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Oh, feeling a little feisty, are we? I spun myself closer to her as Balkersaff sent plumes of smoke in my direction. Smoke that reminded us both too much of a village on fire, of innocent screams, of a friend falling to the ground.

Time seemed to slow. The echoes of the past swirled around me, though it wasn’t Hallow’s Perch that flooded through my memories.

I was with my mother, huddled against an alley wall on a tattered blanket that had been reduced to mere threads over the years. The stars that peered down on us between the eaves cast my mother’s face in speckled light, but the years had blurred away the details of her features. I couldn’t remember exactly what she had looked like, only what she whispered to me as she rocked me.

“I promise it will get better, my sweet boy. I promise this is not forever.”

It felt like forever. The clench of hunger. The dampness soaking our skin. The other faeries who walked by, most of them hardly glancing our way. The sinking feeling that life was a nightmare we couldn’t escape or wake up from, that nightmares like this were the cards we’d been dealt and we’d never be able to move from our checkered space. But my mother did not stop whispering it.

“I promise it will get better. This is not forever, sweet boy. I promise.”

And it hadn’t been. Maybe for my mother, but not for me. Now there were other nightmares to plague me, ones I shared with the breathtaking woman before me. I didn’t want them to last forever, but I wanted us to last forever.

It was time for us to climb out of our nightmares. Together.

With my free hand, I reached out to Rayna’s thigh and plucked her crescent knife from its sheath, placing it in her palm. Before she could fling it away from herself, I curled her fingers around the handle and gave a significant nod.

Her eyes flared dangerously. With our minds connected, she knew.

In Hallow’s Perch, it hadn’t actually been me she’d stabbed, just a replica of me. Now, here, today, the world squeezed around us both, our lips inches away.

Right in front of Balkersaff, Rayna drew back her arm and plunged her crescent blade toward my heart.

For real this time.

CHAPTER

34

RAYNA

Coen disappeared a millisecond before my blade could pierce his skin.

In his place, a single golden key clattered to the ground. Retrieve that which lies at the end of your path: our way out of this hellhole. It had probably been somewhere on the ground behind the lizard mutant until Coen had put it in his pocket.

“Where’d he go?” Quinn cried, twirling in frantic circles.

“I think…” I snatched the key and straightened. “I think we killed him.”

Even saying the words tasted sour on my tongue. I was so tired of these games. When would Coen and I be able to just be together? Never? My hand shook around the handle of my knife, and I slipped it back into my sheath as quickly as I could.

“Come on.” I held up the key. “Let’s get out of here.”

On our way back, we came across the dead pre-elite, whose blood had stopped trickling and brain matter had stopped leaking. I used my Object Summoning to hoist up her body, grunting with the effort of carrying her along.

“What are you doing?” Quinn asked.

“I’m not leaving her here. She deserves…”

What? A proper burial? There was no way Mr. Gleekle would showcase her death to the Institute or her family back at home. Still, I couldn’t let her carcass fester underground forever, so I pulled her along, all the way to the water where the eels…

Were also lying dead on dry ground, the water drained.

A scream boiled in my throat. I kept it in, but my blood burned as we continued, stepping over the eels whose demise I had promised to avenge. Through the space where it was no longer raining. Across the narrow strips of rocky ledge, no more hallucinations to drive us to the edge. Past the statues in armor, who didn’t so much as twitch when we went by the second time, their weapons motionless.

Finally, we unlocked the iron door that had bolted shut. Mr. Gleekle was still standing in that underground chamber, his hands clasped behind his back.

Upon seeing us, his eyes zigzagged from me to Quinn to the dead body floating behind us and back to me. Surprise flashed there, quickly devoured by a tight smile.