Page 47 of Bartered by the Shadow Prince (Bargain with the Shadow Prince #3)

A Castle in the Sky

ELOISE

A s our walk stretches on, I’m thankful for our moments alone.

It gives me time to think. These challenges are uniquely personal and ultimately spiritual.

Thanesia is trying to break us. I think about all the souls who walk this road alone at the end of their lives and how the sacrifices of blood their families are supposed to make can ease their way.

Considering this land isn’t crowded with ghosts, I assume most souls eventually make it through Thanesia’s door and enter the Darklands.

Now, having experienced what we have, I wonder if, by the time they do, they have a different understanding of their life.

A different understanding of themselves.

As a shade, Damien will live a long life, perhaps thousands of years, but he won’t live forever.

My life as a vampire will, too, have an expiration date, even if that is ten thousand years from now when the flesh clings to my bones like shrunken leather.

In the end, when we walk this road once more, I wish we could have children to mourn us. Children to ease the road.

This, though, is beyond my control. It is enough that I will give him a kingdom to mourn him.

“You’re quiet, little bird,” he says in that low, gritty voice that always tugs at something deep within me.

I smile at him. “How do you decide whether to call me little bird, little dragon, or Eloise?”

He slants me a lopsided grin. “Simple, I only call you Eloise if the situation is gravely serious and I must have your full attention. Little bird I reserve for times when I am moved by your delicate beauty and grace or your occasional vulnerability. Times when I want to take you in my arms and comfort you. Times when I’m so fascinated by you, I fear you might fly away if I don’t hold you close. ”

“And little dragon?”

“When I’m afraid of you.”

We both laugh.

“So…what were you just thinking about, little bird.”

“I had a dream about you once, before we were mated.”

“Please tell me it was a sex dream.”

I snort and shoot him a hot look. “Oh, I had plenty of those, but this one was special. I dreamed we had children.”

His feet shuffle as if this surprises him, but he doesn’t say anything.

“We were in the yard out front of Harcourt Manor, near the river. We were having a picnic, and our two children were running around us. It was a happy dream. I was disappointed when I woke. I knew that it could never be. You could never picnic in the sun, and I assumed you could never have children, at least not with a human like me. But it was a beautiful dream.”

“Are you mourning children we’ve never had?”

“Maybe. Maybe I’m mourning the dreams that other couples get to have, the ones where anything is possible. I’m mourning choices lost. A future taken from us.”

His answering smile is infectious. “Oh Eloise, after all we’ve been through, aren’t you satisfied with any future at all?”

I laugh, and it grows and grows until it comes from my gut. “Considering we are having this conversation on the path to the Darklands, yes! One hundred percent, yes.”

“Eloise—”

I see it the same time he does. Stygarde Castle blocks the road, and the door is hanging wide open.

But this Stygarde Castle is different from the one in real life in one important way.

We cannot walk around it. The road and everything else ends at the castle.

The enormous building of silvery stone floats, unmoored, in a dark sky.

There is nothing underneath it or to either side. Above it, only stars.

“One way through,” Damien says, his throat bobbing on a swallow. I can tell he’s trying hard to keep his cool and not show fear, for my sake. But I also sense that he’s afraid. He can’t hide it from me anymore. And this trial appears to be about him or his life.

“None of it is real, right?” I say supportively.

Our gazes connect and hold. The corners of his mouth twitch up. “Right.”

We move forward at the slowest pace we’ve walked so far and ascend the stairs to enter the front doors. Immediately, the scent of death hits me in the face, and I cover my nose with my hand. Bodies of servants are strewn across the floor. Their gray uniforms are soaked in dark red blood.

I follow Damien as he picks his way through the maze of bodies, respectfully avoiding their limbs and the pools of crimson they lie in.

“I know these people. They are the ones who worked for my family before, during my childhood. I thought they’d been replaced by Nevina when she rose to power, but my mother confirmed Brahm eliminated any who witnessed my father’s death. I didn’t realize it was this many.”

“This is an illusion too,” I remind him. “We don’t know that it even happened this way.”

“No. But we do know he’s capable of it. I would not put this massacre past him.”

I can’t think of any way to respond to that.

He’s right. Brahm probably killed these people.

It might not have been all at once or exactly like this, but they did die.

My skin prickles as we continue making our way through the fallen bodies toward the stairs.

The cuts across their throats are still bleeding.

The road leads us to ascend in the same way it moved us through Harcourt Manor.

If we try to navigate in any other direction, the passageway simply disappears.

Our journey ends in the king’s chambers.

I’ve never been in this room, but I know where we are by the person on the bed.

I’ve met him once before—or rather, I met his ghost in the Stygarde cemetery.

Damien creeps to the side of the bed and looks down at his father. I check the door we entered to find it gone, then take my place next to him. It looks like Malek is sleeping, but his skin is unnaturally gray. I’d mark him as one hundred years old if he were human.

There’s a caw from the window, and an enormous raven lands on the sill. Fuck . That’s the bird Catarina sent to warn Malek that Brahm was a traitor, that he was poisoning everyone in the castle.

“This is the day my father was killed,” Damien says. “Maybe I’m supposed to stop it.” He approaches the bed and shakes his father gently by the shoulder. “Father? It’s Damien. We have to get you out of here.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to save him, Damien. In every other challenge we’ve faced like this, we haven’t been able to change what happens, only our response to it.” My voice cracks with sadness at the pain in Damien’s eyes.

The king wakes, but no pupils or irises look back at us.

His eyes are entirely white. Damien takes a full step backward, his hands shaking.

I don’t blame him. The thing in the bed is a wraith in the same way my grandmother was played by a harpy.

It may resemble Malek, but that isn’t the father Damien knows.

As we bear witness, shadows spill into the room and form into Brahm. Damien draws his sword and swings, but the blade bounces off his brother like it bounced off the window in the parlor. Brahm approaches the bed.

“You should have named me your successor the moment you knew Damien was gone,” Brahm says to Malek. “None of this would have been necessary if you would have simply treated me the way you did him. But naming Karyl in my place? That is unforgivable. That will not happen.”

Damien turns to look at me. “He named Karyl as his successor?”

“Neither your mom nor your sister mentioned anything about that. I’m not sure it’s true.”

Brahm slithers forward like a snake and slices the king’s throat. The blood begins to spill, and then everything freezes, everything but the clock on the wall whose moon is about to rise.

“We’re running out of time, Damien. What do you think this trial wants from us?” I ask.

But Damien is staring at his father, pale and mute. I rub his back. “It’s true,” he says softly.

“What’s true?” We knew Brahm killed his father. His mother wouldn’t have made something like that up.

“When Karyl came to talk to me on the mountain, when she was trying to convince me to let you walk the road, she said that no one could rule in my place. She said if I gave up the throne to Brahm, our family line would never sit on it again. And when I asked her, what about her? What about Mother? She said, ‘Sometimes no matter how much the river longs to flow, it can’t do so without the rain.’ I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I do now.

She was my father’s named successor in my absence, but she didn’t have enough support to reclaim Stygarde from Brahm.

She isn’t a warrior. She couldn’t fight or lead the umbrae.

She couldn’t stand up to Brahm and Nevina, even with the queen’s help. ”

The king’s head pivots on his bloody neck, those solid white eyes falling on Damien and me by his side. The corpse’s gray lips slowly enunciate. “It…must…be…you.”

“It will be me,” Damien promises. “I’ll make Brahm pay for what he’s done to you.”

I look over my shoulder at where the door should be, but it’s still gone, still missing.

“There’s something else. Something else we’re supposed to do.

” I look at the clock, at the raven in the window, at the likeness of Brahm, still frozen with a dagger in his hand.

The castle shakes, and I hear stone cracking.

“We’re almost out of time, and I’m afraid when the buzzer sounds, this castle is coming apart. ”

“I don’t know what else to try,” Damien says. In a desperate move, he rushes the window, but he can’t penetrate the force that holds us in, the same as Harcourt Manor.

With Damien on the other side of the room, I notice that the king is still staring at me. “It…must…be…you…” he rasps again.

I stare at King Malek as the castle shakes around us again. “I promise you. I will give my life if I have to. I will put Damien on the throne.”

Damien whirls to face me. “Why did you—” His eyes catch on the wall behind me.

The door is open. We both run for the stairs, the castle crumbling around us.

Pieces of the floor fall away. I leap over a massive hole and race for the exit.

The walls implode around us, chunks of stone crashing and shattering, sharp pieces cutting into my ankles and shins.

We barely dodge the deadly strikes. Damien breaks apart into his shadow form and sweeps me over the dead bodies and out the rear exit of the castle.

Our feet hit the black bricks of the shadowpath but we continue to run, only slowing when we are at a safe distance.

“We made it,” I say breathlessly. Damien takes my hand in his.

Behind us, what remains of the castle collapses in on itself, spires diving into the imploding center.

The entire thing heaves and groans, stone cracking.

It drops out of the sky and disappears in a shower of sparks and fire that lick the heavens.

In seconds, it’s all gone, vanished within the cavernous depths.

“Eloise—” The way Damien says my name, I know there is something else, something grave.

I turn around to see a set of sandaled feet the size of my entire body.

I tip my head back to see a knee and then the edge of leather armor.

More, and I see a woman’s chest, and finally, I take in the looming presence of a giant of a goddess who sits on a throne before us, her three monstrous dogs flanking her, curled near her feet.

Her bow and quiver wait within her reach.

Behind her, two doors the height of skyscrapers rise into the starry night.

The goddess looks at us with her radiant gaze, white and blinding. A nuclear gaze. A laser-beam gaze. I can feel it pass through me like an X-ray of my soul. I drop to my knees next to Damien, who has already dropped to his, bow my head, and pray.