“There,” Florian said, pointing to a boulder fifty yards ahead.
Cassian disappeared, reappearing an instant later beside the massive stone. Ros watched him put his hands above his head before stepping around the boulder out of sight.
She couldn’t see what was happening, but she knew she needed to get to him right then. She slid off Mercutio and threw his reins to Florian. “Don’t endanger the horses. Follow when you can.”
Ros called upon her gift. She felt the water surging to her, begging to rise up and overwhelm her and the place around her. That was the problem with having a gift like Tsunami: it was wild and uncontrollable, always seeking to consume and destroy.
But Ros was focused, her mind and heart on Cassian. Her gift could not overwhelm her when she was already consumed by the way she felt about him. The water rose under her feet, rushing her towards the boulder. It moved with her, leaving the ground behind her wet, but not flooded.
When she reached the place where Cassian had disappeared, less than a minute had passed. He was standing there with his hands still raised. Zandor was on the ground ahead of him, but Ros couldn’t see what was wrong with him. She peered around the boulder until her eyes landed on the source of the trouble: Graeme.
He floated a foot off the ground and seemed to crackle with energy. It wasn’t like the elemental power he possessed. No, this was dark magic. Shadows seemed to creep from tiny fissures in his skin and she knew immediately what was wrong. Whatever was happening with the darkness, whatever had taken her in the great hall, that evil that Cassian had pulled out of Elaina in the medical unit...it was here. It had been festering in Graeme overnight, maybe longer, and it wasn’t giving up as easily as it had before.
She slipped back behind the rock, hoping he hadn’t noticed her, but she’d barely moved when she heard, “And where do you think you’re going, Princess?”
With a curse, Ros stepped back into their view. She said, “Graeme, this isn’t you.”
The thing inside Graeme barked out a laugh. “Oh, how perceptive. Or at least that’s what you’re hoping, right? Because what would it mean if this was Graeme? That would make you a fool, aye.”
“Just leave her out of this,” Cassian said, trying to step between her and Graeme. “We can work something out.”
“That is truly precious. A Night mage with a noble heart. But alas, I’ve seen what you can do and I have no use for it. Be gone.”
Graeme flicked his hand and threw Cassian against the rocks near Zandor. Ros let out a yelp, her hand flying to her mouth, when she saw the way Cassian landed. There was no way he wasn’t injured, not when she could see his ankle twisted and bone jutting out.
She turned back to Graeme, eyes narrowed. Her powers surged through her, electrifying every cell of her body with the need to be used against this foe. She felt it building in her fingertips, aching to escape and wreak havoc on the evil around her.
But she held it back. Barely, but that was enough for now.
“What are you?” she asked.
Graeme shrugged. “Just a passenger, darling, looking for the right host. And if I’m being honest, I’m not crazy about this one. It seemed fine until I tried it out last night against that vuljasari. Turns out all he can do is fly around. I’m looking for something a little more intense. Like, I don’t know, Tsunami-strength power.”
“Forget it,” she spat. “I’ll never let you take control of me.”
“Pretty sure you will, actually. If not, I’m going to kill your lover-boy.”
Ros told herself not to look at him, willing her eyes to stay focused on Graeme, but felt them slip to Cassian anyway. She only glanced at him for a second, but it was enough to confirm Graeme’s words.
She took a deep breath, willing herself to stay calm. “If you took me, would you give your word to let the others go?”
He shrugged. “As long as you gave yourself fully, they’d be of no further use to me.”
A flicker of movement behind Graeme caught Rosalinde’s eyes, but this time she refused to look. She knew it was Florian, it had to be, and she needed to give him as much of a distraction as she could for whatever he was doing.
“Why do you need me?”
Graeme sighed. “That’s really none of your business.”
“It’s my body.”
“I don’t care about your body. I want your power. It’s sitting there, untapped, wasted on the likes of you. But in my hands, we could be the strongest mage in Talabrih.”
“Maybe I’m already the strongest.”
Graeme laughed, a vicious crackle of sound accompanied by a wisp of shadow floating from his mouth. “I have no doubt you could be, if you weren’t so afraid to release the waters churning within you. You’ll never be anything until you do.”
She bit the inside of her cheek, as if considering his words. “But you can make me great.”
“No, Rosalinde,” Cassian said. “You can’t.”
“He’s right though, isn’t he? I’ll never really be able to use or control these powers until I learn what they can really do.”
“You know I’m right. Come here and let’s end this, together.”
She took a step towards Graeme, ignoring the pained yells from Cassian as she did. Another step and she reached out her hands. “Ready?”
Graeme reached for her just as Florian sprang up behind him. He zapped Graeme with a bolt of lightning so strong Ros could hear his teeth rattling together. Somehow, Graeme managed to move his hand, to call on his power, and send Florian flying to the ground like the others.
He turned his twitching head back towards Rosalinde and said, “You should be ashamed, Princess. I thought we’d reached an understanding.”
“We have,” she breathed. “Please, let them live.”
Graeme shrugged. “Now that he’s out of the way, I suppose we can still finish our bargain.”
He grabbed her wrists as dark wisps poured from Graeme’s mouth, nose, ears, and even his eyes. She felt his grip weaken as the darkness left him. Graeme’s body fell to the ground, the stench of burnt flesh clinging to him. The smell stuck to the back of Rosalinde’s throat—sour and cloying, a smell she would never get out of her mouth again—but there was nothing she could do. The darkness was already pooling inside her. It had claimed her for its own.
She took one final breath as herself before she felt the darkness take control.
Chapter 30
Rosalinde looked down at the two men on the ground to her right. She could see Cassian and Zandor, knew it was them, but this new, dark part of her only saw them as the enemy. She could feel the darkness twisting her powers towards them.
“You said you’d let them go,” she said, through a voice that wasn’t entirely hers anymore.
“I said they would be of no use to me,” the darkness replied.
“You can’t hurt them.”
“I can and I will. Besides, you’ll feel better once they’re gone. No one to know what happened to you, how easily you gave in.”
But it didn’t matter. Cassian took away the reason for their argument when he grabbed Zandor’s wrist and disappeared.
“A pity,” the darkness said. “I was really looking forward to killing that little darkling. He had pizazz.”
Ros pushed against the darkness riding in her body, trying to take control. She could feel it spreading out, reaching tendrils of darkness into the deepest part of her. She cleared her mind, trying to put up blockades to keep it from worming into her thoughts.
“You’re just upset about not killing him because you know he’ll be your downfall.”
“You give the boy more credit than he’s due. He’s weak.”
When the darkness laughed, it came out of her mouth. It was her chest that shook with the foul thing’s delight, her body beginning to respond to its commands. But by all the elements, she wasn’t giving in without a fight.
“He’s stronger than you’ll ever be.”
“You don’t know
him like I do, no matter how much you might think you love him. He’s always been soft, easy to control, too afraid to do what’s necessary.”
“Don’t pretend you know anything about him,” she said.
She saw a flicker at the corner of her eye and turned just in time to see Cassian flash out of existence, Graeme’s body in tow. She looked to Florian’s body—or where it had been. While she was arguing with the darkness, Cassian must’ve come back for him. In her heart, she was certain he would return for her as well. She needed to give him more time.
“He can have their bodies. I only need this one.”
The darkness surged within her, pressing against the frail boundaries she’d put in place.
Pathetic, it thought, taking over her mind. You’re as weak-willed as he is.
Rosalinde held tightly to the sliver of herself still there, the part he hadn’t yet been able to take. She knew what that piece was, why he hadn’t been able to control it like the rest of her: it was built of tiny moments from everyone she knew, everyone who had made her who she was. It was made of love and light, things this villain didn’t know how to use.
She clung to her mother’s bedside whispers when she was a child, playing dolls with Elsabet, visiting the sick with her father. She dug her nails into memories of sneaking out with Larkin, kissing boys behind the stables, getting sick from too much bad ale with the twins a couple years older than her, Sascha and Sebastian. She thought of nights with Alaric and knowing she was falling in love with him, but being unable to do anything about it.
Then, to her surprise, she found a bit of Cassian in there. She remembered the way he caught her when she tripped on the stairs and realized that she started falling for him even then. She remembered the way he frightened her simply by saying who he was, the way danger seemed to surround him like a cloak—but that was all it was, something he could take on and off when needed. Underneath, he was kind. He cared about others, like her father. He built her up, like her mother. Like Elsabet, he challenged her, made her better. He was as much a part of her now as any of the others.
Stop that, the darkness thought.
Ros didn’t know what she’d done, only that she’d been thinking about Cassian. She focused on him, remembering the way it felt the first time he’d teleported her through the darkness. He’d put his hand on her waist and moved her into his world, giving her a glimpse no outsider had seen before. There were so many colors, so much more than she expected.
“I said to stop,” the darkness said.
It pulled at her thoughts, trying to dismantle them from the edges. She felt it scratching at them, but no matter what it did, she held firm. She would hold onto this last bit of herself until the breath left her lungs for the final time.
She felt a hand clamp around her wrists and looked up to see Cassian’s dark eyes staring down at her. He whispered her name, shaking her as he did, but she couldn’t seem to form words anymore. She couldn’t make her mouth move, couldn’t do anything but hold onto that tiny core that was the last part of her that hadn’t been consumed.
“You can’t have her,” he growled.
She felt the darkness recoil at his words. Somehow, she knew it wasn’t from fear, simply surprise. Though she couldn’t make words on her own, she could hear the darkness say, “You’re too late, Cassian. This one is mine.”
“I will not lose her to you or anyone else.”
The force in Cassian’s voice would’ve taken her breath away, if the darkness wasn’t controlling that, too. She felt him pulling at the darkness inside her, winding his elemental magic into her to rip at the power that was holding her hostage, just as he had taken it out of her in the castle when it tried to control her the first time.
But this was too much, even for him. This wasn’t the tiny part of every person that leaned towards evil, this was a being made of malevolence that now lived inside her body. He might be able to get it out of her, he might even be able to consume it, like he had the smaller pieces, but even without fully understanding his powers she knew he wouldn’t be able to control it for long. In the end, it would swallow him up and leave nothing but a husk.
She had to warn him, had to stop him. Maybe while the darkness was distracted with Cassian, she had a chance. From the tiny part of her mind that still belonged to her, Rosalinde held tight to her love that was blooming for Cassian. She fed it with her thoughts, built it up, and pushed it out from herself. She watched it spread through her mind, felt it moving through her body just as she’d felt the darkness when it had taken control.
“What are you doing?” the darkness thought.
She wasn’t sure, but it almost sounded nervous. Ros didn’t answer, just pushed more love out into herself, letting it flood through her until she felt her stomach doing somersaults at the mere thought of Cassian’s strange, dark eyes.
The darkness slithered out of her as quickly as it had entered. Cassian reached for it, but it slipped between his fingers, a black smoke that smelled of decay.
“You haven’t seen the last of me, Princess,” it said. “I will have your power.”
“You’ll never have her,” Cassian said.
As it faded on the breeze, Ros heard a faint laugh as it said, “We’ll see about that, little hollow boy. We’ll see.”
“Hollow boy?” she asked.
Cassian dropped to his knees. His eyebrows were raised, his mouth ajar, but it was the sadness in his eyes that caught Rosalinde off guard. There was more pain in those eyes than Ros had ever seen.
She knelt in front of him and put her hands on each side of his face, drawing his gaze to her. “I’m here. How can I help?”
“Gaius,” he whispered, tears beginning to trickle at the corners of his eyes. “It-it can’t be. He died. Mother told me…”
“Gaius?” she repeated. “Your brother?”
Cassian nodded. “He always called me that—hollow boy. That’s what my name means. He always said Mother named me that because that’s how she felt when I was born.”
His words were a punch in the gut. As much as she and her sister fought, Ros couldn’t imagine saying something like that to Elsabet. It was hurtful and cruel, the kind of thing your family was supposed to protect you from.
Ros stroked his face with her thumb from cheekbone to jaw. She wanted to comfort him, but couldn’t imagine what he was feeling right now. “It was probably just a trick. The darkness is trying to weaken you.”
Cassian’s eyes were on her, but when he spoke it was as if he was looking straight through. “I wasn’t sorry that he died. He was a terrible brother, a terrible person. I swore to myself I would never be like him.”
“You’re not,” she said. “You’re nothing like him.”
“How do you know?” he asked, his eyes meeting hers in a way that seemed to plead for her to give him proof that he wasn’t the same as Gaius.
“Look at what you did today,” she said. “You have the ability to teleport. You could’ve escaped all of this. But you didn’t. You saved the others, risking yourself every time you returned. And you came back for me.”
“Anyone would’ve—”
“No, not anyone,” she said, cutting him off. Ros pressed her moon-scarred palm against his chest. “Your brother wouldn’t have. You don’t have to tell me anything else about him for me to know that. If that thing really is Gaius, I felt him in me. I know who he is, and you are nothing like him.”
Cassian put his hands over hers where they rested against his face. “Thank you.”
Ros felt heat rise into her cheeks as he looked at her. The gap between them seemed to shrink, though neither of them moved. Cassian’s lips curled at the edges in a tentative smile that seemed shy and knowing at the same time.
Her stomach flipped again as her feelings flooded back to the front of her mind. The affection for this man, the love she’d been afraid to admit, was the very thing that had protected her from Gaius.
She stared at his cheekbones, at the slope of
his nose, the shadow of beard on his jaws. Ros tried to look anywhere but his lips, but of course that’s where her eyes inevitably went. There was something mesmerizing about them and once her eyes landed there, she couldn’t look away. As she watched, begging them to draw nearer, she saw them start moving instead.
“I want to kiss you,” Cassian breathed.
“Okay,” she said, still staring at his perfect mouth.
His smile grew ever so slightly, but he said, “I can’t, Ros. Not until this is over and you choose me.”
“What? Why?” she asked, finally meeting his eyes.
“I can’t let this get out of hand. I know how I feel about you, but you’ve got a big decision to make and you need to be thinking clearly. I want you to pick me, Ros, but I need to know you’re doing it for the right reasons and not just because we went through something crazy together.”
“It isn’t because of that,” she protested. “I mean, yes, that definitely made me realize how I’m feeling, but—”
He shook his head. “I want our first kiss to be the day I know you’re never going to kiss anyone but me, forever.”
The words gave her pause. Even her parents kissed other people. It was accepted, expected even, for them to take lovers. If he was saying he didn’t want that, wanted to only be with her...did that mean he loved her?
He stood up, not giving her the chance to dwell on the question further. Reaching down a hand, he helped her to her feet. “Come on, we need to go.”
“Where are we going?”
“To finish our quest, Princess. We still need to find the king.”
She nodded. “We’ll need supplies and a place to rest. We might also need more help than we thought.”
“I have someone in mind.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
Chapter 31
Rosalinde wasn’t sure what she was expecting from the Night house, but this wasn’t it. In her mind she’d thought of massive black spires and a drawbridge over a moat filled with spider-fish, maybe the occasional head on a spike. She should have known better after getting to know Cassian, but years of stories had built a villain’s fairytale castle in her head and it wasn’t until they were standing at the fence that she realized how wrong those stories had been.
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