Page 96 of Ballad of Nightmares

“You act like you have any chance here,” he replied.

“I don’t lose,” she practically growled.

Ana lunged at him. She swung, but he ducked and caught her legs. She wiped out to the ground, shovel crashing on the mud, and she scrambled for it. He caught her leg, but she kicked and reached, and kicked and reached. Until the very tips of her fingers grazed that wooden staff, nothing else in the world mattering except her survival. She had not come all this way to be taken out by some Firemoor mercenary.

Ana’s fingers latched onto the wood, and she swung as hard as she could. The metal whacked into his head, and he flew backward to the ground, legs swinging out from under him.

Ana’s chest heaved, her head throbbing, and she slowly made her way to her feet, made her way over him, shovel still in her hands. She stared at the groggy man beneath her, her body shaking with the panic of having an actual soldier after her again.

Rage billowed in her veins.

“I do hope you left your family with a few meals to spare,” she hissed. “Because you’re not coming home this time.”

The shovel met his neck, and his eyes blew wide as it snapped his head off.

The cemetery fell silent around her.

Ana wiped the blood off her forehead as she looked down at the lump of a man now bleeding out at her feet.

Firemoor soldiers. Here in Shadowmyer where she thought she’d be safe, at least for a while.

Shadows began to circle her body. Ana searched over the umbra and held up her hand, letting one of them wrap her fingers like silk and water between traveling over her flesh. This was how she knew Death himself was taking this body. Because for every person she’d ever killed, she’d never felt this.

Comfort washed over her skin and settled in her stomach. Calming her thudding heart. Such a comforting euphoria that she had to blink herself out of such a daze. She could have walked into it, laid down on that wet grass and let those shadows cradle her into an abyss from which she would not return.

Ana’s knees hit the dirt, and she watched. She watched that darkness take care of the blood pooling around her limbs. She watched the soldier’s body fade into the fog, and all she could think of was how she would have begged for such reprieve for her father’s death instead of having to bury him in the frozen waters of Icemyer… Watching his body disappear down and down, until nothing was left except the freezing ripples on the surface.

A single tear crawled down her cheek, and just as she felt her insides begin to break, she pressed that emotion back down and stared at the disappearing face of this assassin.

Firemoor.

She wondered if they actually knew she was there or if they’d just been sent to search for her. And if it was the former…

Sam’s face flashed in her mind, causing her heart to ache.Sam… Her thumb absentmindedly brushed over the new tattoo, and she hated herself for ever thinking she could be free.

She could never have the life she had dreamt of just a few hours earlier. She would never be free of this. Someone would always want her dead. She had done too much, took too much.

Her gaze shifted over her shoulder to the dark castle, to the cemetery around her, and to the crackling thunder in the distance.

If she couldn’t have that life with Sam…

Then she would havethis.

This…all of this… This crown. This kingdom. This final realm. Vengeance and that final edge. The world… All of it… It was hers. She had bled and crawled and suffered her entire life for this.

Damn her heart. Damn her stupid…fucking… heart.

And sniffed back the rest of her tears and picked herself up off the ground, turning to look back at the castle once more time.

Hercastle.

Lightning cracked high in the clouds, cascading its glow onto the grounds—

And she swore in that light, she saw a man with high tattered wings and scarlet eyes staring back at her.

Ana’s heart skipped, though in the next flash, the shadow was gone. But Ana knew what she had seen. Knew Death himself was watching her, and her breaths went jagged at the thought.

There you are.