His eyes blazed a lethal navy. With a flick of his finger, the spirits shrieked and tightened. Her eyes bulged, her skin taking on a horrific bluish tint.
“Goodbye,” Talon promised, his voice a cold ruin.
The shadows multiplied, pulling inward like a vacuum. With a sickening, wet crack, they tore her head from her shoulders.
I gasped, my fingers flying to my mouth, leaving a dark trail of vine residue across my lips.
Her limp body dropped to join the heap of fallen guards. I stared at the spot where she had stood, and my stomach turned—not just at the blood, but at the way my own pulse spiked in a dark thrill.
The green lattice of light around my home flickered and dropped, leaving small motes floating in the air. I scrambled to my feet, desperate to reach the door, but Talon was swift. He caught me by the waist and hauled me back.
“Let me go! They are dying!” I sobbed, kicking against him as I pointed at the windows where the mist still danced over my family.
“Kaelia, look at me!” Talon barked, grabbing my face and forcing me to meet his burning gaze. “They are not dying. It is a memory-wiping spell. Their minds are resetting. They will wake up and this whole night will be a distant memory.”
“They are hurt!” I wailed, my knees finally giving out.
“They are alive,” he whispered into my hair as I collapsed into his chest. “If you go in there, you will jeopardize the spell. You will put them in further danger. Let them forget, Kaelia. They do not need to remember what they have seen.”
I sobbed into his shirt, my hands clutching the dark fabric. “This was not how it was meant to be.”
“I know,” he said, his arms tightening around me. “But you are alive. And you are mine. I will keep you safe.”
He swept me into his arms, stepping into the gathering darkness. As the shadows rose to swallow us, I caught one last glimpse of the house I did not know if I would ever see again. I closed my eyes and prayed my family would wake up whole, even if they woke up without knowing if I was alive or dead.
22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Talon stopped so abruptly that I nearly collided with his back. I huffed, moving to step around him to demand an explanation, but the words died in my throat as a roaring sound tore through the heavy silence of the night.
I braced myself, my hand flying to the hilt of the silver knife at my waist as I expected another ambush, but the mountain before us began to groan. Beneath the pale moonlight, the ancient stone seemed to split open, a jagged fissure widening until it swallowed the darkness and revealed a path where there had been only rock.
A colossal waterfall unveiled itself, hidden within a cleft of the rock. Silver water plunged from heights so dizzying that my neck ached as I tried to follow the descent, the torrent shattering into a furious pool where mist leaped into the air like a shimmering veil.
The spray kissed my skin, instantly chilling the sweat that had gathered at my temples during our flight.
“Wow,” I gasped, the word nearly lost to the roar of the crashing water.
Talon huffed a laugh, his eyes tracking the way the moonlight fractured against the spray.
I squinted through the haze. “Where exactly are we?”
“Somewhere no mortal would dare venture,” he replied.
Without another word, Talon stepped into the shimmering veil of the waterfall, his form dissolving into the white noise of the crash.
“Talon!” I called out, but my voice was swallowed by the roar.
Cursing his name, I took a breath and stumbled into the torrent. The icy water hit me in a violent shock that soaked through my nightdress in an instant, causing the fabric to cling indecently to every curve of my body. My teeth chattered as I pushed through the heavy curtain of the falls, stumbling out the other side where the roar faded to a muffled echo.
The chamber that opened before me stole the breath I had just fought to regain. It was impossibly vast, a cathedral of stone suffused with a light that felt ancient and sentient. Walls of polished obsidian gleamed, smoothed by eons of water, while a river of glowing cobalt light ran through the cavern’s heart. Its reflection scattered across the ceiling like shifting constellations, and tiny fish—shining like fragments of fallen moonlight—darted through the luminous current.
Radiant blue dust drifted lazily through the air, turning the cavern into a sky caught in stone.
Talon shrugged off his damp shirt in one motion, the fabric sliding to the ground to leave him bare-chested and impossibly real.
His back was a map of shadow and light. Ancient runes curled across skin stretched over corded muscle, every line astory I did not yet know how to read. Some of the ink pulsed with the same cobalt glow as the river, while pale scars marked the spaces in between.