Page 13 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

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The cold came back with twice as much intensity.

My knees shook but I didn’t slow down. Because even if common sense said that the Seelie soldiers would have horses and could probably track us now that we were out in the open, I somehow still had hope.

I somehow still expected we’d make it to another place, this one safe for real, and we would be okay.

Of course, hoping didn’t magically make things into reality. And we weren’t caught by the soldiers who were surely coming after us, no.

We were ambushed by another big group of them from ahead—and the dogs warned us first.

Their howls pierced through the forest. I’d thought we’d have at least another few minutes of running before we got to the edge, but no. The trees ended about thirty feet away, and the golden plaques of their armors caught the sun rays and threw them at us like fucking magic.

My stomach turned. We all came to a halt. Every single person in this forest had weapons in their hands—except for me .

“ Attack! ” someone shouted, but I couldn’t tell you whether it was someone from our side or theirs. I just knew that Rune gave me a single look, and in his dark eyes I saw the fear. The panic. The hopelessness that mirrored my own.

Yes, we were most definitely screwed—and more soldiers were coming toward us from behind.

We didn’t turn to look at all because what was the point? We could hear them just fine as they came. We could hear the sound of their armors as they got closer and closer.

Rune moved to the side, let go of my hand and with his other put something else in it—a knife with a dark blade and leather wrapped around the handle.

Then his hand was on my cheek and he pulled me closer, kissed my lips for barely a second. “Run the second you get the chance.”

There was no time to tell him that I loved him once more. He let go of me and shot forward, and I followed only because I had no clue what the hell else to do.

A thought occurred to me—I was not fit to fight in a battle, not with weapons or with magic or with anything at all. Yet here I was, running with fae and dogs toward armed soldiers like I knew exactly what the hell to expect.

It was the second most intense out-of-body experience I’d ever had. Everything happened so fast, and in slow motion at the same time.

Shadows peeled from the trees, from the ground, and spun around us. Bright golden lights flashed past the trees and the leaves, like rain moving horizontally. They slammed against wood and fae and dogs at such an incredible speed that I couldn’t move a single inch.

All I could do was watch.

Stabs at my gut coming from the inside .

Shadows and light, blood and metal, bodies on the ground and deafening howls in my ears. Rune was fighting, moving so fast his limbs were a blur, and so were the others. Hessa and Ergen and Acul and Merenith—and all their friends.

Then a golden light hit Merenith on the side of her head and she moved, flew off the ground and then a tree took my view of her. I had no idea where she ended up, if she fell, if she got back on her feet.

I had no idea if anybody was going to survive.

My hands froze and my feet froze and my fingers were no longer able to hold the knife Rune had given me. It moved in slow motion, I swear, so I saw it in perfect clarity as it slipped from my fingers then fell on the patch of dry grass at the side of my feet.

Something was attacking me from the inside, and it was going to make me explode, just like Rune’s shadows had slipped to the other side of that pile of rocks and had torn it apart from within.

I was seconds away from collapsing, I thought, yet my legs didn’t shake.

When I looked up, my view didn’t tilt. I saw the soldiers and the Broken Crown and Rune fighting, and I saw the dogs, too.

I saw one biting the arm of a soldier and dragging him to the side.

I saw, and I knew that I was in way over my head here. I wasn’t a fighter. I was merely a human.

Except…that wasn’t true. Not because the seer had said so, and not because the scratch of an alpha werewolf hadn’t killed or shifted me.

Because of this cold that had frozen all of my insides, had covered my bones and my mind. Because of this cold that was finally— finally— going to come out of me for real and tear me apart piece by piece in the process.

I tried to stop it, I really tried. The warmth I’d understood. It had been solid; I’d known what to expect of it. The warmth had been a friend, had filled a void I had no idea I even had inside me until I got unbound from Lyall and lost it.

But the warmth was no longer there to save me, just the cold carrying promises of pain.

Someone called my name, I thought. Could have been Rune, but I no longer saw anything. I could have sworn my eyes were open, but the world had lost its colors, had turned completely dark. My ears worked only halfway, but I still heard the metal and the bodies and the magic slamming everywhere.

Then it was my turn.

The scream that ripped out of me came from all that was left of my soul. The cold that had taken over me slipped out of my hands and arms and chest and fucking mouth together with my voice.

It came out of my very eyes, too, and it somehow expelled that darkness that had stolen the world from me in the process.

But the colors didn’t come back. Instead, everything around me had turned white.

The energy that came out of my body was light, so cold that it burned and froze the air at once. That’s what it looked like to me in the first of the two seconds that I was able to remain standing—nothing and nobody was moving and everything was frozen.

But it wasn’t.

Instead, that silvery white shimmer that had been on my skin just the night before was out there in the world now, like some unusual kind of hail or snow, covering the trees and the leaves and the earth.

The fractured earth .

Cracks as thick as my entire body had spread out from underneath my feet, as if I had suddenly become as heavy as a giant.

My eyes moved, though the rest of me was locked in place, and nothing had frozen over for real.

No ice was anywhere around me—but even so, leaves touched by that silvery white had suspended in the air halfway to the ground, and bodies that had been about to hit trees were stuck mid-movement, and Rune, Rune, where the hell is Rune? !

I couldn’t find him.

I couldn’t find me.

The world tilted. The cold hadn’t faded away from me now that it had covered the forest and everything in it. Instead, it felt like it was feeding on the sudden silence around me, the lack of movement, of gravity, of air.

I dropped to my knees first, then on my side against the ground.

It wasn’t cold. It was…normal. The silvery white shimmer moved like someone had blown on it, and then slowly, so slowly, the bodies and the leaves fell, too. Soundlessly.

My eyes closed and my mind shut down, and I was certain that I had died. I was certain that whatever that cold was, it had torn my skin and cut off my limbs, even if I hadn’t seen the pieces of me on the ground.

It had killed me—it must have.

Yet I was still alive.

Minutes or hours could have passed. The fear didn’t lessen inside me—on the contrary. Thoughts of Rune and the people and the dogs—thoughts of those soldiers and Lyall himself coming to find them, finish them off— us !

Lyall coming to finish us off all by himself—they tortured me, those thoughts, yet I couldn’t even move. Image after image of what it was like out there in the world I couldn’t access right now filled my mind— spilled blood and broken bodies and cut off heads. Dead eyes staring into nothing.

Merenith, Hessa—Rune .

The thought of him dead was worse than anything that cold could ever do to me. The thought of him dead made me want to rage.

It was that fear that finally gave me enough energy to open my eyes.

I wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t move, and I expected to see blood and soldiers and gold—armor and weapons and magic.

Instead, all I saw was white.

It looked silver through half closed lids, and it still covered every inch of the trees and the leaves and the people who’d been around me. I saw their silhouettes on the ground— all of them on the ground, none standing or moving. I even saw a dog lying on his side.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed, I thought, except me.

Except him.

I knew I was dreaming when what I’d first thought was just a dot in the distance became bigger and bigger, and grew eyes and a nose, ears and legs. Paws. Silver-white fur.

Such a creature could only be an illusion, like the animals in the Illusion Game Lyall had taken us to. Like that silver fox he’d touched to get his token— that’s what the animal coming toward me looked like.

Not a fox but close. Bigger. Fur thicker. Eyes an icy blue almost identical to the ones I saw every time I looked in a mirror.

A blink, and the animal was gone—for good, I thought. And I kept expecting to find everything covered in ice once more when I looked about me, but it wasn’t. Not ice, just color—or maybe drops of water, maybe some kind of strange silvery snow .

Then I felt the touch against my leg.

If I could have jumped and screamed in that moment, I would have. My heart about broke right out of my ribcage, and Rune’s name was at the tip of my tongue.

If only I had voice to call with. If only my jaws were my own to command.

As it was, all I could do was scream on the inside and count each beating of my heart as something cold and hard pressed against my skin, then pulled my leg to the side, turning me on my back.

Teeth. Fur. Icy blue eyes on mine.

My heart no longer beat. If I was dreaming, it no longer mattered. The creature that I was so sure was an illusion was real, and it was right there next to me now. Looking down at me. Sniffing the short breaths that left my parted lips.

With all my strength, I prayed for Rune to run before the animal sank its teeth in my neck. I prayed that he would make it, that he would somehow get up and run away and survive Lyall and his soldiers. Get all the way to Raja.

Live.

My eyes closed and I was thankful that my mind was too weak to remain awake through what I was sure would be my ending for real.

The cold had won. It had come out of me. There. Now I died empty .

But I never felt teeth in my neck, and I never felt pain anywhere in my body.

What I felt was the ground underneath me as I was being dragged away over patches of grass. What I felt was the rough bark of the tree that pressed against my arm—or maybe my arm pressed against it.

I fought to open my eyes now, fought to regain consciousness just to see where I was, what was happening, why I was moving. And I did see for a second. Only a short second—something I could have never imagined.

I saw the animal with my ankle between his jaws dragging me toward trees, the leaves of which moved just slightly like they were waving , like they were underwater.

I saw the edge of the forest, the shore to my side, and the still water beyond; saw half the heads of countless mermaids peeking out of the surface, watching us in perfect silence.

The next time my eyes closed, my mind shut down all the way and I didn’t wake up again.