62

Sand and Shadow

My first instinct is to scream as Shadow drags me, feet and arms flailing, through several chambers of the palace-temple that houses the throne room. Damn them all to the deepest hells. Shadow finally stops, and it takes me a moment to orient. We’re in the lesser tomb of the palace-temple, where lower authoritates’ and royal servants’ ashes are enshrined. Walls and walls of urns are tucked into symmetrical rows of alcoves.

My parents aren’t here. Grandmother, either. Rulers and their families have their own private tombs.

He turns me loose, spinning me away from him with a thrust. As I turn to face him, darkness wraps around me, binding my arms to my side the same way Reven did when he kidnapped me. I stare at him—this heartbreakingly beautiful monster. Only, instead of fear, anger burns everything inside me, melts and heats and purifies me until I’m like glass.

The amulet, still tucked inside my breastband, flashes white-hot against my skin in a star flare of intensity, like it’s absorbing my anger and reflecting it back to me. Reminding me…

He’s in my house now.

I don’t have to dredge the sand from the soil. It’s all around me. Everywhere. My lifeblood. My hands are bound behind my back. Perfect. I splay my palms open and call the sands to me.

Nothing appears to happen at first. I don’t stop, though, because the tingling of my power is slowly building, so I know it’s working.

“Now,” Shadow sneers, staring at me from under thick, lowered brows. “Since I can’t trust you to stay put, you and I are going to wait here for that ceremony to be finished.”

Most of my focus is on the power building inside me. The vibration of it, a buzz, has taken up residence in my spine. Like being in my dominion, in my element, is feeding me. Maybe the same way being in darkness feeds Reven’s power?

Please, goddess, let the sands be coming to my call.

I need a distraction or he might notice the glow, so I glare through him. Past the current face to the one inside. Desperation edges the flow of shadow between me and Reven, but that connection is quiet and still, a pale imitation of what I feel when he’s fully in charge. I’m not sure if what I’m sensing is him or my own wishful thinking.

“Reven?” I ask.

Shadow’s sneer curls deeper. How he can make that beautiful face twist into something ugly is amazing to me, but he does.

“The traitor is buried deep, little girl. He can’t hear you, and he never will again.”

There’s no answering swirl within me. I believe him. “He’s better than anything you could ever hope to be. No wonder he rose to the top when Eidolon shed his shadows.”

The nebulous binding cuts into my skin like knives. Before I can cry out, the urns in their alcoves rattle as the tomb itself starts to shake.

I smirk. Got you.

Shadow whirls toward the window just as a wall of sand blasts through it, slamming into him. The momentum picks him up off his feet and hurls him across the room. His shadows drop away from me.

In the same instant, I brace, throwing my hands up in front of my face, because the wave of sand is coming for me, too. Except nothing happens. I open my eyes to find that I’m encased in some sort of…I guess it’s a bubble.

Like the sand knows not to touch me.

Rivers of it continue to pile in through the window, but slower now. Before I have a chance to do more than straighten, an impenetrable column of shadow bursts out from beneath the onslaught, filling the room like a giant fist raised to smash down on me.

On pure instinct, I jerk my hands up again, and the amulet sparks, bright orange glittering embers pouring from me. The sand around my bubble flash heats to glass. The shadow form slams down on top of my own personal glass fortress, but it holds.

With wide eyes, I watch as Shadow rises from the sands and stalks forward, darkness a cloak flowing from him, consuming him, feet barely touching the rolling dunes I’ve filled the chamber with, now mixed with the ashes of the dead and porcelain shards of broken urns.

He’s all beast. A rabid, wounded animal out for my blood.

Then his gaze lands on the glow of the amulet under my clothes as if he can see exactly what I have hidden there. If anything, his gaze sharpens to something covetous. “That explains a lot.” His gaze shifts up to mine. “You have no idea what that is, do you?”

Before I can answer, darkness curls around my protective glass bubble almost like a lover’s caress, flowing around my refuge until I’m buried and sight is stolen from me. Then something massive slams into the top.

It strikes again and again until I can feel the pounding in my bones and my teeth. Until eventually I hear the sound I’ve been dreading with each strike—the faintest brittle hiss of cracking glass. I can’t see to try to patch it.

On the next blow, he’ll crush me. No doubt in my mind.

I have seconds to figure out what to do, and in those seconds, it hits me that I have only one choice. The realization is like a spear of sunlight obliterating the night.

I’m out of other options.

On a deep breath, I disintegrate the glass. The dark disperses with it—whether from surprise or because I pushed it back, I don’t know. Don’t care.

I take that half a second Shadow pauses, lift my hands, and blast him with flash-heated glass. The force of it slams him back up against the wall of small alcoves, and it molds around him, cooling on contact, fusing him there. The glass flashes in strobes of bright orange as I layer more and more, winding it around his wrists and ankles like vines, then covering the rest of him. Faster than he can get the shadows out.

The heat of my power, melting and reforming the sand so fast, scorches my palms as the amulet singes my chest.

I don’t stop.

I keep layering glass over glass, tighter and tighter around his body—his arms, legs, torso—containing him, using all the piles of sand in the room.

“You bitch.”

I ignore him and keep going.

He flexes against my glass prison, and then suddenly his body relaxes, his voice overflowing with self-satisfaction. “You have to let us out some time.”

“Who says so?”

While his smug smile doesn’t slip, a tick in his jaw tells me he sees my resolve. He shoots a significant glance at my side. At the scar in my side holding me together and connecting me to Reven.

A threat.

Can they control those shadows inside me? Can they draw them out? It’s a risk I have to take. I keep going, only now I’m pressing the glass inward. I’m going to crush him.

I’m sorry. Can Reven hear me? Does he know I’m out of choices? I’m sorry. Goddess, so sorry.

The raw fury that passes over Shadow’s features ripples through every inch of his body as the glass slowly begins to grind at him.

He opens his mouth, and an eerie growling shriek comes out, a sound so raw and furious it’s ringing in my head, pain fracturing through my skull. Then shadow leaks from his eyes and mouth and nose and ears. Reminding me of the Hollow’s tentacles, they writhe around his head.

One tendril trails down my body to that spot in my side and spears through the scar. I gasp as a terrible sucking sensation hollows out my insides. A glance down tells me I’m right. They’re siphoning out the shadows that bind my wound. Blood blooms against the blue of my dress.

Keep going.

I don’t know if the voice is Reven, or my amulet, or me. But I set my jaw and focus. I’m too late for Tabra, but at least I’ll be able to take out two of the critical pieces in this deadly game Eidolon is playing. Both his Shadows and I will be off the board.

I press closer, moving my hands to his face. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

Glass spreads out from my fingers across his skin, winding into his hair. A few more moments of this and he’ll be crushed. Suffocated. The shadow tentacles writhe as I block their connection to him, the wound in my side opening farther.

I don’t let go.

One last time, I reach for him through that connection. Closing my eyes, I picture that swirl of darkness. It’s too faint for me to step into, but I touch it with my mind as I cover his face with glass, locking the shadows inside. My hands, held to his skin by the molten mass, burn as shadows frantically twist through my fingers, but I don’t open my eyes. I can’t watch the moment he dies.

“I’ll find you in the afterlife,” I whisper, broken.

Suddenly, the shadows wrapped around my hands turn tender. Sweeter. Softer. A caress instead of a desperate attempt to escape the glass coffin I’ve trapped them in.

On a gasp, I open my eyes and meet his clear, aqua-blue gaze through the glass separating us.

“Reven?” I’m desperate for it to be him.

Redirecting my power, I pull the glass back from his face.

He takes a deep breath. Then another. “Thank the goddesses for you, Mereneith Evangeline XII,” he murmurs.

“Is it you?” What if this is a ruse to earn my trust? I’m torn apart. I want to believe him, but…

“Meren—”

“I need proof.”

He closes his eyes as if that hurts, only to open them again immediately. “You hate heights. You carry two knives unless I take them away. You make glass flowers for your sister that you work on in a secret garden at the palace…and you also made one for me. You talk when you get nervous or stressed, and it’s so damn adorable—”

The sob that bubbles up from deep inside me surprises even me. Because I wasn’t sure. But I know the Shadows don’t share information with one another. That’s why Reven’s memory is so patchy, and why the Shadow I interacted with after the healing ritual didn’t know Reven had protected me from the rest of them.

Reven alone was present for every single one of the moments he’s bringing up.

I shatter the glass holding him, and he surges away from the wall, coughing as he gulps in air. I almost step back, just in case I’m wrong, but he’s faster, pulling me close, burying his hands in my hair, and presses a kiss to my forehead.

Before I can stop him, he lifts up my dress, exposing my now partially open wound. He blows out a sharp breath. “They didn’t get it all. I was trying to stop them.”

A glance shows that the edges are raw, but already shadow is moving and swirling to fill in the gaps. Slowly, like the creep of dusk across the sky as day turns to night. But I’ll be okay.

He lowers the dress.

My mind chooses this moment for his words from a second ago to sink in. “You saw me in the garden?” I thought he’d just seen the flowers.

He smiles, eyes crinkling around the corners even as the clear turquoise turns gentle. Truly Reven. “I watched you form a tiny flower, turning sand into glass, the glow illuminating your face. You looked so lonely, and all I could think was that it would be nice to sit by you in that glass garden. At the time, I thought you were the Princess Tabra, but it was…”

“Me.”

“You,” he whispers. His lips tip in a crooked, heartbreaking smile.

Then he cants his head, gaze caressing my face. “But before that, long before that, there was this voice I would hear in the dark.”

I’m starting to tremble.

“A girl who would call out sometimes, wishing for a new life, and I’d hear her. I thought she was in Enora, but I could never find her. Never get to her fast enough or figure out quite where she was. I was looking for her that night. The night at the gate.”

My eyes grow wide. “I called to you that night.”

“Yes.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “You sounded different when I saw you trying to leave the city, though, so I didn’t realize I’d finally found her. Then I stole the princess, and she opened her mouth, and I couldn’t believe my ears—”

“Me again,” I whisper.

“You again. Which made no damn sense, because the voice I’d heard was in Enora. That voice has haunted me for years.” He grimaces. “Years. How could I fall for a glass-making princess? So I fought it. Ignored it. Decided I had to be wrong, all while I was falling more under your spell with every bewitching, frustrating word that came out of your mouth.” He bends a gently accusing look on me. “Then I found out who you really were. That I wasn’t wrong, that you were both girls, and I had no idea what to do with that.”

“I’m sorry.” My heart is cracking all over again. Because everything inside me is pure joy at his words but also unbelievable sorrow.

He lifts a hand, tracing the curves of my face. “In those same memories that told me who you were, I found out about the curse, and I realized being around you isn’t making me weaker—it’s making the Shadows inside me stronger. Once the things inside me got a whiff of you, keeping them under control has been—”

He breaks off and shakes his head. And I know—I can feel how scared he’s been.

“They’re trying to get to you,” he says in a gritty voice. “They always will. I have to protect you from that.”

He sucks in a shaky breath. “I knew for sure I couldn’t live without you when I saw you go down under that pile of soldiers. I knew if I released my full power, the Shadows would overtake me. But I couldn’t let you die.” He swallows, throat working, jaw tight.

I realize then what he’s saying. He sacrificed himself for me. Knowing the Shadows inside him would bury him when he used that much power. That’s how he took out the army.

The part of my flesh that’s made of him prickles. The connection is real, tangible. Him.

His lopsided smile is tinged with murky sadness. “I didn’t think a thing like me—something that started from a source of evil—could ever love.” He closes his eyes and draws in a long breath. When he opens them, they’re pure ocean. “That connection you feel is my heart, and every beat is for you.” His expression turns sheepish. “I think I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you in that glass garden.”

Even as my soul glows at those words, at the look in his eyes, anguish seeps through me with the knowledge that, like every other essential, promising event in my life, this one is about to be ruined. I want to settle into this moment, memorize it, but we don’t have time.

I smile back, trying to steal just one more moment for us, but I know I fail. I know he sees the sadness when he frowns.

“We still have to kill the king,” I say.

Everything that is love for me leaches from his eyes, and Reven’s expression hardens, answering bitterness seeping in, a reflection of my own. “I know.”

Sunlight blooms inside the room, rays of it reflecting off the crystal particles in the dunes and glass all around us. The first kiss of sunrise. A clamor of ecstatic bells peals, announcing the union of my precious, beautiful sister to the man who has deceived her.