His fingers clench tighter into my skull.
Electricity tingles across my scalp.
I let out an involuntary whimper that sounds more canine than human. I remember the way he tricked my mind into feeling comforted, and I have a feeling I know what’s coming next—and it isn’t going to be a brief relaxation spell—but my mind is a strange mix of human and wolf, and it’s too confused to stop him.
He overpowers me, and he injects the sensation of pain directly into my mind.
I feel my body convulsing with it, over and over again until I can’t feel anything anymore, just a strange weightless sensation. My mind blanks. The trees towering around me become blurs of shadows that collapse over my still body, plunging me into total, unconscious darkness that lasts for I don’t know how long.
When I manage to blink my eyes, to actually see again, Soren is far away, bending to pick up something in the grass.
But my first coherent thought isn’t of him.
The first coherent thought I manage is, Liam was right. I was so stupid to let that boy mess with my mind. And suddenly all I can think about is my best friend, and how I wish he was here. I would almost swear he is here—would swear I can smell him, feel him all around me—because I’m thinking so clearly of his voice, his words, that argument.
There’s no such thing as a harmless spell.
I try not to think about the lingering harm this latest spell has done to my mind. My head is throbbing, and I don’t know if it’s with real or imagined pain, but I push myself through it, rising up onto shaking hands and knees.
“Don’t move,” Soren says, his back still to me as he stands, one of the keys now clenched in his hand. There’s one in his other hand too, I notice.
How long was I out for?
“Stay where you are, and I won’t hurt you again,” he says. “I won’t hurt any of them.”
“Any of…?”
(ELLE!)
I twist around—too fast for my throbbing head, and I almost pass out again. But the sight of the people running toward me helps me find my balance. I wasn’t imagining Liam’s smell. And it isn’t just Liam. Carys is there too.
And my parents are right behind them.
I try to get to my feet, but Soren’s quiet, threatening voice stops me cold: “Tell them to stop. Or they’ll regret it.”
I jerk my head toward him. And that’s when I realize: he doesn’t just have two keys.
He has all three.
They’re hovering just above his outstretched hands, each one emitting a menacing cloud of black, swirling energy.
“Last chance,” he says.
But there’s really no chance. It all happens too quick. Before I can shout at him to stop, before I can warn my family to look out, before I can even turn away myself, it happens: the energy of those keys seems to overwhelm Soren, and he’s thrown back against the ground. He fights to keep his arms stretched above him, trying to keep the keys steady in the air.
There’s a low rumble—like distant thunder.
It grows louder. Closer. It builds and builds until it gives one final, massive BOOM.
And then all the stars above us go out.
Twenty
Darkness and Falling
That dark expanse of no stars stretches further and further, until I’m afraid it might engulf this entire world in an endless, impenetrable night.
But just when it all starts to look completely hopeless, I see the first of the showering dust—like fissure residue, except that it glows as bright as any of those stars that were driven away. Just scattered, tiny specks of it at first, but soon it’s falling faster and thicker, gathering into a waterfall of stardust that cascades down to where the three keys now rest against the ground.
Soren staggers to his feet, and he starts toward the bottom of that cascade.
I run after him.
My mom is faster than me.
I’m less than ten feet away from Soren when she grabs hold of my arm and jerks me back. She wraps me into a tight embrace without taking her eyes off the scene before us.
“What in the world is going on?” she whispers.
I can’t even begin to explain, so I just lean against her arms to steady myself, and we watch as Soren takes out his dagger and stabs two of the keys, over and over, directly in the center of their respective marks. Magic sparks from his hands and down along the blade as he does.
And soon enough, those two keys shatter.
The waterfall of dust weakens, most of its light flickering out save for a wobbly stream still collected in its center.
He steps to within a few feet of that center.
My heart seizes with fear for him, even after everything he’s put me through. I can’t help it. Especially not after his eyes, with all their true, brilliant color, drift from the final key and up to me.
“This path only goes one way. After I’m gone, destroy that last key for me, will you? And hopefully it will close everything up and stabilize things.”
I don’t know what to say.
The path only goes one way. There are none of Canath’s monsters coming out of it—so he must be telling the truth. He wasn’t trying to use me to unleash anything, the way the rest of his kind wanted to.
But then why?
Why would he do this?
Everything seems to be moving too fast all of a sudden. I wriggle my way out of my mom’s embrace. She’s too confused, too stunned to really fight me over it. I don’t go far, anyway; the rest of my pack folds in around me, and together we stare at the strange sorcerer boy who just tore a hole in the world, all of us completely unsure of what to do about it.
He hesitates before stepping into the dust, just long enough to stare back at us.
And I’ve seen that look on his face before: jealousy. Last time, I’d thought it was because of my relationship with Liam—that it was some silly lust and unwanted love triangle thing that was making his jaw clench and his gaze harden this way.
But now a deeper truth occurs to me: he’s jealous of my family.
Which explains exactly why he’s doing this.
“You think they’re still alive,” I breathe in sudden realization, just loud enough that maybe he hears it, maybe he doesn’t. “You think your mom and your sister are alive in the other world.”
He meets my eyes and gives me that soft smile of his one last time. “Good-bye, Elle,” he says. “And thank you, and I’m sorry, and you know—everything else I should have said.”
What if he’s wrong? The thought slams through my brain. What if he ends up even more alone on the other side? What if he can’t find them on his own?
He steps under the showering dust, lifting his hands as if trying to catch their little bits of light.
And within seconds, he’s gone.
For a long time after, I can’t seem to look anywhere other than where he was standing. Can’t seem to manage a deep breath, either. I hear my mom take one, though, and a moment later she says, “Let’s destroy it, then.”
My dad moves toward it first.
I stop him by throwing my arms around him the way I’ve been wanting to do for weeks now. It startles him a bit at first, I think. And he’s not really the hugging type, but he relaxes after a moment and then crushes me so tightly against him that I can hardly breathe. I manage to grab my mom’s arm and pull her into the embrace as well. And Carys has always been a fan of group hugs, so she’s there a second later, too.
The only one who doesn’t join in is Liam. He stands just a few feet away, watching me. Suspiciously.
He always could read me better than anyone else.
(Don’t you dare,) he thinks at me.
(I’m really, really sorry,) I think back.
“I love you all so much,” I say out loud.
And then I jump back, and I sprint for the falling dust. I draw my dagger as the first cold flecks of that dust fall over me, and I focus all my energy on trying to summon that once-forbidden elemental magi
c that I know dwells in my blood. I only manage to transfer a few flashes of it to the dagger. I can only hope that it’s enough. Because I’m not letting anyone else follow me this time.
They all try.
But I’m too fast, and my aim is far too good.
I fling the dagger.
It pierces the center of the final key just as a burst of light and cold swallows me up and sweeps me away.
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