Was there any reason to hope at all?
I opened my mouth to confess all these thoughts to Kalen—maybe he’d have a salve for the darkness in my mind. But a bird’s screech shattered the silence. Kalen grabbed my arm and jerked us to a stop. His gaze went to the clouds as a pair of black wings swooped toward us. Boudica raced closer, and another screech shot from her open beak.
“What’s happening?” I asked, instinctively reaching toward Nellie, who rode on Silver just beside me.
Kalen’s sword whistled as he pulled it from his back. “Pookas. They’ve caught our scent and are heading our way. They have some wraiths with them.”
“Wraiths?” I asked sharply. In my time spent in the mists, the only creatures I’d faced had been shadowfiends—or pookas, as Kalen and the shadow fae called them. They were monstrous things—fangs and claws and matted fur, capable of ripping a man into pieces before feasting on his blood and flesh. They were terrifying enough without adding another creature to the fight.
“Wraiths are usually not so brave,” he murmured, “and they only like the taste of bloody spines. I imagine they’re hoping the pookas will do the work for them, and then they can come in behind to feast on our remains. Watch the ground. They leave poisonous sand behind anything their feet touch.”
Bloody spines?
I swallowed and glanced up at Nellie, whose face had gone bone white. “Stay there.”
“I won’t be a coward,” she hissed at me. But she didn’t make a move to dismount.
Kalen wound a hand around the back of my neck and gazed at me with fire in his eyes. “Stay in the back here with Niamh. I know you’re learning to fight, and you’re damn good at it already, but there are too many of them. Let the trained warriors take care of it.”
He kissed me fiercely, and then marched toward the front of our party, barking orders at his warriors. They moved into formation, facing the dark mists ahead of us. Those with swords stood in front, while the fae carrying spears, including Toryn, waited just behind them. In the back, Niamh and the other archers readied their arrows. Kalen, to my dismay, was right in the front.
I stood within a cluster of archers, my hand tight around Silver’s reins. Silence descended upon us, thick with fear and rage. The moments inched by. Warriors shifted on their feet, but they stayed in position, their weapons raised, their eyes set on the dense fog that swirled around us.
Nellie suddenly leapt off the horse and landed beside me. “I can’t stay up there. It’s driving me crazy. I feel like my skin is about to jump off my bones.”
“It’s not any better down here,” I muttered. “Why haven’t they attacked yet?”
Niamh leaned in from my other side, her violet eyes gleaming in the dark. “The beasts have been changing tactics these past few months. They move in bigger groups now, attacking when they wouldn’t have before. Prepare yourselves, and don’t leave my fucking side. I have a feeling this is going to get bloody.”
My tongue thickened into a lump of sand. With tension wracking my body, I pulled the Mortal Blade from my belt, but Niamh’s hand on my wrist brought it back to my side. She shook her head. “Best not. If things turn to chaos, you could scrape one of us, and then we’re ash. Take this instead.” She handed me the sword I’d lost in the mists near Albyria—the one Kalen had given to me as a gift—and then she glanced at Nellie. “Can you fight?”
As I gratefully took the sword, Nellie pushed the breath from her flared nostrils and then held up her claw-tipped hands. “I have these.”
“Good.” A ghost of smile flickered across Niamh’s lips. “If a beast attacks you, claw their eyes out, and then paint yourself in their blood. They won’t be able to see or smell you then.”
Nellie grimaced. “That’s disgusting.”
“Better disgusting than dead.”
Thunderous footsteps boomed, shaking the ground and growing louder with every moment that passed, as if a wicked storm were rushing toward us. Gripping my sword, I quickly realized what was so wrong with that sound. The shadowfiends weren’t headed toward the front, where the swordsmen waited in perfect fighting formation. They were coming straight for the archers—and me.
And as I whirled on my feet, the beasts leapt from the darkness.
Eight
Tessa
Five shadowfiends raced toward me. Shouting into the night, I grabbed Nellie’s arm and yanked her sideways, out of the path of the beasts. The ground slammed into my side. Pain cracked through my shoulder, which was still sore from my recent fight against the shadowfiend in the mountains.
The archers scattered, caught off guard from the direction of the attack. Arrows launched into the sky, but the volley wasn’t fast enough. The nearest shadowfiend threw out its vicious paw and slammed it into an archer. The fae flew into the air, screaming as his body vanished into the mists.
“To your feet!” Niamh barked at me as she loosed another arrow. It whistled through the foggy air and punched into the nearest beast, but the creature kept charging forward as if the arrow were nothing more than a pesky fly.
I grabbed Nellie’s arm and hauled us up from the ground before throwing myself in front of her. For a moment, the world seemed to slow around me as I took in the chaos. There were at least a dozen shadowfiends—maybe even twenty. Several dark figures shuffled along behind them, their faces hidden in the depths of their cloaks. The ground hissed as they walked, and smoke curled around them like strands of mist. I glanced back at the fae warriors. A third of them had scattered to the right, while another third had launched to the left, where I’d ended up. The rest surrounded Kalen, now at the rear, but there was a gulf of air between us all, right where the shadowfiends were whirling in circles, fighting off any fae who approached.
Through the chaos, I locked eyes with Kalen, just for a moment. Twelve, or fifteen, or even twenty shadowfiends was nothing to him. He’d faced far greater numbers than this. But these shadowfiends were in our midst, which meant Kalen couldn’t take them out with his brutal power. If he launched it at them, he’d certainly kill them. But he’d kill everyone else in his path, too. That meant us.
“What do we do?” Nellie whispered from behind me.
