by Sadie Moss
More grunts from behind me and the sharp sound of blades meeting are the only proof I have that Callum, Echo, and Paris are all on their feet again and fighting back. The connection between the four of us stretches taut and intact, and I cling to the feeling of them there at the other end of the tether as chaos reigns over the throne room.
I’m rushed by two more messengers, but adrenaline has turned me into a more skilled warrior than I was even in training. Maybe it’s adrenaline, or maybe it’s from my time practicing on the mountain with three men unwilling to let me die in battle. I’m using the weave and my blade hand in hand, moving so quickly my mind can hardly keep up with my fingers. It doesn’t even matter that I’m fighting swords with my trusty knife—the weave makes my weapon just as deadly as theirs.
One man darts in, his sword slicing at my arm. I barely feel the cut, just a mild annoyance through the pulse-pounding sensation in my veins. I lunge into battle with him, my dagger against his sword, my weave against his. He manages to get another slice in, this time on my leg, and I snarl at him. Pulling a card from my hound-fighting experiences, I fall to the floor and roll, my blade sinking deep into his thigh before I dart away, leaving him bleeding profusely all over the pale marble.
I duck under a mighty blow from another messenger’s sword, and turn in a swivel to bring my blade around. The wounds on my arm and leg are bleeding, and they sting, but I can’t focus on them. The fight moves too fast. I dance around Echo, who’s up against three men, one of whom I jab in the kidney with my blade before I leap at another messenger and block his sword on the downswing.
But then I catch sight of Kaius stalking into the melee, unencumbered by strands of the weave and absolutely towering in his rage. He’s shaken off the last vestiges of our binding spell, and he is furious.
Distracted by his advance, I’m dealt a blow to the back of my head that doesn’t knock me down but does send me reeling. I lurch away and grab my skull with a pained intake of air.
Before I can lift my blade again, Kaius unleashes his fury.
Godly magic flares through the room with a force greater than nature itself. The magic passes through me, icy cold and intense, and the blow knocks me off my feet. For an interminable moment, I’m airborne, and all around me, messengers fall to the floor, eyes closed and weapons ripped from their hands and flung away from the impact.
Not just my men, but all messengers present—even the ones loyal to Kaius. He attacked indiscriminately, bringing his own servants down to get to us.
In the seconds before my head hits the floor, I realize we’ve failed.
We tried. And we lost.
Then I know nothing more.
26
All my other senses return before my eyelids remember how they’re supposed to work.
It feels as if there are bags of sand resting on my eyes, and it takes a vast amount of effort for me to force them open. I blink up at a high stone ceiling covered in moss, late evening light filtering in from the small window overhead and giving the air a purple glow.
A groggy, lightheaded haze has taken over my mind. I fight through layers of sleepiness and fog, trying to recall what led me here—and where here is.
The bars on the window are what bring recent events crashing back into my memories. I recall Callum’s big fingers using the weave to slice the bars away so that we could sneak into the palace, into a part of the dungeon that looked as if it hadn’t been used for some time.
Though the dungeon is being used now, it seems.
Cold, wet stone digs hard into my back, and I become aware of a cool breeze blowing in from the window. As soon as I recognize the chill, I’m wracked with shivers. I guess prisoners aren’t given the privilege of glass windows or warm room and board.
I’m in Kaius’s dungeon—the place where Callum, Echo, and Paris were ordered to take me before they defied their god and saved my life. He’s going to get the chance to extinguish me as an example to his people after all, just as he planned to do in the beginning.
I’m still flat on my back, becoming more alert with every moment. The wounds in my arm and leg burn. I ache all over. A rushing in my ears heralds the return of my hearing, and as my sense grow sharper, I realize I’m not alone in the dungeon. Distant shouts, ragged and pained, drift on the cold air to my cell, followed by the rapid crack of a whip.
No. Oh, farse, no.
My heart lurches, and I finally move, covering my mouth with both hands to stifle the sob as tears well in my eyes. One of my messengers is being tortured. I can feel the agony at the other end of my connection to him.
Over the cracking and despairing screams, I hear Kaius’s taunting voice, nearly unintelligible in the distance.
“You aren’t so strong now, are you?” he seethes, ending the statement with a mad chuckle. “No access to the weave. No brothers to help you.”
I roll to my knees, a wave of nausea forcing me to pause and breathe slowly and deeply so I don’t I pass out again. Kaius’s final blow knocked me right off my feet, and I landed on my head and shoulders—the dull ache and throb that emanates from them leave no room for doubt. I realize there’s a strong possibility I have a concussion.
But even worse, it sounds as if Kaius has bound my messengers to keep them from accessing the weave. They have no recourse now, no way to get the upper hand.
No way at all to fight back against his godly power.
As Kaius’s rumbling voice continues to mock his prisoner, I shuffle toward the cell door on my hands and knees. I sway dangerously with every dip in the rough-hewn stone floor, but I keep my focus on my messenger’s shouts until I get to the heavy door that separates me from freedom.
Clutching at the cold wood, I drag myself into a sitting position and fall against the door.
I can’t tell who Kaius is hurting, but I can tell he’s enjoying the show.
“You’ll join your disobedient little soul in death,” Kaius hisses, his voice like a living thing in the empty stone hallway far beyond my cell. “In extinguishing all of you, I’ll show my people what happens to those who defy me. They’ll never defy me as you did. Ever again.”
Several dangerous cracks follow his statement, and the strangled cry that comes from my messenger sends a fresh wave of agony through me. Hot tears leave cold trails on my cheeks, and my fingers turn numb where I clutch at the stone beneath me.
A moment later, a commotion begins to draw closer, and I yank myself to stand, clutching at the bars of the small window in the door as I stare into the dim hallway.
Two palace guards appear, dragging a bloody, bedraggled man down the dingy corridor by his arms. The guards’ creased uniforms are spattered with blood.
Paris’s blood.
One of his beautiful blue eyes is swollen shut, and his lush lips are split and cracked. He’s hardly recognizable but for the blood-spattered blond hair. His head lolls toward me, his good eye focusing as his gaze latches onto me.
“Paris,” I whisper, my fingertips reaching through the bars as if I could touch him. Save him.
Help him somehow.
His one good eye blinks, and I get the absurd notion that he’s winking at me. But of course he would—playful and charismatic to the end.
Paris and his escorts disappear into the shadows, disappearing down another hallway. They take him so far from where I’m being kept that I can’t even hear his groans anymore, although I can still feel the slow burn of his pain through the connection between us. Several minutes later, the guards return from depositing their prisoner back in his cell. They pass by me again on their way to the dungeon’s exit, and their footsteps disappear up the stairs, eventually fading into nothing.
I still cling to the bars of my own cell door, my face pressed between two of them. I hope desperately that Callum and Echo are still alive. Closing my eyes, I search our connection, striving to feel beyond the agony I can sense from Paris. I dig deeper, another sob working its way through me as I realize Callum and Echo are al
ive, but they’ve been tortured too.
I stay inside the connection for a few minutes, soaking in their presences, grateful to know they’re alive, even though they’re in more pain than I can bear to think about. This might be the last time I get to be with them.
Biting back more tears, I slide down the door, all my strength waning. I collapse to the damp stone floor and press my cheek against the stone, curled into a fetal position.
I’m too stunned to sob. My tears turn to ice on my skin under the cold wind blowing in from outside.
After a time, a strange sound reaches my ears. I plant my hands on the floor and lift my head, trying to focus through the ache pounding at my skull.
It’s a voice, speaking quickly and quietly into the silence.
I sit all the way up and go still in an attempt to figure out from which direction the sound is coming. Is it Paris? It can’t be. He’s too far away for me to hear his voice. All the men are, I’m sure of it.
Using the door as leverage, I stand again on trembling legs and cling to the bars once more, craning my ear toward the direction where the guards took the blond messenger.
No, it’s definitely not Paris.
I turn my head in the other direction, my ears pricking as I press my skull against the bars, straining to get a little closer to the sound. The voice is louder now. I can pick out words among the nonsense.
“—ought to stop him,” the voice is muttering in a tone just shy of hysteria. “Awful creature, that god is. Kaius. Bringer of ruin and damnation. He will murder the world.”
My entire body is pressed into the door, as if I could pour myself through the small window like water to reach the source of the voice. I can tell now that whoever it is isn’t talking to anybody in particular. The way the voice fades in and out makes me think this poor soul has been tortured too, and what I’m hearing is the mental aftermath. The poor man has gone mad.
“We can’t defeat him, no,” the voice goes on. Then the man, whoever he is, sucks in a breath. “Too strong. But the god to rule all gods… that god could.” The person guffawed—a low, deep sound, and I realize it’s a man, despite the high-pitched tone of his speech. “The Weaver. The one who controls all. That god could win. If we just reach the third plane, we reach the god to rule all gods. That would put Kaius in his place.”
The third plane?
There’s somewhere other than the earth and the afterworld? I’ve never heard any messenger or god say such a thing. The knowledge rolls through me, as cold as the breeze at my back. I shiver, then before I can talk myself out of it, I hiss, “What third plane?”
The babbling voice cuts off abruptly. For a moment, I think he’s going to remain silent, spooked by my response.
Then, in a voice much more sane than the one before, the man says, “A place where The Weaver dwells. A god even more powerful than those who rule earth and the afterworld. He who rules the gods themselves.”
“How do I get there?” I whisper, casting a glance toward the other end of the hall. Getting caught speaking to this other prisoner would likely earn me a lashing, should a guard sneak up on us.
“I do not know,” the man replies sadly. “But it is there. He is there.”
I move away from the bars, my mind racing. There is always the possibility that these were simply the ravings of a madman. But lunacy or not, it’s a lead. It’s hope—the only hope I have left, in fact.
Sierian refused to help us, stating many reasons, not the least of which was her desire to protect her own people by not striking up a war with Kaius. But she also intimated that all the gods were equal in power. That none could best or rule over the others.
That means we need help from someone who is stronger.
The gods’ god? The Weaver?
If he exists, as this man has said, all I need to do is escape and find him.
So the next question becomes—how do I escape?
My strength bolstered slightly by the sudden shot of adrenaline, I stagger to the window, casting my mind back to how we broke into the dungeon. Callum sliced through those bars like fresh butter. Then he did the same to the stones around it. If we used the weave to break in, then it begs the question of whether I could use the weave to get out.
I hold my breath and extend a hand, reaching toward the weave with my fingertips and my mind. Did Kaius bind me as soundly as he did my men? Surely, he must’ve seen in the throne room that I was casting the spell with them. He isn’t a simpleton.
But the weave sparks against my fingers, and I let out a low, triumphant cry.
Kaius isn’t dumb, but he’s too arrogant to see beyond his own little world. In the chaos and violence of our foiled attack, he must not have noticed that I was using magic alongside my men. And no matter what he thought he saw back in the throne room, he couldn’t possibly believe a human soul might possess power over the weave.
And that arrogance will be his downfall.
I tug at more strands, letting them shimmer against my fingertips. The feel of the universe’s magic brushing against my skin fills me with hope and determination.
I’ll get out of this cell, I promise myself grimly. I’ll save my men and get us out of this godforsaken city. We’ll find this one, all-powerful god.
And then we’ll defeat Kaius—for good.
THANK YOU FOR READING!
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And don’t worry, there’s more coming! Ascension, the final book in the Her Soulkeepers series, will be here soon! Turn the page to see the cover and blurb…
Kaius won't succeed. I'll make sure of it.
The angry, vindictive god wants to make an example of me and my men. To destroy us forever.
As dangerous and unlikely as it is, if there's even a chance we can find this mysterious god who will stand up to Kaius, who'll be strong enough to beat him, we have to try.
I'll risk oblivion itself to protect the men I love.
The keepers of my soul.
The keepers of my heart.
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Also by Sadie Moss
Magic Awakened
Kissed by Shadows (prequel novella)
Bound by Magic
Game of Lies
Consort of Rebels
The Vampires’ Fae
Saved by Blood
Seduced by Blood
Ruined by Blood
The Last Shifter
Wolf Hunted
Wolf Called
Wolf Claimed
Wolf Freed
Academy of Unpredictable Magic
Spark
Trials
Thief
Threat
Hunt
Clash
Hidden World Academy
Magic Swap
Magic Chase
Magic Gambit
Her Soulkeepers
Sacrifice
Defiance
Ascension