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“I . . .” Nesta began again, brows knitting together. “I . . . I’ve felt it before.” As if in answer, a chill shivered through the temple. It was familiar to me, too.

Nyx began twisting, trying to pry his hand free from ours.

“Enough,” Rhys said to the priestess, and laid his hand on the ribbon. Magic flared, but the fabric held. “Get that knife.” He inclined his head to where it lay on the altar behind us, his words barely more than a growl. His eyes met mine, dark with power and that predator’s urge to start shredding apart any threat to me or Nyx. “We winnow out of here in—”

He didn’t have the chance to finish.

One breath, there was light. The next, there was dark. A darkness I had not seen in a long, long time. Not since I’d begged for its help in the bowels of the House of Wind. Not since it had fled into the wilds, freed from its restraints after I’d unleashed it upon Hybern.

I knew what that darkness brought. Knew what that darkness was crafted from.

Fear.

CHAPTER

15

Azriel

Azriel had been standing in line—Elain so painfully close that he savored her scent, even with her mate mere steps away—when Nesta picked up on something before anyone else. Before his shadows, even.

Not that his shadows were here. Elain had chased them away with her proximity, bright to his dark, scattering them beyond the temple’s boundaries.

When the first scrap of darkness had appeared in the open temple doorway, for a moment he’d thought it was his shadows coming to extend their own blessing. Then the blackness had devoured everything.

He knew that darkness—knew its name: Bryaxis.

Its power was that of pure, unfiltered fear. One’s deepest terrors personified and amplified to deadly effect. It took all of a second for someone—Elain—to scream. Not a scream of alarm, but of absolute horror.

Azriel’s power erupted, blue light exploding outward to kill and to protect, but the darkness was impenetrable. It swallowed his Siphons’ light with a single bite.

Cassian bellowed, a sound of gut-wrenching torment.

Had Rhys and Feyre gotten Nyx out? Had they sliced that ribbon off their hands so they could face this nightmare given form?

Elain screamed again, and Az whirled, Siphons illuminating the dark in a wash of blue. His shadows were gone—his shadows couldn’t find him, couldn’t come near, somehow—

Lucien was shouting for his mate, but that shout turned to a roar of agony.

Drawing from the Siphon at his right hand, Az shaped his power into a sword of blue light, and as he brandished it, the dark cleared. The scene it revealed turned him to stone. Into the living dead.

Bodies lay scattered on the temple floor, bloodied and broken. Rhys. Cassian. Feyre—and a tiny, fragile body lay half-covered by Feyre, blood leaking from Nyx’s small hands.

Az looked down at himself. There was blood on him, too. On his own hands. On Truth-Teller, somehow back in his grip. He’d done this to them, as he’d done this to his kin long ago, with the same blade.

Yesterday, he’d been so sure that he didn’t regret it—insisted, as he’d stared Ramiel down, that he didn’t care. But this time, with his friends—that beautiful baby—dead at his hands, hands that were now unable to release Truth-Teller’s blood-slick hilt—

This wasn’t real.

Elain was crawling toward him through the gore, reaching bloodied fingers for his stained boots. “Please,” she begged—to spare her or to end her pain, he didn’t know. He’d done this to all of them; he’d gone to a place within him that he’d dreaded Rhys or anyone ever finding out about, a place as hollow as Ramiel. He couldn’t let go of Truth-Teller. The knife was bound to his very flesh.

Rhys began screaming. Not the prone corpse before him, but off in the distance.

This wasn’t real. But Rhys’s scream of suffering was, and their temple, their city was under attack. Bryaxis, Fear itself, had come.

Feyre was sobbing somewhere beyond the unbearable field of death, too. “No,” she cried. “No, no, no.”

He had to fight it. Had to stop seeing it. But there was Mor, inches away from his bloodied boots, her naked body brutalized again, a note nailed to her abdomen.