50. Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty

D aizin and Kej had been assigned to accompany them to Virian, and neither Holt nor Zylah had objected.

Holt’s guilt over the state of her eyes still clung to him, but she knew he just needed time to process it. If she depleted her magic and lost her other sight, she’d still possess a narrow field of view, and even with the shadows and the grainy film over everything, that was more than enough for Zylah.

The four of them stood on a rooftop at the edge of the palace district, Zylah’s threads spreading wide and her concern growing with each new vampire and thrall they counted. The city had fallen into further disarray since the day they’d all attempted to save the prisoners, most of the buildings’ windows shattered, doors hanging open on their hinges. Rats scurried over a decaying corpse in the street below, Daizin’s shadows darting out to scare them away.

“Can you communicate with Nye from this distance?” Holt asked the Fae quietly as they took it all in.

Daizin dipped his chin. “The Seraphim hasn’t been much help with Ranon but…” His eyes slid to Kej’s face for a moment and then back to Holt’s. “He said Imala possessed shadow abilities, too. She could shift into any shadow form she chose.”

“When did he tell you that?” Kej asked, his attention still fixed on the street, his brow furrowed.

“When you were busy getting your arm tended to.”

By the healer. Both Kej and Daizin fell silent at that, and Zylah wasn’t about to try and make light of the situation when they’d clearly meant something more to each other than a casual fling.

She sifted through everything she knew about Imala from her perspective of living as a human and a Fae. The stories she’d been taught as a child. She considered the texts Nye had shown her, most of the pages focusing on Ranon and Sira, yet the key to release Ranon, the one Malok had believed could defend his court, had been hidden within a statue of Imala. Zylah had never really considered why before, but then she remembered what Arioch had told her back in the maze.

I think there’s much more to the story of the original nine than any of us have been taught, Holt said in her thoughts in response to her quiet consideration. Zylah wholeheartedly agreed. There was so much they didn’t know.

Arioch suggested Ranon and Imala were lovers. What if the history books are wrong? All the stories the Fae have had passed down throughout the years. What if it was all nothing more than whatever narrative Ranon wanted them to believe?

Holt’s attention danced over her face, and she knew he was assessing her damaged eyes again. Ranon is capable of anything.

There was no fear accompanying the statement. Only his anger, his white-hot wrath, snuffed out as quickly as she’d felt it. Going anywhere near Ranon was a risk for all of them, but if the army couldn’t fight their way through the vampires and thralls, if the Fae soldiers couldn’t get close to the palace because of the vanquicite, they’d never succeed in bringing him down.

A thrall shuffled out of a deserted building below them, Zylah’s threads reaching for it at the same time as Daizin’s shadows. The shadows reached it first, swarming the creature in darkness before an unmistakable crack rang out in the street below and the thrall fell into the dirt, unmoving.

Kej raised an eyebrow at Daizin before turning his attention to Holt and Zylah. “Save the intrepid blacksmiths, destroy the deadly vanquicite, and take out a few shit-eating bloodsuckers in the process. Did I miss anything?”

“You realise it’s our blood they covet above all else, right?” Daizin muttered.

“And?”

“So we’re the shit in your analogy.”

Kej chuckled, throwing an arm over Zylah’s shoulder. “Speak for yourself. Me and Zy are rare diamonds.”

“And Holt?” Zylah asked him, holding back her smile.

“Holt’s about three seconds away from kicking my ass.”

“That makes two of us,” Daizin said under his breath. “I’ll go with Holt.”

Zylah hated the thought of him getting close to Ranon, but they needed to split up to clear the palace gardens. He brushed a hand over her cheek, everything he didn’t need to say out loud pouring down their bond before he evanesced away with Daizin, leaving Zylah alone with Kej.

“What happened between the two of you?” she asked him, his gaze lingering on the spot where Daizin had been standing.

Kej shrugged. “He doesn’t like my tendency to wander off in a fight. Says I leave myself too exposed when I shift.”

“You do. Rin, too.” She’d witnessed both of them being badly wounded in their wildcat forms. There was no doubting they were skilled. Strong. But they shared the same reckless quality that Nye had likely chided them for time and time again. “You’re not indestructible, Kej.”

A soundless laugh shook her friend’s shoulders. “That’s what Daizin said. We fell out over how many injuries I’ve sustained since we’ve been going on skirmishes together. Now he doesn’t trust me.”

“He’s right, though.”

Kej elbowed her gently. “Don’t worry, Holt already gave me a lecture about it before we left, though I doubt he has any concerns for my safety.”

Zylah didn’t share his amusement. “I should hope you’d never need to question how far he’d go for his friends. For all of you.”

“I know. And don’t worry about me and Dee. We’ll be back to it in no time. The fighting is the foreplay for him.” His smile was bright but brittle, and Zylah knew better than to press him further.

“They’re in position.” This was the furthest she and Holt had tested the strength of their bond, and she had no desire to stretch it any further. “Ready?”

Evanescing, like all magic, could be traced, but it made little difference if their movements were tracked within the city. They didn’t intend to stick around. Zylah moved them both through the aether to the palace gardens, the closest she could take Kej given the quantity of vanquicite within the palace. Holt and Daizin were on the other side of the grounds, the four of them intending to clear as much of the estate as possible if Zylah couldn’t nullify the vanquicite inside the palace walls.

Already her threads were reaching out. She passed every piece of information she collected to Holt, murmured quiet commands to Kej. The once-maintained gardens were overgrown, offering them thick bushes to hide amongst and move between, obscuring Kej’s line of sight across the gardens.

“Mostly thralls nearby,” she told him, drawing her sword.

“Mostly?”

“One vampire. Three thralls. Headed this way.”

He unsheathed his sword and cracked his neck as if he were resisting the urge to shift. Zylah prayed he didn’t.

“Vampire first,” she mouthed, and they advanced.

They moved for the bloodsucker together, relief washing over Zylah when she realised this one didn’t possess the preternatural speed of some of its ilk. A silver-haired male with a young face, sharp fangs bared and black, empty eyes glaring at them as they faced off, no hint of vanquicite in the layers of his fighting leathers. Kej swung for it first, the monster evading the strike and rolling his shoulders like it was all just a game to him.

The vampire laughed. “Only two of you? Even if you cut me down, there are dozens more to follow.”

It was only partly a lie. The grounds were crawling with thralls, but only a handful of vampires commanded them. She hadn’t wanted to expend much of her magic, but as three of the vampire’s thralls took note of their master’s plight, Zylah had no choice but to summon roots from the earth to slow them down. She understood now why Holt favoured them; with how little magic they consumed, they were a useful tool in a fight.

Despite every cell in her body wanting to constantly check his progress with Daizin on the other side of the grounds, her focus was already split between her threads, her sight, and keeping the thralls from circling Kej as he fought the vampire. And somehow, she had to reach out for the vanquicite within the palace and figure out how to nullify it, too. Her threads kept some of the other nearby thralls distracted, but she couldn’t cast them as wide as she’d have liked, not yet.

I’ve found the blacksmiths , she told Holt, swinging around to throw her weight into a sword strike. Her blade struck true, hacking at a thrall’s neck as she used another eruption of roots and vines to restrain the other two. The vampire swung for Kej, and this time Zylah summoned shadows to hide her friend, giving him the precious seconds he needed to evade the strike. He muttered a curse from amongst the inky black as she sent another root curling around the vampire’s foot. As Kej landed a killing blow, she dealt with the two thralls before more could come, Holt’s affirmation echoing down their bond.

“Five thralls,” she choked out, “two to your left.”

Kej didn’t waste time on conversation, already moving towards their opponents, and Zylah braced herself for the three creatures coming her way. There were more closer to the palace, so many more, and she knew this would likely drag on until they were all exhausted if she didn’t hurry. She pulled back on her threads, sending them instead inside the palace, seeking out the vanquicite cells and any other sources of the material she could find.

The moment the strands of her magic touched the black stone she shoved down the instinct to recoil, the threads probing and prodding at the vanquicite, calculating, considering. Vanquicite had magic imbued into the stone at source, directly from the earth it was mined from, and she’d unravelled magic before. In theory, this should be no different.

But she was stretching herself thin, the three thralls occupying her attention as she tried to focus on all the ways she’d split her attention. Though Holt could withstand proximity to the vanquicite now, they weren’t certain yet whether it would affect his ability to evanesce. Reluctantly he’d agreed that only Zylah should enter the palace, and they’d discussed at length the necessity of getting closer to complete her task, repeatedly reassuring him she would evanesce away at the first sign of Ranon or Aurelia.

It took cutting their way through another cluster of thralls before she could consider leaving Kej alone. A grove of brin trees afforded them some coverage, beyond them another line of overgrown hedges, but Zylah was still reluctant to leave her friend alone, even though Holt and Daizin were close.

We’re making our way around to him, Holt said. How many between us?

One vampire. Four thralls.

Go.

Zylah snapped some instructions at Kej before she could talk herself into staying with him and evanesced inside the palace. She reappeared within one of the servants’ passages, catching her breath for a heartbeat before she sent out her threads again. Moving through the aether severed them abruptly, and it was the first time she’d cut them off mid-task. But it wasn’t just the evanescing, she realised. She’d passed through a large number of wards, no doubt alerting someone to her presence.

Holt’s concern danced along her skin.

I’m alright , she reassured him.

The two blacksmiths sat in separate cages in the throne room, largely unaffected by the vanquicite, but still locked behind bars. Curious. She moved closer, to the passageway behind the throne she and Holt had escaped through. Ranon and Aurelia weren’t in the palace, but where Aurelia might have evanesced them to Zylah couldn’t be certain.

She needed to focus. To block everything else out if she was going to nullify the vanquicite. Whatever happened after this, the ability to have eyes and ears within the palace would be paramount to helping them gather as much information on Ranon’s intentions as possible, information they sorely lacked.

The vanquicite was scattered throughout the palace. In the throne room beside her. The inner courtyard below. Weapons in the armoury, Zylah’s threads flitting over every piece. A dull ache pressed at the base of her skull as her threads coiled around all of it, sinking themselves into the stone and sifting through its properties, seeking out the magic. Just like pulling down wards, she told herself.

The ache bloomed into a sharp pain as her threads began to tug and she leaned back against the wall in the darkness to steady herself, but she didn’t stop. The vanquicite had a signature, just like the signature she’d come to recognise in her friends, in Holt, in anything that contained magic. And all she had to do was snag the piece she needed to begin unravelling it. The difficulty was the quantity. This wasn’t a single ward, or an individual’s magic; there were countless pieces of vanquicite around her.

She pulled again, a sharp pain pressing at her temples and a silent gasp causing her breath to stutter.

Zylah, stop. Holt’s plea skittered down her spine.

She pulled back from the vanquicite for a moment, enough to check in on him and her friends. There were so many vampires and thralls surrounding them, Zylah could barely count them all.

We’re handling it , Holt told her. Forget the vanquicite, just get the blacksmiths and get out of there.

But she was so close. She pulled at the material again and again and again, and on her fifth attempt she felt some of the magic shatter, but not entirely. Only this time her breath stuttered for an entirely different reason. Thallan. Her threads detected him inside the palace.

Zylah abandoned her checks of the vanquicite to evanesce into the throne room, blinking at the onslaught of light and cursing under her breath as she realised her other sight had been affected from overstretching herself.

Shadows obscured her vision, but she could still see the two blacksmiths staring back at her, neutral expressions on their faces as they studied her carefully. Vaguely, she registered the deceits settling over their features, but there wasn’t time to dwell on that. She needed to stall Thallan, to finish her work on the vanquicite. No sooner had she finished the thought than the doors to the throne room slammed open and Thallan strode in, mercifully alone.

Zylah. The urgency in Holt’s tone had her sending a flare of reassurance in response.

“I let you slip away once, don’t think my bleeding heart will extend that offer to a second time,” the vampire said quietly as he stalked towards her.

“You tortured him for months, you think I want to walk away from this?”

Outside, Holt and the others fought ruthlessly, a clash of magic and steel and fangs and the vicious, monstrous blows of the thralls, her mate’s concern palpable.

She felt Thallan trying to break his way in, a blinding pain behind her eyes that almost brought her to her knees, but her threads wove a protective barrier around her mind, an impenetrable shield that he couldn’t shatter.

The vampire laughed mirthlessly. “All walls break.”

Zylah didn’t let her surprise show on her face. She pulled at her magic, summoning roots and vines to restrain him, shadows to swarm him and cloak him in darkness.

Thallan only laughed again. “Parlour tricks.” This time his mental attack brought her to her knees.

In the gardens, Zylah felt the way Holt grappled with a vampire, holding onto his most powerful magic, channelling it to her instead. She sucked in a breath, picturing Rose as she had seen her the day before, the shadows under her eyes, the jut of her collarbone, and opened the tiniest crack in her mental defences.

Thallan stilled. “Rose,” he breathed.

Zylah hadn’t realised he’d moved to stand before her, but as his onslaught receded and he cradled the memory of Rose in her thoughts like a delicate flower, the details of the room came back to her. It gave her the seconds she needed to yank her threads across the vanquicite one final time. To shatter the magic within it until it became nothing more than black, polished stone, every piece of it inert where it lay scattered throughout the palace. Shadows swam in her eyes again, the pain so acute it was as if it were splitting her skull in two. Her hands pressed into the plush carpet to steady herself, her breaths coming out in ragged gasps.

Holt’s blast of magic rippled over her skin from the gardens, and Thallan muttered under his breath, fingers curled into her shirt as he dragged her to her feet, clicking his tongue.

“Your power has grown. I’ll give you that,” he seethed.

Zylah didn’t get a chance to reply. Another wave of Holt’s magic rolled over her skin, ripping Thallan away from her and sending him tumbling across the throne room in a rush of flames. She sagged back, strong arms catching her and banding around her waist, Holt’s healing magic already seeping into her bones.

The next few moments were a blur. Kej and Daizin muttered instructions to the blacksmiths, the six of them evanescing away to a rooftop on the other side of Virian.

“Call for a scout,” Holt snapped at Daizin. “Now.”