EPILOGUE

Avana

AVANA’S POINTED NAILS scraped her temples. She peered over her desk in her room in the tower. Shouts and screams still echoed outside her door, which she had marked with runes and traps. Nobody was getting in.

Her grandmother’s journals lay open on the black, elegant desk. Its surface was immaculately clean, every paper, book, and writing utensil filed neatly in their corresponding place. She skimmed the yellowed pages and Anali’s rough sketches again—for the hundredth time.

Her nails dug deeper into her temples. The Quincara legacy—her grandmother’s legacy—everything Avana had been searching for was now in danger. No matter how many times she stared at Anali’s journals, they wouldn’t give her the answers she needed. But now Ryker was dead, along with all of his knowledge, and Evangeline had been taken away. Avana’s raven scouted the castle grounds, but she couldn’t find her. Much like Raiythlen, who had disappeared. Hopefully, he bled out somewhere.

His poisoned tongue had tricked her in the past. Had convinced her to hand over the journals to him, believing he was helping her, their family, in pursuing Anali’s legacy. He knew how much it meant to her, the years she’d spent studying it. Instead, he had betrayed her and their parents by burning them.

And like those journals, he had permanently burned the bridge between them.

All she had left was this journal and Evangeline. And now she didn’t even have that. Everything she had worked for was slipping through her fingers. She was going to be stuck, yet again, at a dead end. And she didn’t want to wait—potentially years—for some stroke of luck like this to happen again.

She turned another page when she felt it. An electric current. A shift in the air. It couldn’t be . . .

Avana whipped around, an incantation leaving her lips. Light like a feather, swift as a bird. Her arms and legs vibrated with magic, the runes beneath her breast and lower stomach coming to life. She had already used these spells a few times today. She estimated about an hour left before the symbols disintegrated. Maybe less. She’d only used this spell a handful of times and didn’t know its full effect.

A familiar pressure soaked up the room. No way . . . But there was no mistaking the sensation of a nearby Shadow Door. One that previously hadn’t been in her small tower room. The space by her single-sized bed shimmered, and her fingers unwound the bun from her hair, the beaded hairpins sharp at the end. The tips, dipped in a concentrated toxin, would kill any opponent, either in seconds or minutes, depending on the type of Nyte and their body mass.

A tall, exotic man stepped out from the distorted space, and Avana propped her clips, ready to aim at the intruder’s throat. Emerald eyes squinted as they met hers, but what made her hands shake and her stance falter was the symbol on his right hand.

“Avana Quincara, granddaughter to Anali. I believe it’s time we met.”

Her breath caught. It wasn’t often that she lost her calm, but ever since stepping foot in Peredia, her logical, calculated life had been a series of dark corners and abrupt turns.

“Who . . .?” She swallowed and straightened but never lowered the beaded clips. “Who are you? What do you want?” His eyes crinkled into a smile, but she was more focused on the circular symbol encased in old Castanian on his right hand. The same as Evangeline’s.

“You may call me Jaden.” Something ancient layered with an unknown depth of wisdom poured from his words, his posture—his very existence. Would he be the one to finally bring her what she had been searching for all these years?

Jaden cocked his head. “As for what I want, that depends on you. Do you want to help me save the world?”