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“Fey don’t get sick.”

“I know. Believe me, I know, and I can’t understand it. I can only tell you what the data says.”

“How many people know?” Ivain asked.

“No one outside this room,” Aiden said. “So far. But I don’t know how long we can keep this quiet. If the fever really has jumped, he won’t be the last. This disease, it’s…aggressive.”

“People will panic.” Skye could already see it. And once fear took over, things would get ugly fast.

Ivain’s face darkened. His eyes, no longer bright from the alcohol, held only a solemn weight. “We can’t let thisinformation spread. Not until we know exactly what we’re dealing with—until we’re sure it’s a cross-species contagion. Aiden, I want you to notify the other healers and menders,discreetly. Meanwhile, I’ll—”

A sudden, discordant jolt of keys cut through the room, snapping his words in half.

Every eye in the room followed the sound, to Taly, still at the piano.

There was a pause—a strange stillness about her. She almost seemed to… sway.

Then came the dull, mutedthudas her body slumped to the floor.

Chapter 41

Taly stared into the dark, eyes frozen in a wide, unblinking stare. Her body felt heavy. She lay on her back, unable to move, unable to wake up.

Dreams slip through the Weave quietly, Azura once said.Scrying snags the threads, sending out ripples into the void.

Hands pawed at her body, forcing her onto her side.

So, build your defenses tall.

Fingers dug into her mouth. She tried to bite down. Couldn’t. The line between her body and mind had been cut.

Make them strong.

Bone crunched, and she felt pressure but not pain. It took her a moment to realize those fingers were now digging inside her broken skull.

And be ready for when the monsters come hunting.

“Grimble…”

The thing hovering over her was large and hunched. In the dark, she could only make out its shadow and the faint impression of too many arms moving around her, too many hands dragging at her body.

“Grimble,” it muttered in a rotting, gravelly voice, those fingers still digging, digging, digging inside her skull. “Tell me, grimble, show me, show me…”

Taly didn’t know what she’d done wrong. She’d been careful, followed every one of Azura and Leto’s rules for responsible dreaming. One moment, she was trailing a riftway key down a shadowed alley; the next, everything went black.

Those fingers stopped. “There, grimble…”It gave the most horrible, little laugh.“An open thought, practically inviting me in…”

Then the landscape shifted. The darkness gave way. Red dirt scraped against her cheek. Her eyes remained open, unblinking. Beneath her, blood pooled, leaking from the wound at the back of her head.

“You think much of this place. Can’t help but come back…”

In front of her, the Aion Gate loomed.

Of all the gates on the island, Aion was the largest. Almost 100 feet wide and so tall it was impossible to see the top through the gray wall of clouds. Twin pillars of hyaline towered high, their translucent forms catching and refracting the eerie light of the swirling sky. Between them stretched a flat pane of shadow crystal with a thin sliver of gold slicing through the center—rising into the clouds like a seam in reality.

A rotting fist slammed into the dirt beside her, another yanking her onto her back.

The thing that Taly saw above her was a creature born of nightmares—a monster fashioned from sagging gray skin stretched over emaciated bone. Too many arms sprouted from its body, each ending in a writhing cluster of too many hands. Its head was large and bulbous, bald and unnatural, with slitted holes instead of nostrils and a lipless mouth filled with twin rows of razor-sharp teeth. With each breath, its body heaved, its sides working like ancient, wheezing bellows.