Amarantha screams.
And reaches through the bond.
It moves before I see it. My shadows—the ones pinning her—shudder. Something is pulling at them from the inside. Not breaking them. Draining them.
Amarantha is pulling power through the mate bond so hard that Moros convulses in the chair, his body arching as she rips his magic out of him like thread from a spool.
Shadow magic floods into her. Not the scraps that have been bleeding through. Everything. Every shadow in the Unseelie Court answers her call because she’s pulling it through the king himself.
My chains shatter.
Kestra’s ice explodes.
The blast throws me backward into Ash, who catches me, and for one terrible second the room is nothing but white light and dark shadow detonating at the center where Amarantha stands with her mate’s stolen power pouring from her hands.
Moros slumps in the chair. Conscious but barely. She’s taken so much that the shadows around his feet have gone still. Dead. The Unseelie king drained by his own mate bond.
And Amarantha stands in the ruins, wreathed in stolen shadow and dying light, and she is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.
She is not stronger. She is full. Carrying more than her body was built for. The shadow leaks out of her in places it shouldn’t—her eyes, her teeth, the seams of her dress. Her hands shake. She doesn’t notice.
The math has gone bad.
Amarantha turns. Not to us.
To Ash.
“You.” The word carries venom of a woman who has watched everyone choose someone else over her. “You took everything from me.”
61
Ash
I’m on the floor.
That’s the first thing I become aware of. Cold stone against my palms and the copper taste of blood in my mouth and Kieran’s body half-covering mine because he threw himself between me and whatever Amarantha just detonated.
The second thing is the sound. Or the absence of it. That ringing silence after an explosion when your eardrums have decided they need a moment before they’re willing to participate in reality again.
The third thing is Amarantha.
She stands in the center of the Unseelie throne room wreathed in stolen shadow and dying Seelie light. Moros is slumped in his chair behind her, barely conscious, drained so thoroughly that the shadows at his feet have gone flat and dead. She pulled everything out of him through the mate bond and she’s wearing his power like armor and she is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.
Everyone is down. Kestra is against the far wall, blood on her temple. Tiana beside her, blade still in hand. Orion’s fire has guttered where the shadow blast hit it. Pepper has Sabina andWhispen behind an overturned table. Finnian is on one knee, the Summer Sword half-drawn.
We were winning.
We’re not anymore.
“You.” Amarantha turns to me and her eyes are wrong. Not the crystalline violet I remember from the Academy. Something darker. Moros’s shadow magic has bled through so completely that her irises have gone black at the edges. “You took everything from me.”
She raises both hands.
The power that gathers between her palms is not one thing. It’s two things stitched together—Seelie light and Unseelie dark, twisting around each other like snakes eating their own tails. The mate bond made her a hybrid. Neither court. Both courts. An abomination of stolen magic wearing the face of a woman who was only ever a handmaid.
She’s going to kill me.
I know this the way I know my own heartbeat. The way I knew the moment I stepped on Academy stone that I belonged there. Certainty that bypasses the brain entirely and lives in the body.
