around her, that strange metal helm concealing everything except a slow smirk.
That mouth parted with a full laugh when Kaazhim burst into movement, sprinting across the room and towards the glass case where I’d found the journal. No, to the hidden doorway behind it. I backed up a step, glancing at the prince heir close to my side.
“Coward,” she drawled as Kaazhim fled.
It was bad enough when King Bakshi wanted the journal, but the Zalaam queen herself wanting a book that was written about her and her army? Another shiver went down my spine, and I got the unshakeable sense that what happened here would tug a thread from the weave of fate. Either it would unspool entirely and those dark wyverns and the king’s clergy—perhaps her warriors in disguise—would sweep their dark poison across my entire homeland. Or we could excise that poison like infected flesh.
If this journal was important enough to warrant a visit from a queen of true, mythical evil… I couldn’t let her get it.
