Kalen was by my side in an instant. “Did you mean to do that?”
I shook my head emphatically. This was everything I’d feared. “No.”
“All right. Don’t panic.” He rustled around in his pockets before extracting a pair of thin leather gloves. “Wear these, just for now.”
A horrible, terrifying sensation snaked through me—the feeling of no control. When the leaves had died, I had not been thinking about my power at all. I had no intense emotions rattling through me. I felt…fine. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe I’d done it.
The death magic was seeping out of me. I couldn’t touch anyone without risking their life.
My heart rattled. I couldn’t even touch Kalen.
Swallowing hard around the intense pain in my chest, I took a large step away from the man I loved, hating every inch of separation between us. “You need to stay away from me.”
“It was only a small plant. No need to panic,” he said, his voice even and calm. “But just to be safe, wear the gloves until we can figure out a way for you to regain control.”
Regaincontrol. I’d never truly been in control in the first place. A memory flashed through my mind, a moment in time I’d scarcely thought of since. When I’d first met Kalen and we’d traveled through the mists to find my mother, we had stopped in the woods outside a little village called Vere. He and the others had left me with the horses—which I now knew had been powerful joint eaters—while they fought a group of storm fae.
A strange little creature, something like a scorpion, had crawled onto my hand. As soon as it had touched me, it had curled up into a ball and fallen onto the ground, seemingly dead. In fact, for a moment, I’d beencertainit was dead. But then I’d poked it, and it had come back to life and scuttled away.
It had been such a strange moment. I’d meant to ask Kalen about it at the time, but then the storm fae had almost killed Toryn, and I’d forgotten all about the strange little scorpion. Now the moment lit up in my mind like the eversun’s brutal, incessant rays. I had touched that creature, and it had died. And then I’d somehow caused it to come back to life, just like I’d done to Fenella.
I hadn’t been in control then, and I wasn’t in control now. I couldn’t risk touching anything.
And so I slipped on the gloves, unshed tears burning my eyes.
From across the room, Toryn wore a knowing smile, but he didn’t say anything. For that, I was grateful. I didn’t want to talk about this, not yet. And I certainly didn’t want to hear empty words.It’ll be all right. You’ll find a way to control it. Your powers aren’t terrifying at all, Tessa.
We didn’t know if any of that was true, and if I wasn’t careful, I could turn this entire realm to dust even before Andromeda arrived.
Twenty-Six
Tessa
We split up, searching the queen’s quarters for hidden doors. There were none that I could see in the living area, though it was difficult to investigate with the plants hogging every spare corner. Kalen came up empty in the bedroom as well, so it was Toryn who called out in victory from his exploration of the bathing chambers.
When Kalen and I joined him, he pulled aside a tapestry to reveal a door barely tall enough for me, let alone either of them. A strange symbol was etched into the wood, a circle surrounding five stars that were linked by swirling lines. In the very center of it all, an onyx stone gleamed where it was embedded in the wood.
That symbol matched the ones I’d seen tattooed on the necks of the storm fae we’d faced in Itchen.
My stomach turned, and a thick sense of dread clogged my throat. “That’s not a good sign.”
“This definitely has something to do with the gods,” Kalen murmured, his eyes on Toryn’s paling face. “I’m so sorry. I hoped it would turn out we were wrong.”
Toryn’s entire body exhaled his next breath. “Of course she’s involved. Only a queen loyal to the gods would want her children to murder each other.”
I pressed my lips together. There truly was nothing to say to that. He was right, of course. Oberon’s cruelty had been more abundant than Queen Tatiana’s, but hers was more intimate, more personal than his had ever been. At least he had been trying to protect the person he loved most in the world. Queen Tatiana, on the other hand, was quite the opposite.
But the wicked truth of it all was that maybe they could have been different. Maybe neither one of them would have been this twisted if not for the corrupting power of the gods.
It was clear that having that power nearby, or using it in any way, got into your heart and warped it until you were nothing but an unrecognizable shell of who you’d once been—one so capable of monstrous deeds that any scrap of humanity you’d once had was gone.
And this—thiswickedness—was what I had to look forward to if I did not get my power under control.
“Shall we see what’s down here?” Kalen said, drawing his sword.
Toryn nodded and pushed the door open. The hinges squealed as it swung inward, and a yawning pit of black nothingness glared back at us. A harsh wind rushed into our faces, bringing with it the overwhelming stench ofwrongness. I ground my teeth and braced myself against the force of it. A deep, dark power seemed to vibrate through the very bones of the castle, of the city itself. And it came from the tunnel we were about to enter.
“Kalen, do you feel that?” I whispered.
