Page 198 of Brimstone

I reached for the Hazrax’s rune and held it as tightly as I could. It woke and answered inside the same breath. The ink didn’t light up on the back of my hand. No energy surged through me. I knew it was listening thanks to the faint, barely there vibration that buzzed at the ends of my fingertips.

“Break,”the Hazrax had said.

I probed for the warding spell that guarded the door. I found it there, wispy and intangible, the vaporous strands of magic slipping through my fingers as if it were sentient and determined to elude me. I lunged for it in my mind, grasping with all my focus, and before it could slip away again, Ibrokeit.

The Hazrax’s rune tingled briefly, and the rot that encased the door crumbled. It had been thrumming with power a second ago—admittedly, an awful lot of that powermine—and now its vines were desiccated husks. They withered and broke apart as the door opened at last . . . and revealed Kingfisher sitting in the high-backed chair in front of the fire.

“What the hell are youdoing? Didn’t you hear me trying to kick the door down?”

Fisher stared into the fire. His hair was wet, the ends made spiky, curling in every direction. Water dripped onto his leathers and onto the wooden floorboards, where it formed a large puddle. He had been sitting here for some time.

The room was cold.

The fire in the grate was colorless, all shadow-black, blizzard-gray.

“Fisher? Fisher, look at me!”

He didn’t move.

I stepped into the room and something crunched, gritty, beneath my feet.Sand.The sand from Yvelia that Fisher had poured from his boots only days ago. There were still two piles of it, sitting there, in the middle of the floor. The sight brought tears to my eyes. He’d held me that day. Laughed with me. Shown me what it meant to be loved and worshipped by someone body, mind, and soul. He had told me here, in the bed on the other side of the room, that he would sacrifice the sun and surrender the stars if it meant that he could keep me safe.

And now he was missing and lost to me . . . because I could already tell hewasn’there with me now.

I didn’t want to cross the room and stand in front of his chair. I didn’t want to turn around and face him . . . but I had to.

I covered my mouth with my hands, stifling a sob when I saw him. His eyes were clouded over, the vivid green turned to murk and shadow. His pallor was deathly, his skin cadaverous. His bottom lip was split wide open, and a steady, thin trickle of blood ran down his chin and dripped down onto the silver wolf-head gorget he still wore around his neck.

“Fisher?”

He didn’t answer. Worse, he showed no sign of having heard me at all. Whatever his eyes were seeing, it wasn’t the fireplace or his room at Cahlish. Or me. Wherever he had gone, it was somewhere I could not follow.

“Fisher, please.” His hand was freezing, his fingers stiff. He could take on the entire realm with these hands normally, but when I lifted his left hand and took it in mine, it was so limp and lifeless that for a terrible moment I thought that he was dead.

His rasping breaths refuted this, but it was hard to trust the shallow rise and fall of his chest when his lips were so blue.

I squeezed his hand, begging him to respond both out loud and into his head.

“Fisher. Fisher, youpromised.”

Hadhe promised? I couldn’t remember. The Fae were loath to make promises they weren’t one hundred percent sure they could keep. He wouldn’t have been able to promise that he would never leave me. Death would have claimed one of us eventually . . .

“Wake up,” I whispered. “Wake . . . the fuck . . . up. Are you seriously going to do this to me? Are you going to leave me here alone, to fix this without you? This—” I huffed, my desperation rising. “This is yourfuckingrealm, Fisher. Your friends. Your people. And you’re just going to disappear and leave it to everyone else to defend them?”

His right eye twitched—the tiniest flicker of movement—but then he was still again. Could he hear me? Did he know, wherever he was, that I was here? There was no way of telling.

“Fisher, if you love me . . . If you care about me, or . . . or any of us, you will figure this out and wake up right now. We need you.Ineed you—”

“Save your breath, King Killer.”

The voice took me by surprise. I’d been so fixated on Fisher that I hadn’t heard it enter the room. The Hazrax hovered by the bed, its hands tucked formally inside the belled sleeves of its robes. Its pale skin was shot through with black veins—the same kind of black veins that marked the infected feeders. The former Keeper of Silence drifted across the floorboards, making that eerie ticking sound in the back of its throat.

“Wait. Stay over there. This isn’t your dream, okay? You’re notwelcomehere.”

The Hazrax snorted. “I am welcome everywhere, Saeris. Do you forget so quickly that you and I have a deal?”

“The deal was for you to observe the Blood Court. I hate to break it to you, but the Blood Court doesn’t exist anymore, so you’re going to have to find someone else to observe.”

The Hazrax grimaced, showing its needle teeth. I’d been around it long enough to know that it was smiling. “You’re really hopeless at this, aren’t you, child? I almost feel bad for you.”