The shadows were choosing, trying to decide.
The Priestess realized it, too, because her expression shifted instantly into cold satisfaction.
“You see?” she said softly. “It still knows me.”
The shadows around her surged forward several feet.
Barlen swore under his breath and stepped protectively in front of me despite being dramatically less intimidating than literally everyone else in the building, and that made my heart clench with worry. He threw something onto the ground, and before I had time to think, the Academy floor cracked beneath my feet.
Light exploded upward through the fractures while a deafening roar echoed somewhere deep below the structure, and every shadow in the hall jerked violently toward me all at once.
Chapter Forty
I kept my balance as a beam of light shot from below me through the ceiling, and the Priestess cackled, but the shadows weren’t to be controlled.
Not this time.
She moved her hands toward the floor and then up to the sky to whisk the power she’d been accustomed to using, but the shadows remained where they’d been. Her eyes blazed with anger as she looked across the room at me with Barlen at my hip, staring up at me.
If I didn’t know better, I thought it might be his teeth chattering that I heard.
“Enough,” the Priestess called into the air, expecting the shadows to respond.
But they didn’t.
The word floated above us and disappeared into the rafters as if the Academy had simply swallowed it.
A strange sound whispered through the entrance hall. It moved along the pillars and across the ceiling beams before drifting down the staircases in long, velvet streaks. It wasn’tlaughter exactly, but it was close enough to make every hair along my arms stand up.
The Priestess heard it too.
Her shoulders stiffened as she slowly lowered her hands.
The shadows gathered around her feet, curling over the cracked stone, and through the open doorway, but this time they didn’t rise for her command.
They circled, slowly and patiently, almost curious.
Barlen’s hand clutched the sleeve of my cloak. “Maeve…”
“I know,” I whispered, even though I didn’t.
The shadows nearest the Priestess stretched upward like smoke pulled by invisible strings. They brushed against the hem of her dress, and she immediately stepped back, her eyes flashing with outrage.
“You forget yourselves,” she hissed at them.
The sound came again, an eerie, almost-laugh.
The Academy answered as the rooms brightened, and the entire entrance hall shimmered with light and darkness woven together. The shadows didn’t shrink from the glow. They moved through it, drinking it in like they’d been starved for years and had only just remembered what nourishment felt like.
The Priestess lifted her hands again.
Black magic sparked between her fingers, piercing and jagged, the kind that made my shadow mark pulse in warning. She twisted her wrists, and the darkness that had always obeyed her should have snapped into place.
Instead, the shadows leaned closer, but not to serve…to feed.
A gasp fell from Barlen as the darkness around her hands thinned and poured away from her fingers in silky strands. The shadows on the floor absorbed the threads, and for one impossible second, the blackness rippled with silver.
The Priestess froze, and I couldn’t breathe as I watched them.
