Page 18

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A Higher Power

NYX

B eing in the shadows with Solaris had been terrifying.

But being in the shadows without him? There were no words to describe the feeling that settled in my chest as I found myself standing in the endless sea of black. Every which way I looked, I saw nothing. Only darkness. Nothing above me or below me. Nothing in the distance. Just an eternal expanse of darkness so black, it winded me.

My chest rose and fell. I dared to move forward as if that would make a difference.

“Solaris?” I called. My voice echoed through the dark mist.

I waited for a response, but none came.

How did I even get here?

Panicked swamped me. I did my best to swallow it down and figure this out. I had gotten us out of the shadows before. I’d do it again.

“Solaris!”

He had to be here. Somewhere.

It made no sense, really. Hadn’t he been cut off from his shadows? Yet, despite that fact, I could feel him, lost somewhere within this darkness.

“ Nyx. ”

I gasped and stilled.

The voice that called me was female.

My brows narrowed as I listened intently. “Who’s there?”

A whoosh to my left had me jumping out of my skin. Goosebumps rose over my flesh as I watched a ghostly figure dart by in my peripheral vision. When I turned, she was gone.

I moved in the direction she seemed to go.

“Who’s there!” I called again, more fiercely this time.

“ Nyx …” the voice replied.

I started running. Running through the shadows, feeling them fill my lungs as I panted heavily. The voice called me again, and again. She sounded ethereal, clearly non-human, and yet…something about her was so fucking familiar. I felt like I knew her. I trusted her.

Suddenly there was a door.

I came to a screeching halt, my hand flying to my heart in surprise. Right there, in the middle of absolute nothingness, was a steel door. Nothing around it. No walls, no nothing. Just a door, standing alone.

A door I was meant to walk through.

Every molecule of my spirit came alive, thrumming with white-hot energy.

I moved slowly toward the door, listening for the voice, but she didn’t speak to me again. I gulped as the door towered over me. A daunting thing, with nothing good behind it, that much I knew.

I twisted the knob with little hesitation. It was locked, of course, but it yielded to my kinetic demand. The bolt unlocked with a harsh clank . I pushed it open just enough for me to sneak through, my heart having a fit up my throat as I dared to step inside.

The door led me into a hallway.

A long, dimly lit, dull-colored hallway with endless doors on either side.

“Goddess damn me,” I murmured to myself.

I started walking. Each time I passed a door, I could hear shit happening on the other side. What, exactly, I had no idea. My soul filled with heaviness, the foreboding sense that I didn’t want to see any of it.

Still, I had no choice but to continue down the never-ending hall. Was Solaris behind one of these doors? He had to be. I paused and cocked an ear beside each one, listening for him. So far, all I heard was strange chattering, some yelling, some thrashing. But I had yet to recognize a single voice.

Until I passed one door. A tall, pale one. From behind it, I heard a thunderous voice. One I knew all too fucking well.

I stopped outside of the door and pressed my ear to it.

“AGAIN!” Lord Aries Vanderbilt roared. “Don’t stop until it works!”

The screech of his electric power had my heart sinking like a stone. I was horribly familiar with that sound. Half a second later, a bloodcurdling scream made me flinch away from the door. The high-pitched, feminine cry struck me, dead center. I backed away from the sound, my head shaking. I didn’t understand why my eyes burned, nor did I stop to ponder it.

“Seven hells, Solaris!” I hissed, darting further down the corridor, a cold sweat breaking down my spine. “Where the fuck are you!”

As if in response to that, the hallway abruptly came to an end. An enormous steel door loomed there, marking the finale of this part of this unsettling little journey.

I gulped. Why me?

I should have stayed with Jedidiah.

On the other side, I found myself in an empty white room with closed doors on either side. My heart raced as I spun around, taking in every inch of the space, confused by the sheer vacantness of it.

Oh, shit.

A trap.

I turned back to the steel door that I’d come through. It was gone.

“Of course,” I growled.

Fear clutched my throat. How could I have been so stupid? Follow a dark figure through the shadows and into the door it leads me to?!

Every inch of me felt like it was filling with sand. I whirled around, petrified at the prison I’d just walked right into.

But then the door on the far wall opened. A child was pushed into the room. The door shut and locked instantly behind him.

The sight of the child punched me in the gut. He couldn’t have been any older than ten. Thin, sickly. Bloodshot, shadowed eyes that spoke of no sleep. His wrists were bound by peculiar manacles. A matching collar latched around his throat, looking tight enough to restrict his breathing. His head was clean-shaven. He wore a white shirt with slacks that matched the drabness of this room. His papery skin told the story of a boy who’d never seen the sun.

I gawked at him with a sore heart, but by the way he stared through me, I gathered that he couldn’t see me.

What in the seven hells was happening?

His features were collected into a stoic, indifferent mask. He appeared completely detached, his bright eyes staring off into nothing.

“Let’s hope this session goes smoother than the last.” The male voice that came from nowhere and everywhere made me jump.

The child didn’t react.

“We begin now,” the voice said. “The sooner you cooperate and do what we want you to do, the sooner this is all over.”

Again, the child gave nothing.

Seconds later, the door on the other side of the room opened. Confusion laced through me when a large dog was shoved into the room. A mangy, neglected dog who cowered and growled, his teeth dripping with bloody drool.

My eyes narrowed. The dog shuffled around, leaving bloody pawprints on the tile floor. I realized in that moment how injured the poor thing was. Someone had abused it before sending it in here.

The animal had its feral gaze locked on the child, growls rumbling from it constantly.

The dog started barking profusely, darting side to side, challenging the boy out of fear.

But the child did nothing. He didn’t move—he hardly looked like he was breathing. He just watched the mutt, keeping track of its movements.

I did not, for the life of me, understand what was happening right now.

A beeping alarm went off, triggering the dog into full-on attack mode. The animal lunged viscously for the child.

The boy shot his hands out in defense. The dog froze. No, it didn’t freeze. It was being held in place by his telekinetic command. It quivered and snarled against the invisible force that overpowered it.

The child kept his hands out, but his face hadn’t changed at all.

“We know you are very skilled in the kinetic arts. But that is not what we are looking for from you today.”

Where the hell was that voice coming from? I kept checking for speakers, but I couldn’t see any. Nor was there a two-way mirror or a camera. So how was the child being watched?

“If you won’t relent, you know what will happen.”

At this, the child’s chest rose and fell slightly. I noticed beads of sweat forming on his pale forehead.

The threat frightened him.

“Release the dog and use the magic we want you to use.”

The boy did not.

The racket of electricity filled the room as the boy’s manacles and collar suddenly lit up with powerful charge. He released a cry and fell to his knees, blue lightning bolts sizzling over his flesh in three different places while he writhed in pain. He dropped his kinetic hold on the dog, and instantly the mongrel was on him. He screamed and thrashed against the two different horrific attacks. The dog growled with abandon as he went in for the kill, clearly trained for this, blood pooling on the floor under them.

“No!” I yelped uselessly. I went to lunge for them, to help—to stop this —but I was rooted in place by a higher power. I could not intervene.

I thrashed while forced to watch. Watch as a child was torn to fucking shreds. The voices kept yelling at him to fight back. He didn’t. I felt his power in the room, potent and vengeful. But he didn’t use it.

Only once he was on the brink of death did it stop. A high-pitched frequency filled the room and the dog yelped, unlocking his jaw from the boy to fall to the floor and writhe and cry. Seconds later, two men in dark cloaks and silver masks entered, one of them removing the dog, the other grabbing the boy.

The boy. Bloody, limp. Wheezing as he clung to life.

“Ah!” I shouted, desperate. This time, nothing held me back as I leapt toward him. They can’t take him, they can’t take him . I grabbed his small, frail shoulder, his cold blood soaking my palm. I don’t know what I planned on doing—I just acted. I needed to get him out of here.

Shadows engulfed me when I touched him.

I gasped for dear life as I came to on the floor in Solaris’s dark room. My spirit crashed back into my body like a head-on collision. It took me a moment to settle back into this reality, and when I did, his face was mere inches from mine. His eyes were wide open and pure silver. No longer curtained by darkness.

He stared up at me in mute shock.

Wait. Stared up at me?

My own eyes bulged as I realized our predicament. I had his face between my hands and his body between my thighs. We were on the floor beside his bed, and somehow, I’d managed to climb on top of him during our little episode in the shadows.

A debilitating heat clawed through me, pooling in my abdomen, and staining my cheeks. I slid off him, my heart racing a thousand miles a minute. I shuffled on the floor and clutched my knees to my chest, keeping away from him as he straightened up.

“What just happened?” I whispered.

But Solaris ignored me. He was no longer staring at me in shock. Instead, he was looking down at himself with relief.

His wounds had healed .

The horrendously infected slashes that had polluted his entire torso were now nothing but four faded silver streaks, the skin slightly lifted.

Perplexed, I glanced down at my own hands. My skin was no longer tainted with the poison of shadows.

I panted, beyond confused. How much time had passed? My eyes instantly darted to the window. Shock zapped me when I found the sky outside to be deep, deep purple rather than the starry black it was before. The moonlight shining through the window was coming from the wrong side. I hopped up and darted over to the glass to look outside. A sharp gasp sailed from my throat when I saw the horizon still bled with the last blood-orange lines of sunlight. Judging by the position of the moon, rising right over the shoulders of the mountains—a new night had just fallen.

Over a whole day had gone by.

I blinked.

In the shadows, it felt like I’d only been in there for minutes .

“Well, that all worked out better than I thought it would,” Solaris said.

His voice rolled down my spine, sending shivers through me.

I had the feeling he wasn’t talking about our rendezvous in the void. He rose to his feet and loomed over me with his daunting frame and enormous wings . “Are you going to try and run away again, Firefly? Because if so—”

“You are not about to dismiss what just happened !” I hissed, perplexed.

He clipped his jaw shut and glared at me. Then he said, “Perhaps we should discuss it.”

I scoffed. “So what you’re just sucking people into the shadows with you now?”

That caught him off guard. His dark, naturally arched brows narrowed even more. He said nothing. Just stared at me. Like he always fucking did.

Goddess damn him . The way he looked at me.

The boy who wouldn’t hurt the dog to save himself.

No. No, no, no.

“Actually, I don’t want to know anything that happened to you.” The words just fell out. They landed harshly between us, permeating the air with something suffocating and dizzying.

Solaris’s expression went ice cold. “I don’t want you to know.”

A thick, silent moment passed.

“Fine, then.” I straightened up, sucking in a sharp breath. “You need to get your little shadow trances under control. Either way, don’t pull me into them again.”

He made a disdainful sound. “The shadows will continue to hunt until we are reunited.” He held up his wrists suggestively. The violent silver manacles gleamed.

My chest tightened while my stomach rolled.

“How are you healed?” I demanded, desperate to keep my tone and face even.

He glowered down at me. His wings rustled against the ground as he took a step closer, erasing the space between us. The moon goddess favored him tonight, illuminating his haunting beauty in her silver light. “I am, as you are.”

My blood ran cold.

He didn’t give me any time to process what that truly meant. “Go clean yourself up and then meet me in the great room so we can go over our agenda.”

He watched my face react to that, a smug expression sinking over his features before he walked away from me.

“Our agenda ?” I said, exasperated. “You can’t be seri—”

An audible crash went off from outside the double doors of Solaris’s room. That sound—I knew that sound. A portal .

Someone just showed up. But who would—

“Nyx. I know you’re fucking here!”

My eyes nearly flew out of my skull.

Solaris turned back to offer me a sadistic grin kissed by malice and moonlight. “As always, the Groundshaker is right on time.”