Page 5 of The Nymph King

“Upstairs. Last door,” the innkeeper muttered, his voice shaky. “And if they come back, I don’t know you.”

Imani didn’t bother to thank him. She took the stairs two at a time, slipped into the small room at the end of the hall, and locked the door. Voices carried faintly up from the street below. The hunt had widened.

Sweeping into the room, she shoved the room’s lone chair beneath the handle and crossed straight to the window. From behind the curtain, she watched elves flood the street below, splitting into pairs to search doorways and alleys.

Only once she confirmed no one had followed her upstairs did she step away. Her back hit the wall, and her head rested against it for one brief second while her lungs caught up with everything she had demanded of them.

The Draswood. Kiran. The destroyed town. A riot carrying her face on every wall.

Her eyes slid closed for a second, then she opened them and pushed away from the stone. None of those dangers had disappeared just because a locked door now stood between her and the street.

She wanted to collapse onto the bed, but instead she stood in the center of the room, wand in hand, shadows curling restlessly along the floorboards. Rest would not come here. Not while desperation hunted her face from every wall.

Imani paced, flipping her wand between her fingers.

Tanyl had certainly been busy since she left Niflheim. The posters were everywhere… whether he had created this town’s desperation or merely exploited it, he had turned that desperation into another weapon against her.

And she had walked straight into the jaws of the beast.

* * *

Imani walked out of the inn as dusk bled color from the sky, a small sack of leftover provisions slung over her shoulder. She drifted through the streets, careful to remain unseen. It was eerily quiet.

Once she reached the edge of the Draswood, the silence broke. Birds chirped and chanted, and a low, resonant whisper that was not the wind seemed to beckon her into the trees.

She glanced over her shoulder, debating whether to cloak herself in shadows. The magic was always available to her, but the danger came when fear, rage, or panic outran her judgment. Her shadows answered emotion almost as readily as her commands, and once they surged hard enough, pulling them back became more difficult.

The street behind her was empty, but the prickle of being watched lingered at the nape. Kiran would wait, watch, and step exactly where she didn’t expect rather than chase loudly. The thought pressed in tighter than the shadows around her.

Fortifying herself, she stepped into the forest. Her boots crunched over brambles and underbrush, making her flinch. She needed to find the soft moss path she’d traveled before, but as she pushed through the thicket, the forest felt strange. Tense.

She kept moving deeper, but unease nagged at her.

In a whoosh, a blur of teeth and warped magic flew past her. A creature barreled through a tangle of ancient roots, shrieking, its body nothing but claws, spines, and an insatiable, gnawing hunger.

She screamed when she saw the chapalus’s snarling mouth.

Its eyes glistened with a feverish need, and its jaw unhinged to reveal a tongue like a fistful of razors. It was on her in two breaths. She spun as the creature’s teeth grazed her hip, sending a cold, numbing sensation through her limb. Instinct pulled Imani toward her shadows, and darkness had barely begun to gather beneath her skin when the Draswood moved first.

Roots bucked beneath the chapalus, moss flared with magic, and the oppressive silence shattered as a force belonging entirely to the forest ripped through the clearing.

The beast had no time to flee. The ground split beneath it as roots surged upward, wrapping its limbs and torso in a violent grip. Light pulsed through the moss and into the wood, traveling along the roots and into the creature’s body, forcing it rigid as the magic burned through it from the inside out.

It roared once, the sound cut short as the Draswood pressed harder, crushing bone, collapsing its frame inward as the energy consumed what was left. The body broke apart under the force, dragged down into the earth as the roots receded, pulling it beneath the surface until only torn ground and fading light remained.

Her chest heaved after the ambush, and Imani stared at the fallen chapalus. Imani’s shadows had never reached the creature. They remained coiled inside her, unused.

The Draswood had killed it.

A rustle broke above her as leaves parted just before a body dropped from the branch, landing lightly beside the beast’s corpse, and Imani heard wings flutter. Blue hair caught the light first, vivid against the Draswood’s shadows, then violet eyes locked onto hers, bright and alert.

Esa straightened from the landing in one smooth motion, her full height now matching Imani’s rather than the pixie she’d been just seconds earlier.

But Imani barely registered her friend. Instead, she locked her gaze on the thin lines splitting the soil near her boots. They had appeared during the Draswood’s response; she was certain. Fractured magic had passed through the ground when the roots destroyed the chapalus, and the moss around the disturbed earth had lost its bioluminescence, leaving it dimmed in a wide, ashen ring.

Her forest had protected her, but even its magic seemed in danger of causing Fabric events.

Imani ran her fingers over the lines and the dead moss. She closed her eyes and reached inward again, more cautiously this time. She needed the heartmagic pulsing behind her chest.