Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

HALWEN

" N o!" I screamed, my voice breaking as I launched my body across the dark stone of the ledge, my heart breaking all over again as I watched Verena fall through the pitch-black chasm. Within seconds, she was too far to make out the details of her face, but I knew she was scared, knew her freckled cheeks would be bleached with panic.

I didn't stop to think; I leapt off the edge and snapped my wings out, diving through the chasm towards her. I wouldn't be fast enough to catch her. Her body would break when she hit the bottom. Bile burned my throat at the thought of it.

Wind should have torn at my feathers, should have ripped out strands of hair as I fell, but the chasm was eerily still. It was dark, but it didn't compare to the infinite black of Wane's shadows. I could see Verena below me, her arms flung out as she fell, her body rendered in greys.

The satchel strap slipped from my shoulder, and I gasped a ragged curse, fumbling to stop its fall. Panic made my stomach flop. Gravity tugged the bag away from me in seconds, but I snatched a strap on the side and fought back a scream as the movement flipped me upside down.

My fingers slid into the pocket, wrapping around the bone pin, and I had a moment of relief before power razed through me like fire and lightning. My back arched, my fingers locked, and magic coursed all the way from my burned fingertips, through every vein and blood vessel. My mouth hung open on a silent scream as it travelled up my arm, through my chest, and into my soul.

Fuck. I forgot how brutal the pin was. Who thought it was a good idea to make something this intense?

Power cracked on the tip of my tongue, burned my nostrils, and I felt it echo around the chambers of my heart like a second beat. One moment, the chasm was dim around me, the next it blazed with crimson light, and my eyesight sharpened until it hurt to see.

Verena was there, just below me, screaming as she twisted through the air, trying to protect herself by curling into a ball. My heart skipped, and then blood magic thumped through my body, filling my skull with heartbeats until I couldn't hear Verena's screams.

I looked beyond her, gauging the distance to the bottom, and pain jabbed my eyes like needles as my power brightened the chasm. Oh, shit. It wasn't a solid stone floor that waited for us at the bottom. It was a perfectly circular pool of rippling, liquid shadow, blacker than anything inside this chasm. Panic beat wings in my chest when I recognised the magic—more of the shadow Cronus had stolen from my mate.

But what had he done with it this time? And why did blue lightning crackle through the black ink, like veins of poison?

I stretched my fingers down for Verena, pumping my wings harder, my gasps turning into sobs. We were too close. I couldn't reach her, couldn't stop her momentum.

A bubble popped when we dropped within a few metres of the black pool. When noise slammed back into my ears, deep screams and furious growls came from behind me. Above me.

Oh, those idiots. Those loyal, perfect fucking idiots. My mates had jumped into the chasm after me. And now we were all going to be devoured by the pool of magic Cronus had set at the bottom of the prison. A sob shattered my chest. A trap—this whole thing had been a trap.

We knew it was, and still came. Like lambs walking ourselves to the slab for slaughter.

The bone pin's power scalded my blood, growing, sizzling inside me. I gritted my teeth, snapping my wings to my sides so I dropped faster, cutting through the air like a bullet. I stretched my hand out, reaching, reaching…

Verena's screams battered my ear drums when I hit her back hard enough to ram my brain against my skull. 1 I locked my arms around her and let the torrent of magic erupt in a wave of crimson from my pores. My whole body lit up, every part of visible skin covered in sanguine light. It scattered like smoke into the chasm's darkness, but even more power blew from me, rushing around me and Verena and diving into the pool of magic waiting to swallow us.

It did nothing.

My breathing hitched. Verena shook violently against me. Blue magic flickered like lightning through the black water, and my breath cut off in my chest when sapphire veins rose from the pool like grasping, hungry hands. Stretching towards us.

"No!" someone howled above us, terror cutting their voice into sharp edges.

I only knew it was Wynvail who spoke when white light split the darkness, his moonlight desperately trying to cleave the veins of blue magic before they could—

Magic lashed my ankle and coiled like a whip, biting deep. Pain cut through my skin into the bone, and the constant pain of the bone pain was like tickling feathers against the white-hot agony of this thread of power. I snapped my jaws shut, tears burning down my cheeks, but the scream bubbled up my throat, raw and destructive.

Cool liquid brushed the feathers at the tips of my wings, and I jerked back, fighting the inevitable. It wasn't wet. The pool of shadow swallowed me like fluid velvet, far stronger than any magic had a right to be. The blue vein bit deeper into my ankle, gouging a brutal wound that made my eyes stream, and I couldn't hold back my scream anymore. We lost. It was over.

It was a relief when I slammed into the pool of shadow, and everything—pain and screams and magic and Cronus—fell away like ashes scattered on the wind.

In the split second before each one of my senses was overtaken by silence, I heard a roar, thundering and deep and unfamiliar. But something in the sound made my magic surge—in recognition. I tried to fight, to answer the call to battle, but silence swallowed everything I was and had ever been.

And then it swept over everything I would ever be.