"I said GO!"
The shout echoed through the garden. Shadows exploded around him — actual shadows, pooling at his feet, crawling up the tree behind him, making the lanterns flicker and dim.
I stumbled back. Stared at him. At the darkness that shouldn't be possible, not here, not in someone apprenticed to the Light Court.
"Why have you got shadows Hakan?" I whispered.
He laughed. It sounded broken. "I don't know. But you should run, starlight. Forget this ever happened."
He turned and walked away, shadows trailing after him like a cloak. Like they were part of him. Like they'd always been there, waiting for the right moment to show themselves.
I stood there alone, hands shaking, mouth still burning from his kiss. My light magic was rioting under my skin, reaching for something that was no longer there. Reaching for the darkness that had answered it. That had felt like —
No.
I touched my lips. Tasted wine and shadow and something that might have been ash. Somewhere above us, a branch cracked. I looked up. A single bough of the old oak had caught — just the tip, barely a flame, gold and violet flickering along the bark where our magic had bled together. It burned for a handful of seconds, then died, leaving a thin curl of smoke and the smell of scorched wood hanging in the air. Above me, golden lanterns swayed in the breeze.
In the distance, music started. Drums and strings and voices raised in celebration of light's eternal victory over shadow.
And I wondered what we'd just unleashed.
What we'd just become.
CHAPTER 6
THE BEAST
Hakan
Two weeks since the festival and I was running out of things to destroy.
The training hall had become my graveyard. Every morning before dawn, I'd beat practice dummies into kindling until my knuckles split and my shoulders screamed, and every morning the restless dark thing beneath my ribs stayed exactly where it was — coiled, patient, growing.
The shadows were worse now.
That was the thought I kept circling, unable to get past it. Worse. As though there had been a before, a baseline, a thing I understood and had adapted to. There hadn’t and whatever was living on the other side of that crack was not something I had a word for yet.
I'd discovered this two days after the exhibition, alone in the training hall before anyone else had arrived. I'd been working the heavy bag when a seam of darkness split from my left handand slid across the floor like spilled ink. I'd stared at it. It had stared back — or that was how it felt, the strange intelligence of something that knew where I was even when I stopped looking at it. I'd done what any rational person would do: stepped away from it and waited for it to stop.
It didn't stop. It followed.
I'd spent the next three nights sitting alone in my room, methodically trying to understand what I was dealing with. Not because I had any real hope of controlling it — I didn't, not yet — but because I needed to know its shape. Where it came from. Whether it obeyed me or just moved toward me the way water moves toward a drain. The answers I found were not reassuring. The shadows came when my attention slipped. They came faster when I was angry. They came without warning and retreated without cause and twice — twice — they had moved before I had consciously wanted them to, reaching for something I'd only half-formed the intention of reaching for.
That last part frightened me more than anything else.
I'd taken to wearing gloves. Thick ones, the kind training officers wore when handling magical equipment. People assumed it was an eccentricity or an injury. Neither explanation required me to speak.
Lord Volkan had been watching me since the exhibition. I'd seen it — the way his ancient eyes tracked me across the great hall, the way he'd leaned toward the High Priest and whispered something that made them both look my way. He hadn't made a move yet. But he was circling.
And he wasn't the only one I'd been watching.
Lord Tahir had met with Serkan three times this week. I'd clocked each one — once in the eastern colonnade after evening prayers, once in Serkan's private study when the door hadn't been fully closed, and once in the lower gardens where they'd sat on a bench like old friends despite a forty-year age gap and no obvious reason to be speaking at all. Tahir was old nobility, eldest son of a family whose name was carved into the Academy's foundation stones. Serkan was the council's most ambitious reformer — the man who'd been pushing for expanded purification authority and harsher shadow-blood registries for years.
I didn't know what they were planning yet. But I knew it involved Gün Ata. I'd caught fragments —when the old god fadesandthe girl will need guidance— spoken in the low voices of men who believed no one was listening.
I was always listening.
Today's provocation arrived at breakfast.