But I don’t think Amarantha has ever faced a single consequence. Not even before Tiana was born. She’s throughthe gap before Tiana’s hand closes on empty air. The wall seals behind her with a sound like a coffin lid closing.
Tiana hits the stone with both palms.
“She built that one herself,” Tiana says. More pissed off than defeated. “I didn’t know about that passage.”
“She always has one more door.” I should have known. She’s always been covert and deceitful. “She’s been building exits since the day she stole the crown.”
Tiana stands in front of the Seelie throne. Her eyes look like they want to burn through the door. Burn it down.
But it’s useless, Amarantha is long gone. We both know it.
“Go get your queen, Finnian.” She turns to me, “There’s nothing more here.”
Some endings, I fear, only end in dread.
55
Ash
Not going to lie.When we first entered the Academy I didn’t have a plan. Nothing aside fromshow upanddo the thing. Which is unlike me.
I admit, it’s a loose plan.
With some pocket change.
But a war strategy? Not a single one.
And the worst part? There’s a piece of me that wants nothing more than to give my cousins a tour of the Academy. Show them the dormitories with their impossible staircases. The library that rearranges itself based on your mood. The courtyard where I first saw Kieran standing in a pool of his own shadows looking like he’d been personally offended by the sunrise.
We would have had fun going to school here.
“I’m not sure I much like this school.” Pepper dodges a window that flies past her head. Irritated, she turns around and zaps it with her chaos magic. The glass doesn’t shatter, it just stops existing.
“Aww, where is your sense of adventure?” Sabina hops on a wardrobe and surfs it down the corridor before doing a backflip off the end. She lands in a crouch, arrow already nocked, grinning and buzzing from the adrenaline.
“Show off.” Pepper zaps another flying object. A candlestick this time. The Academy is apparently emptying its furnishings at us like a drunk throwing bottles at a wall. “You two go ahead. We’ve got your six.”
I don’t remind them that the Academy is alive and some of those objects are sentient.
I don’t want to spoil the fun.
I stop down the corridor and turn. Pepper and Sabina stand there making a competition over who takes out the most inanimate objects. Pepper’s chaos magic crackles purple. Sabina’s arrows pin a flying chair to the wall.
“Hey.” I keep my voice low. “I appreciate you.”
Pepper’s expression softens for exactly one second before a roar thunders through the building hard enough to rattle dust from the ceiling.
Vanessa. Doing her job. Whatever it is she just hit out there, I hope it deserved it. Knowing Vanessa it could just as easily been a friend and not a foe.
I turn to Orion. “Let’s go.”
“My lady.” Orion smiles in that cheeky way of his. The one that makes him look like he’s about to suggest something reckless and thoroughly enjoy the consequences.
“Guardian first.” I usher him forward, mostly because he’s big and burly and honestly if I stand in his shadow, things will hit him first.
His laugh is a calm bellow that fills the corridor. He knows exactly what I’m thinking. Either through the bond or because he reads me the way a hunter reads. It’s nice. Having someone know you so well that they don’t need you to explain yourself.
And not in the manipulative way.
