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While she could still feel his emotions pulsing down their bond, they weren’t as pronounced—as though the distance had impacted it somehow. Even with the bond being somewhat muted, a single emotion rippled down it. Then a sudden wave of a deeper emotion swept over her.

Staggering forward, she clutched her chest.

Shame, she realized. But why? What was happening?

Before, he’d been experiencing pain and fear, but this… This somehow felt worse.

I’m running out of time,she thought.I have to hurry.

Gasping, she struggled to stand upright. She felt the others’ eyes on her but ignored them. Slowly, she managed to put one foot in front of another and walked past the prince toward the rising sun. “Let’s go.”

Behind her, Hadeon cleared his throat. She stopped, looking back.

“It’s that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

Of course.

She marched in the direction he pointed without a word, still clutching the map.

Anger surged through her, and the sharp edges of her emotions heightened. Even as she walked, she longed to move, to fight, to dosomething. While she understood the importance of this mission, doing anything but journey directly toward her mate had something in her chest setting aflame.

Fuck you, Magnus,she thought.You’ll die soon. At my hands.

Shadows hissed at her feet, curling and twisting as her thoughts turned dark.

She glared at the mountain peaks in the distance as she moved in silence.

After some time, she found herself walking at Hadeon’s side.

The prince had a distant look in his eyes, and she thought to wonder just what he might be thinking about. Had he been honest about his motivations for finding the shadow fae? She meant what she’d said to Jessamine the night before. She didn’t believe the prince was dishonest. But she doubted he had their best interests at heart.

Even if she couldn’t be entirely certain of his motivations, she couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t simply forced her to help him find the shadow fae with the favor she owed him.

“Why didn’t you call in the bargain?” she eventually asked, hoping the conversation might distract herself from the agony slicing down the bond. “Why this roundabout way of getting me to come with you to the Abyss?”

“Perhaps I thought it would benefit us both.”

Leveling a flat look on him, she said, “You don’t do anything without a reason.”

Eyes scanning the gently sloping hills around them, no power winked into her awareness. There wasn’t a single magic wielder nearby outside of their group. It was completely desolate. Though… as she cast her awareness further out, she thought she detected something else lingering in the air. It dusted her senses with dread, feeling like hundreds of eyes followed their group’s every step.

Like they were intruding in a place they shouldn’t be.

She’d never believed in ghosts nor had she encountered spirits of the dead in her time as an enchantress. All she’d had to consider were the demons that threatened her home. Most had physical bodies, and killing a corporeal form was simple enough by magic or blade. How did one fight an angry spirit?

Pushing thoughts of the lingering eyes aside, she said, “How did you meet Prince Arden?”

Hadeon shrugged. “The shadow fae weren’t highly favored toward the end of their existence in the fae realm. And I’ve never been among my mother’s favorite sons. Arden and I bonded over our mutual unfavored existence at court functions, balls, and the like.”

The queen disliked her own son? The notion seemed ridiculous. But Arabella needed to know if there was more to why Hadeon wanted to stop his mother. What was their history? Why was he so desperate to stop her from securing immortality? What could the price be for one queen to live forever?

As they walked, her eyes caught on how the light reflected off sections of his wings. They didn’t just have feathers like his brothers’ wings, which she’d seen on the dais the day she’d met the queen with Elias. Speckled between the feathers, something glittered in the light.

Turning to the blank parchment in her hand, she said, “Any suggestions for reading an unreadable map? Maybe something Arden said to you?”

“It was something he created,” Hadeon said as he navigated around a boulder, angling downhill. “He’d been studying old texts and went on about how some realms are mirror images of each other and others were unique unto themselves. He’d been sparse with the details of how he’d created a map of a place he’d never been to. When I saw him after he created it, he looked pale and sickly. At the time, he’d been excitable and eager to tell me about it. But war was imminent, and my mother told me to end the friendship or risk us being viewed as allies to the shadow fae. So, there hadn’t been time to learn much about it.”

“I see,” she said, though this only sparked more questions in her mind about the fae war. There was so much she didn’t know—so much that was left out of the histories. How much ofwhat she’d been taught was a fabrication or partial truth by the victors?