At the very end of this line of watchtowers there’s a much larger, partially enclosed stronghold with a black bell hanging from its center. Two dead guards are resting at the base of this tower, slumped in a way that suggests they tumbled over the hold’s edge, fell and landed in their current positions—casualties of the spells Elric has been firing in every direction, I’m guessing.
But he’s distracted at the moment, him and Liam both tangled up in a battle with three more guards behind us.
He’s not going to be able to stop the creature barreling toward sounding the alarm.
I point to that ominous black bell.
(I need to get there first,) I think.
It’s all the encouragement Carys needs to start sprinting.
(Get ready to jump,) she thinks at me.
Just beneath the room of this main watchtower is an encircling ledge. It isn’t big enough for her to actually land on, and it’s so high up that I’m ninety percent sure we’re about to go splat in a way that would be comical if it didn’t mean we were probably also going to die.
I point this out to her, and she just runs faster.
So I get ready to jump.
She launches herself at the ledge.
The impact isn’t exactly a splat, but it’s definitely jarring. But I’m prepared—as she shoves off of the wall, I shove off of her, and between the momentum transfer and my wolf genes I manage an inhumanly strong jump that propels me through one of the watchtower’s narrow openings.
I roll as I hit the concrete floor inside, and I straighten up and adjust my sword just as the guard flings himself over the tower railing and lands a few feet away from me and the bell I’ve positioned myself in front of.
He isn’t Anima, like nearly all the other guards I’ve seen this far.
He’s not wearing a mask. He doesn’t look like a complete monster. He looks human, aside from eyes that are too narrow—snake-like, almost—and skin that has a weird waxy quality to it. And teeth…he snarls at me and those are definitely not human teeth; there are multiple rows of them, and they’re slightly curved in a way that reminds me of the shark teeth Liam and I used to scavenge for when we took trips to the beach.
The guard’s eyes flicker toward the bell.
He darts for it.
He’s fast, but my sword swings faster. He throws his arm up and my blade clangs against his armor. We’re locked in place for a minute, both of us attempting to shove the other off balance but neither of us proving stronger than the other.
Then the pressure on my weapon relaxes suddenly.
He hooks a foot around my ankle and jerks, and I fall to my knees.
He lowers his shoulder and prepares to slam into that alarm bell.
I thrust my sword toward him and magic rushes through it, desperate and quick; a ball of electricity hits him squarely between the shoulder blades and he tumbles, lands face forward into a twitching heap on the ground. He rolls over onto his back and tries to sit up.
I’m standing over him before he can, my sword pointed at his throat, my chest heaving, my mind trying not to think about the very human-like panic I see flicker through his not-quite-human eyes.
It’s easier to kill the masked ones.
But the difficulty doesn’t matter, because a second later he attempts to inch backward toward that alarm bell again, and I don’t have much choice but to silence him for good with an electric-charged stab to the chest.
He’s nothing but a charred shell a moment later.
I fight through the sick churning in my stomach and search for my next move. I see a hatch in the corner of the tower’s floor, and I run to it and fling it open. A ladder leads down into darkness, and I hesitate for only a moment before scurrying down it. Another guard greets me at the bottom—I practically fall on top of him, and he stumbles back until he hits the wall and braces himself against it.
He eyes the sword glowing in my hand. Maybe he senses the restless magic in me. Maybe he wants backup. I don’t know, but he unexpectedly turns and sprints away without warning.
I consider running after him, but the increasing sounds of battle outside make me worried for my friends, so instead I race in the opposite direction of the guard, until I find a door.
Almost immediately after flinging it open, Carys roars inside. She’s so big that she barely fits through the door. Liam follows her a minute later, and he almost does get stuck. Which again, funny stuff under other circumstances. But at the moment I’m still more concerned with the whole dying thing—especially when I glimpse the mob that’s following close on Liam’s heels.
I’m paralyzed for a moment, staring at them.
Luckily, Elric is still moving.
He gets between them and holds up his staff, which floats from his hands and flips around for a moment before balancing horizontally in the air in front of him.
“I’ll hold them off,” he says without looking at us. “Go find the key. Go find Soren. And be careful.”
Before I can argue, Liam slams his body into the door and shuts it with a bang that’s way too loud. It fills me with dread and a surreal, detached kind of fear as I hold my breath and wait for the deadly response that I’m sure is coming to answer that noise.
But no one immediately shows up to kill us, so I shake off my paralysis while the other two shift back to their human forms.
We creep through the halls, searching. I don’t really know where to look. I’m doing my best to pretend otherwise—to act like I know what I’m doing—but I don’t manage to fool Liam.
“Are we just making things up as we go at this point?” he asks.
“I think part of me didn’t believe we’d actually make it this deep into the palace,” I admit. “So I didn’t bother coming up with any plan more detailed than ‘find the stuff we came for and don’t die’.”
“Simple enough I guess.”
“There’s beauty in simplicity,” Carys whispers.
We’ve definitely ended up in a less populated area of the palace, so at least we have time to mentally prepare ourselves for whatever’s coming next. After so many turns that I start to lose track, we finally run into a handful of soldiers—more of those waxy-skinned humanoids like the one I faced in the bell tower.
Except they have swords.
But I have a better sword, and I quickly take care of them so that Liam and Carys can then relieve them of their weapons.
Once we’re all armed, we move a bit more confidently at least. This is still beginning to feel like a fool’s errand, though, and the relative lack of people here to stop us is starting to make me confused. And wary.
Are they all outside, fighting off Elric and that army he called to action?
Or are they purposely hiding so that we move deeper into the palace, so deep that there’s no chance of us escaping?
The latter seems like a real possibility. But I don’t know what else to do except keep moving. So that’s what I do—at least until we pass a hallway that’s impossible not to stop and stare at.
Because it’s full of gleaming glass.
Mirrors.
Dozens of them hanging in-between a fascinating spread of weapons and armor. Under any other circumstance, there’s no way I would be able to keep myself from stopping and studying those weapons and all their various interesting designs—some that seem familiar, others that are unlike any blade or bows I’ve ever seen. An incredibly tempting display.
But I walk right past it.
I hardly do more than glance at it, because I’m too busy walking numbly toward the imposing wooden door at the end of the hall.
“Elle?” Carys’s hand wraps around my wrist, and she gives it an uncertain tug.
I stop walking, but I don’t take my eyes off that door, or the symbol of Earth carved into it.
“I…I’ve seen this place before.”
Carys is quiet, confused.
But Liam understands more quickly, because he’s always been the first one I tell about my visio
ns and nightmares—because he was always more likely to laugh them off and convince me not to worry about them.
There’s no hint of laughter in his tone as he says: “You mean you’ve seen it in a vision?”
I nod.
“And what happened in this vision, exactly?”
Before I can answer, Carys’s grip on my arm releases. I hear her gasp. I feel her move away. But by the time I manage to pry my eyes away from the door and turn to see what’s wrong, she’s gone.
So is Liam.
Suddenly I’m facing nothing except a wall.
It’s an illusion. It has to be. But it’s a thorough one, because when I reach out to try and press through it, it doesn’t give completely before I’m so weirded out that I snatch my hand back. And there’s no one reaching to meet me from the other side. No answer from either of my friends when I call out to them. I can’t hear their footsteps, their voices, their breathing—I’m wrapped so tightly in this illusion of silence and false barriers that my animal instincts can’t tell that it’s fake. The wolf in me just wants out—by whatever means necessary.
Trying not to panic, I ready my sword.
I take a deep breath.
I look back to the Earth-marked door.
Soren is blocking it, the sister to my sword lifted in his hand and just as ready as mine.
Chapter Seventeen
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t do anything except stare at me with eyes that seem oddly shadowed—until I try to take a few steps toward him. Then he stops me with his voice.
“You got here quicker than expected.”
“Why were you expecting me at all?” I ask quietly. “What is going on here?”
When he doesn’t answer, I quickly stride a few more steps forward. He raises his sword in a threatening motion, and I stumble to a stop. Now that I’m closer to him, it’s obvious that I didn’t imagine those strange shadows over his eyes. Everything about them is darker than it should be. His irises are dull grey; there’s no trace of their usual beautiful green.
“What has she done to you?” I demand.
He smiles. It looks like his real smile—I know, because I’ve memorized that forever-slightly-arrogant way that he curves his lips—but it doesn’t reach his oddly dull eyes, and it doesn’t ease the pressure on my insides.
“Done?” he repeats. “She’s done nothing that I didn’t want her to.”
“You wanted this?” I choke out a humorless laugh, refusing to believe what I’m hearing, what I’m seeing.
His smile disappears. “You knew from the beginning that all I wanted was to get my family back. You should be happy that I’ve found my way here.”
I remember Anika’s words. The way her voice shook when she spoke about the queen. That same fear makes my own words determined to stick in the back of my throat. “The woman who lives in this palace isn’t your family, Soren,” I say, forcing those words out as gently as I can. “She—”
His sword is against my chest, the tip of it digging in toward my heart.
“You don’t understand,” he says through clenched teeth.
I readjust the grip I have on my own sword as subtly as possible
He still notices the movement.
And he takes it as a challenge.
His blade is drawing back and slicing toward me an instant later. I meet it with my own, but not cleanly enough that I can properly push him away. My balance is too far off. And with another vicious swing that I just barely manage to deflect, he knocks me onto my butt.
My sword nearly flies out of my hand as I make the jarring connection with the ground. I clench it awkwardly but tightly, and I scramble as fast and as far as I can on my knees before I twist back to him with my weapon raised.
His downward slice meets the curve of my lifted sword. It doesn’t go any farther than that. I’m braced against the ground now, and with one hand pressed against that ground I manage to balance well enough to precisely aim a hard, quick knee to his stomach. He doubles over and I scramble from beneath him, get behind him and attempt to drop an elbow into his back.
He’s too fast.
He dodges at the last second, and I nearly end up elbowing the ground instead. I catch myself on one hand, the other still clinging tightly to the sword that I desperately don’t want to have to use.
I just want to disarm him.
To wake him up.
To get him to look at me like he did that night on the edge of the mountain.
But he doesn’t seem to see me at all. He only sees a target. And without a second’s hesitation, he’s swinging for that target again.
I spring off my one hand, launching into an intended flip that honestly turns into more of a flail. It’s not graceful, but I do land several feet away—far enough that I have time to stand and face him and work my way into an actual formidable stance. He pauses, sizing me up the way he has so many times over the past few days, every time we practiced together and I tried to learn to better control my power.
The memory causes an automatic reflex of magic, sends it shooting through my veins the same way it did during all of those practice sessions. It feels violent and powerful and pure—and I could use it to finish this.
It would be so easy to finish this, a tiny voice in the back of my head says.
And if I don’t use that magic, I’m afraid he’s going to finish me first.
Because he’s walking toward me with one hand raised, working his fingers in that way that signals an oncoming spell.
“Please stop,” I beg. “Whatever that queen has shown you, it’s not true. Whatever she’s told you…we’re not enemies. She’s tricked you. Did you give her the Earth key? Did you seriously forget about me that easily? Damn it, Soren—”
The walls around me suddenly feel like they’re closing in. The weapons hanging from them rattle. They fall, but they don’t hit the ground. They float. In the corners of my vision I watch at least a dozen sharp objects hovering, twisting, pointing themselves at me.
“I know this isn’t real,” I say, not taking my eyes off him.
“Isn’t it?”
“Shut up. Your stupid mind games aren’t going to work on me. I know you better than anyone at this point. You can’t trick me. You won’t.”
He steps closer.
I thrust my sword out as a warning.
He stops just before the tip of the blade meets his chest. It’s not a particularly long sword; so he’s close enough that he could probably reach me— touch me—and use that contact to fully immerse me in a spell.
But he doesn’t reach for me. He lowers his own sword, holds it together with his hands behind his back and then he simply studies me, occasionally shifting his weight from one side to the other, as if preparing to launch into another attack if I make one wrong move. Every inch he shuffles causes a fresh flutter of panic to shake through me, which I’m pretty sure is his intention.
“You remember the night of your last test?” he asks suddenly. “The one you failed? The one that ended with members of your pack dead, your mother bleeding—”
“Shut up,” I say again.
“You don’t like that memory?”
Fire and electricity run the length of my sword, just barely under my control and confined to the blade that’s dipped to the deepest shade of black I’ve ever seen it possess.
He only smiles at the sight of that magic. “It’s important that you remember that not everything was an illusion that night,” he says. “People really, truly died that night. Just like they will tonight.”
“You aren’t strong enough to create real pain,” I say, shaking my head. “And even if you were, you won’t do it. Because you aren’t your father. You aren’t your mother, and you don’t want to hurt people—”
“You don’t have a clue how powerful I really am,” he says, his expression hardening. “You don’t know what I can do. What I will do.”
I’m speechless for a moment. Because he’s right. How often hav
e I thought about—worried about—that exact thing?
I just never thought I would be the target of whatever monstrous level his power might reach.
The walls continue to press in. The weapons spin around me; I feel the sharp end of one of them digging into my lower back.
Not real, I tell myself. Not real, not real—
But if it is real, then it’s dangerously close to my spine.
Not real, I repeat to myself, stubbornly.
“I don’t want to fight you,” I whisper to him.
“Then I guess this is the part where you die.”
The night-sky blade flies from behind his back, launches from his hand and nearly impales me in the throat. I twist aside at the last possible moment. It shears only a few hairs on its flight past me—but it’s only a distraction.
And it works.
I can’t avoid both it and him, and the next thing I know his hand is clutching the front of my shirt, jerking me to him while his other hand reaches for the side of my face. My sword arm is awkwardly twisted at my side. I try to lift my other arm, to get him in a strong enough grip that I can yank him off of me—
His fingers have wrapped around my head, and now there’s an awful sensation spreading along the base of my skull. It’s like needles have sprouted from his fingertips and they’re slowly digging their way inside, trying to reach my brain.
I didn’t want to fight him.
But I never said I wouldn’t fight him.
So before whatever lies he’s trying to implant in my mind can grip me fully, I close my eyes, and I let my restless magic explode through me.
It brings every nerve-ending in my body to life. Makes my skin rise in little bumps that simmer with an electrical current that builds and builds until he has no choice but to take a step back from me if he wants to avoid getting fried.
He leaps backward, eyeing me cautiously. But even with the distance between us, I can’t seem to shake that needling feeling spreading across my scalp. And now my surroundings keep shifting. Changing colors. Moving, even though I know I’m standing still. He’s distorted too—his facial features changing, his body splitting, stretching in impossible ways that make it difficult to focus.
Silver and Shadow (The Canath Chronicles Book 2) Page 16