Chapter 5

CHAPTER5

Clanking metal. Shouting. Rippling fire. Urtur’s sharp whine. And Ashen’s voice, insistent and panicked. The feeling of a shirt slipping over my skin. I see a flash of him standing at the edge of the Bay of Souls, looking toward the islands in the distance. I see the eyes of the crawler from that night at Bit Akalum, right before Ashen cleaved it in two.

“Lu, wake up. Lu…” Ashen smacks my cheek and I startle, blinking into reality. He’s afraid. I feel it pulling at the skin around my mark, seeping between my bones. There’s a hint of relief in his face as my eyes find focus on his. “Thank the realms. I’ve been trying to wake you for the last five minutes.”

“What’s happening?” I ask as I look around. My thoughts feel murky as I try to unravel my unfamiliar surroundings and the sounds of fighting that echo across the stone cliffs surrounding us. The noise is coming from just outside the building. I glance to the entrance of the orangery where Urtur paces on the other side of the open door.

Ashen hooks his hands beneath my arms and drags my body from the bed, setting me on my unsteady feet. He starts working on the buttons of a black shirt that he’s wrangled me into. “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

“Reapers loyal to the Council?”

“Maybe. But something feels off. More off than that.”

The brain fog lifts with every breath I take, and I start growing antsy on my bare soles. A nervous, metronomic bounce starts in my knees and climbs my body. “I thought my first day as Queen would involve more confetti and booze. This kind of sucks.”

Ashen tries to smile but it’s so fleeting it might as well have been imagined. “I will make it up to you,” he says as he closes a button over the mark on my chest, letting his fingers graze the lapis and gold. He leaves the last few buttons open and I look down at the shirt that engulfs me, hitting my mid-thigh.

“Not really royal attire, but at least there’s no jizz this time. I guess that’s an improvement.”

Ashen steps back and retrieves his sword from the floor, eyeing me with a worried look as the nearby shouting grows louder. I sense the fragmented thoughts of crawlers approaching in the distance, but they’re far away in the mist. The faint trace of blood wafts into the room, rolling in on the fog. I swallow a swell of fear and venom. Every horrible memory of the Shadow Realm seems burnt into my bones.

The flame ripples to life across Ashen’s blade. “You will not like what I’m about to say.”

“Color me shocked, Reaper.”

“You must run.”

“Hard pass. Next.”

Ashen’s jaw clenches in an effort to keep back an exasperated sigh. It comes out as a slow and measured breath. “Lu, I don’t have any other weapons. I have nothing to give you to defend yourself.”

“I don’t need a weapon. I am one,” I argue. My expression hardens into a resolute glare, but it softens at the edges when Ashen comes closer and tilts my chin up with a gentle hand. The sounds of chaos grow closer. His look of desperation grows brighter.

“Your power is new to you, Lu. We don’t even fully understand what you are capable of or how it works. I know you need to touch someone to throw their mind into darkness or capture their thoughts, but you have no sword with which to defend yourself. One clean strike from an enemy and you could lose your hands, or worse.” Ashen leans in close, his eyes never leaving mine. Smoke fills the space behind him as his wings unfurl in a blaze of sparks. Ashen pulls the necklace that once laid around Eshkar’s neck from his pocket and presses the gold square into my hand. “This fits in a pedestal in the Throne Room. If you can get to the Kur, you can open the corridors and let the hybrids in. You can summon them right to you.”

“Ashen—”

“Please, Lu.” The flame in Ashen’s eyes turns black. His distress flows into me. It’s so powerful and urgent that it envelops me like a thick blanket. “I am not strong enough to watch them kill you. But you are strong enough and brave enough to run. I will beg on my knees if I have to, if that’s what it will take.”

As I look at him, that flash from his distant past dances in my mind. The way he pleaded with Davina for her to run. His anger when she refused. The sickening grief when he felt her slip away with the secret she carried in her womb. And I know in that instant I can’t refuse his request.

I nod, swallowing back the gathering tears.

Ashen leans down and steals one swift, searing kiss before he pushes himself away. Just as his hand slips from my skin, there’s a crash downstairs. I hear the sound of boots running on the dirt path, the clank of weapons. The swell of desperation from Ashen mixes with my own fear and nearly knocks me down. “Back door, Lu. Run. I will find you.”

“I know. And bring me clothes, for fucksakes. I’m tired of wearing castoff hot pants and torn robes and shirts that are fifty times my size when you look all…reapery perfect,” I say with grin and a dramatic flourish of my hand in his direction. But my smile fades as quickly as his does in reply. “I love you, Ashen.”

“I love you too, my Lu. Go.”

With one last look between us, we turn away from one another, running in opposite directions.

I pass quickly along a narrow, winding stone path that leads through the ferns to the other end of the orangery. I toss the chain of the necklace over my head before I push the door open just enough to listen for anyone who could have made it to the other side, but the night air is silent. My bare feet make hardly a sound as I dart down a path leading out of the garden and toward a crumbling retaining wall.

The sounds of fighting are climbing up the building, growing closer to the room I just left. I hear shouting but can’t make out Ashen’s voice, though I strain to listen for his familiar, deep timbre as I start climbing the wall where vines eke out a shadowed existence among the stone.

I’m nearly to the top of the wall when I hear Urtur’s haunting howl. It fills every crevice around me. It rattles my pulse. I pause, turning my head toward the sound. There’s a moment of silence. I hold my breath and listen, clutching the wall as I try to still my heart. There’s a sound of metal scraping against metal. There’s a shout. And then a whine, a crash. Breaking glass. A fist squeezes around my chest as I smell blood on the wind.

“Shit,” I whisper. The sound of my voice is punctuated by a whistle and a thwack against the stone, right next to my hand.

A silver arrow.

Shit fuck shit.

I scramble up the wall as another two arrows land close by, lodging into the wall. And then I’m over, landing in the darkness and the fog, hemmed in by the wall behind me and the jagged stone on either side. There’s only one narrow path ahead.

I run.

I duck and weave around the rock that juts out at sharp angles. I startle a small creature and it scuttles up the cliff. Thorny branches reach toward the path and catch my legs, scratching blood out of my skin. The scent of the sea and decay grows stronger with every step.

I feel the presence of crawlers drawing closer to the house and I ask them for only one thing. I don’t even know if they can hear me like I can them, but I ask anyway. Over and over.

Save Ashen.

I hear two sets of footsteps down the path behind me. A weapon scrapes against the stone. An arrow whistles through the fog and I duck, not breaking stride. It clatters against the cliff as I run past.

The footsteps grow louder. Whoever chases me is much faster than I am. I don’t look back to see who they are. I press on as quickly as my bloodied feet can take me, gripping my arrow, pumping my arms.

The sea crashes against the rocks ahead. The fog thins. The path opens up as the cliffs pull back to display the Black Sea below, the oily waves disappearing into a veil of fog before the horizon, a never-ending night.

“Take her down!”

Another arrow flies past me, disappearing over the cliff, then another. One hits my leg and lodges in the back of my thigh, but I don’t stop. I burst onto the landing. I run straight off the edge of the cliff.

One last arrow slices through the side of my neck on its way to the sea, tearing with it a strand of tangled hair that flutters like a banner in its wake.

And then I’m falling.

I see a flash of my sister Aglaope. I still feel her hands on my chest as she thrust me into another sea.

But now I’m falling, flying, facing the distance, not my dying sister whose body plummeted after me from the cliffs of Anthemoessa. No, this time I’m watching the black water that rises up to meet me as though it can’t wait to show me the horrors that live beneath the surface.

The instant my toes touch the sea, I feel it.

Hell.

The impact of hitting the surface tears the arrow from my leg. But that pain is nothing. Nothing when the cold and oily water envelops me in its punishing grip.

Hell is not fire.

Hell is an endless sea of anguish. It’s a countless mass of minds whose thoughts bleed into one another. No privacy. No space. Nothing but constant pushing, touching, jamming up against one another, into one another, in a churning sea of grief. It’s the desperate need to find space or safety or silence, without even knowing which way is up. Hell is a claustrophobic sludge. It’s the scent and taste of decay that fills my mouth, flooding my nostrils.

I vomit into the putrid water, a mix of salt and death. I keep my eyes pressed shut as I kick and flail, trying to reach the surface.

It’s too thick.

The water clings to me. It pushes me down. My lungs burn. It’s taking too long to get to the surface. I can’t seem to move anywhere. My head fills with the sorrow and rage and panic that I sense all around me.

I’m already drowning, from the inside out.

There’s something else…something beneath me. A presence from the deep. And I am a lure in the ocean, tiny and bright. Appetizing.

The fetid, foul souls seem to push away, leaving me surrounded by liquid that feels lighter. I open my eyes and I’m in a bubble of dirty water, utter blackness surrounding me beyond my little pool.

Except for beneath my feet.

A growing light emerges from the depths. A monster from the deep, and a channel of clearer water is opening beneath me as the souls desperately try to get out of the way.

I kick harder. The salt burns the holes in my leg and my neck. I take long strokes with my arms, still clinging to the silver arrow as I aim for a surface I can’t see. The blue light beneath me glows brighter, the creature racing from the depths, eager to claim a rare prize.

My lungs have nothing left. Burning. Desperate burning. I can’t hold it. There’s nowhere to go.

The light brightens beneath me. The creature. I look up. I reach. I kick. I wave the silver arrow, but it only stirs the oil of decaying human souls.

Just like diving into deep water, Ashen’s voice says from memory. You hold your breath. There’s a pressure in your head. Then you open your eyes and you are in another world.

Something slams into my back with a force that empties my lungs of air.

At first, there’s no pain. And then burning, raging fire. I try to strike at the source with the silver arrow, but it’s knocked from my hand. I watch it spin and sink into the black depths.

Crimson stains billow in the water around me. Something is stuck into my back like claws, as though a giant eagle is fishing me out of the sea, carrying me off in its talons.

Except I’m not going to the surface.

I’m going down.

And then a voice. The monster of the deep. Its thoughts are the last that I hear in my mind.

Leucosia of Anthemoessa,it says. It is time to meet your fate.