Chapter 6

ASHEN

“Do you feel her?” I ask as I look down at the witch. Her ebony gaze scans the sea. She is still and silent for a long moment.

“No.”

“She was here. I know it. She leapt into the water.”

The witch takes a step closer to the cliff edge. She looks down at the glistening black waves. “If you’re right, you know what she was up against. You swam in it too. What’s it like?”

I don’t want to tell her. I don’t think I even have words adequate enough to describe the horror of those waters. It is anguish and sorrow in depth unfathomable. It is hell. “Worse than you can imagine.”

“You felt her in it?”

“Yes. She was in distress.”

“And then what?”

“Panic. Terror. And then nothing. I have not felt her since.”

Not even once. Not for a moment. Not a whisper of Lu in the mark that binds us. It’s as though she disappeared from the Shadow Realm altogether. And I felt nothing from her when I went to the Living Realm to retrieve the witch who now stands beside me.

Nothing.

“She cannot be dead, or I would be dead too,” I say, trying to convince myself as much as the witch. “Perhaps if I die, she will be sent back with me to the Resurrection Chamber.”

“Can you be sure? If she’s trapped somewhere that you can’t feel her, you could damn her there. What if she suffers there? Lingers there? Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”

No. It’s not.

I make no reply. I just let out a long breath and scan the sea that keeps its secrets, refusing to give up a trace of my wife, no matter how much I stare or curse or beg it for even a scrap of solace.

My wife. My Lu. The one most precious star in all my darkness, winked out as though she was never more than an illusion.

“Her necklace. It connects you, does it not?” I ask, trying to keep the desperation from my voice.

“Yes. She can summon me with it, if we’re in the same realm,” Ediye says, though her voice is too low and quiet for hope to live there.

“Can you find it without being called?”

“If I could sense her presence even a little, then yes, with the right materials. But I’m getting nothing.”

The witch’s answer sparks the frustration and rage that swirls within me. Smoke and embers drop to my feet and coat the stone. The witch turns toward me and I force myself to remember that she loves Lu with a depth that matches my own. Exceeds it. And she might be my only hope.

“Do you have any texts related to my kind?” she asks, her eyes darting to the vaporous wings unfurling behind me. “Spells? Maybe there’s an ancient incantation I can find that could help locate the pendant.”

“Yes,” I say, but my mind is already pulled into the past. The memory of walking Lu to the library the first time she came to the Shadow Realm strikes my heart with the impact of a sword. The tears she tried to hide. Her notes. You are a monster, she’d written. One of so many jokes. She never said as much, but I knew it was her game, trying to make me laugh, no matter how hard I tried not to. And I put up a good fight, only to see what more she would bring.

“…Reaper?”

I blink at the witch, both relieved and annoyed to be wrenched from memory. “Cyrus. He will take you to the library. He will show you where to look.”

“And you? What are you going to do?”

I look at the witch for just a moment, unable to lay my gaze on the pain and loss in her face for any longer than a heartbeat. My only answer is to turn away, to start back down the path toward the decaying house that was meant to be ours.

Lu was right, though she would never believe it.

I am a monster. And I will rip the realms apart until I find her.