Chapter Thirty-Five WITCHING MOON

Chapter Thirty-Five

WITCHING MOON

Week Three, Day One

Year 3000

With fingers locked around her throat in a brutal grip and her air running out, Zanya closed her eyes and cataloged the weapons at her disposal.

Shadows: useless. The webs kept her from escaping into them, and whatever shimmering gloss of power coated the Beast like armor made even her most brutal shadow attacks slide off harmlessly.

Weapons: gone. She'd lost every one of them by this point, and Demir had been too savvy an opponent to leave them within reach.

Brute strength: meaningless. He was every bit as strong, and bloated with the power the Dreamweaver had fed him, besides.

Experience: pitiful. Zanya was the wobbly-legged baby deer the Shapechanger had called her, thinking her scant weeks of practice could stand up against thousands of years of brutal combat.

Brains: well, she had those. Because this idiot was still straddling her, slowly strangling her, when the smart move would have been to snap her neck and move on. No doubt Sachi's pained cries of her name were the point—she had enraged this monster somehow, and Zanya's pointlessly slow death was his revenge.

A foolish move, because every moment she lived was a moment she could still turn the tide. She just needed a weapon. Just needed ...

The scream ripped across the tower like a physical wave, and the weight on top of Zanya vanished as the Beast went flying. Gasping in a shuddering breath, she rolled away and forced herself to her knees. Bright little spots of light still dotted her vision, and she shook them away.

Another scream tore across the tower, its source a young woman with a gray scarf slipping free of her disheveled red hair. Bruises circled her throat and her wrists, but it was the bruises in her eyes that Zanya recognized on a gut level.

She'd seen enough girls in servants' livery with those eyes to know exactly why she screamed.

Zanya couldn't tear her gaze from the girl's wings. Black and shimmering, they swept back from her shoulders like fairy wings that spat glittering shadows. She hovered above the tower on a wind that tasted of familiar power, and the scream that wrenched from her throat again slipped past Zanya like a caress before slamming into the Beast, as if the pain was a tangible repayment for some deeply personal agony.

Rage and destruction. Dark, beautiful power.

Mine, Zanya's heart whispered. The High Court might have been born of the Dream, but this fantastic creature, held aloft by righteous rage and vengeance ... She belonged to the Void.

And her scream was a weapon flaying the Beast from the inside out.

Time on the tower seemed to slow. The Betrayer tilted his head and watched his ally writhe in agony. "Fascinating," he murmured, flicking his eyes from the Beast to the screeching girl and back again. His grip on Sachi's arm tightened as he pulled her more firmly in front of him, like a human shield. "A pity we don't have time to see what else Lyssa can do. Contain her, Varoka."

He gestured to the final person standing on the tower. The Dreamweaver, the one whose magic riddled this whole place. She perverted the Dream, wove traps to close people in, to take and steal. The Dreams she wielded had gone sour, selfish and greedy and always turned inward. If Zanya had struggled to understand that the Void wasn't always bad, surely this was her proof that the Dream wasn't always good.

But she was too strong. She had thousands of years' worth of stolen power penning Zanya in. And she was reaching out even now, magic twirling at her fingertips, no doubt intending to weave a cage to contain this glorious dark power newly born from the Void.

Protective rage tore through Zanya and ripped open memory. One of her earliest, a trauma so deep it had taken root and made her who she was. A belt that had been meant for her striking Sachi instead. They'd been so small, little children no more than five or six. The cruelty it must have taken to strike any child, but especially Sachi —sunny, friendly Sachi ...

Zanya could hear the belt cracking across Sachi's face. Hear her friend's pained whimper. Taste her own blood as she tried to stand, to take the beating—but she couldn't. She was trapped, unable to save Sachi.

Trapped, but not helpless. Never helpless. Because there was one weapon she hadn't reached for. The first one she'd ever seized, the one she'd run from for most of her life because she hadn't been ready to stare what she truly was in the face.

Nightmares came when she called, and surely a castle like this must be rife with fears that had never been allowed to find expression in dreams.

Planting both hands on the cold castle stones, Zanya screamed for help, shoving her power out in wave after wave. Much of it tangled with the weaver's traps, Void against Dream. But they called the Void endless for a reason. Zanya let it pour from her as some pieces began to break through. More and more tendrils spiraled out, bait for the nightmares she could almost taste now as her power found the staff trapped in this castle, ghosting through minds that didn't know how to dream.

But they knew how to fear. And they feared one thing above all else.

The Dreamweaver laughed as she lifted both hands high, her fingers still twisting complicated patterns. "I've spent centuries making this place my own," she taunted. "You're a powerful child throwing a tantrum. You cannot defeat me."

No, probably not. But drawing Varoka's attention would give Lyssa time to flee.

Zanya bared her teeth in a grin, keeping the other woman's focus on her as shadows began to gather behind her. "Are you so certain?"

But Lyssa didn't flee. She had a kill to claim. So she dove at the Beast instead, clawed fingers digging into his flesh as she lifted him and flew over the edge of the tower. Once there, she dropped him. Her triumphant screech rose to join his panicked scream, both echoing as she followed him down.

Varoka's jaw clenched, and reckless confidence filled her eyes. She must have been brilliant once. So skilled with the Dream that she could work such magic ... and so callous that she didn't see how wrong it was.

She didn't sense the shadows gathering behind her, either, spinning in bits of broken stone and shattered glass. The Terror took the form of the nightmares that had given it life, a furiously handsome, devastatingly cruel shadow version of the Betrayer who loomed half again the Dreamweaver's height.

Even the Betrayer himself seemed stunned by its sudden appearance. He grabbed Sachi to his chest and backed away, abandoning the Dreamweaver as swiftly as he had the Beast. Only then did she realize something was wrong.

The Dreamweaver spun, stared up into the brutal, monstrous face of the Terror. "You can't—" she whispered, but the words choked off as a hand made of shadows and stone and nightmares shot forward to grip her throat. It lifted her, oblivious to her flailing arms and sputtered threats, immune to the wisps of the Dream she attempted to lash around it.

Then it tore the Dreamweaver in half.

The light went out from her eyes, and the entire castle shuddered. Blood rained across the Tower, splattering Zanya's face—but she didn't care. The weight on her chest released so abruptly, she gasped in her first full breath since they'd come out of the heart of the ocean.

The Terror turned to stare at Zanya. For a heartbeat, time froze as she faced the monster that she'd created from the nightmares of the people here.

Nightmares.

They'd been part of her all her life. She could call them to her or spark them in others. She danced in the shadows others feared, and called to the Terrors given form by their nightmares. The shame of that had always curled deep in her, as if the affinity meant she was twisted. Evil.

But nightmares weren't evil. They were the mind's way of purging fears, of giving them an outlet, however imperfect. They had a thankless job to do and no gratitude for accomplishing it, just more hate and loathing. More fear.

Dreams were easy to love. But maybe this had always been Zanya's job—to love the unlovable. So she met the eyes of that terrifying shadow emperor and loved him for doing his job—for freeing the people who'd created him from Varoka's tyranny.

Then she whispered for him to be free.

Time resumed its march as the Terror crumbled into dust—and an inarticulate sound of rage shattered the sudden silence, nearly stealing the air from her lungs again.

Zanya stumbled under the force of it, her hands slipping on the bloody stones as she tried to regain her footing. She raised her head to see Sachi sprawled in a discarded heap on the other side of the tower.

That was all she had time to take in before the Betrayer's hand closed around her throat.

"You foul abomination ," he spat, his fingers clenching tight enough to choke. Her boots kicked helplessly above the ground as he hoisted her up and leapt onto the edge of the tower. "I'll do to you what none of them had the courage. Send you back to the nothingness from which you came!"

And then he jumped.

Faintly, in the distance, Zanya thought she heard Sachi scream. It was impossible to tell over the rush of wind as she and the Betrayer plummeted toward the battlefield below. Her fingers spasmed as she clawed for the familiar brush of shadows, but even when they curled around her, they couldn't take her anywhere.

And they couldn't protect her when she hit the ground.

On the night she'd almost killed him, Zanya had stolen Ash's nightmare of what it had felt like to plummet to the earth at the hands of the Betrayer with enough force to create a lake bed. The pain of it hadn't seemed real.

It did now.

Stone shattered on impact. Maybe something inside her shattered, too. Zanya lay in a perfect circle of destruction, her body on fire, her lungs screaming because those fingers were still wrapped so tightly around her throat that she couldn't drag in even the tiniest breath.

The Betrayer leaned down, his beautiful hazel eyes glowing with the fury of an exploding star. "You think you've won because you killed my soldiers?" he hissed, raising his free hand. It slashed through the air, and something wrenched around them. He did it again, and again, as Zanya tried to regain enough control of her limbs to do more than scratch at his wrist and kick her feet.

A new yet familiar sound rose all around them. Battle cries. The sounds of hundreds, thousands of boots pounding against the stone. The first clangs of steel against steel.

Rolling her head to one side, Zanya caught sight of a ... a tear in the world. As if he'd simply ripped open reality in order to pull something from the other side. Except that something was thousands of soldiers spilling forth, their weapons raised as they charged the bloodied, weary remnants of the High Court and the Raven Guard.

Even if Varoka's death had returned the High Court's powers, it might not be enough. Especially when Zanya heard the same noises coming from every side.

They'd fight. They'd lose.

"Yes," the Betrayer whispered, as if he could hear every thought. "The High Court will fall today. But don't fret. You won't be around to see it." The fingers at her throat tightened. Zanya groped for a discarded sword nearby, but he slapped her hand away, crushing it against the stone. "Almost there."

Darkness rose up, as if to embrace her. At least there was comfort in that.

She'd always loved the shadows.