Reign of Shadows

  Calm swept over me. Suddenly I knew what to do.

  Unsheathing my dagger and pressing a palm flat to the tree’s trunk, I gathered my nerve, inhaled several quick breaths, and dropped down from the tree. I struck the sodden ground on my knees. Mud splattered me in the face, sticking thick in my eyelashes. I wiped at my eyes with the back of one hand.

  An eerie quiet surrounded me. I moved quickly, frantically, covering a wide area, distaste coating my mouth as I patted the surrounding ground for remains of Fowler. As I suspected, they took him. They had all gone back below with their quarry. He could still be alive—for a little while anyway.

  I continued crawling, rushing until I found where the ground was the softest. Not even ground anymore, but more like a pool of mud. This was where so many of the dwellers had emerged.

  I flexed my hand around the hilt of my dagger, sucked in the deepest breath my lungs could hold, and dove headfirst.

  Into the abyss.

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SOPHIE JORDAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Avon historical romances and the Firelight series. She lives in Houston with her family. You can visit her online at www.sophiejordan.net.

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  BOOKS BY SOPHIE JORDAN

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  COPYRIGHT

  HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  REIGN OF SHADOWS. Copyright © 2016 by Sharie Kohler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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  ISBN 978-0-06-237764-7 (trade bdg.)

  EPub Edition © August 2015 ISBN 9780062426475

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  16 17 18 19 20 XXXXXX 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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