Page 36 of Night Fae

The world seemed to tilt. Malik forced himself to breathe.

"And he will do it," she continued, her voice gentle, almost kind. "Just like he killed the wolf yesterday. Just like he'll kill the others today. There's nothing you can do to stop it."

She was lying. She had to be. But the certainty in her voice made Malik's stomach twist.

"You're wrong about him."

"Am I?" Lady Morvena's smile widened. "We shall see."

The carriage slowed to a stop. Outside, the forest had grown darker, the trees pressing close around them.

"We've arrived," Darius announced, reaching for the door.

Two guards opened it from outside. Darius stepped out first, then turned to offer his hand to Lady Morvena. Malik followed without assistance.

It was nice to get a breath of fresh air after the suffocating atmosphere inside the carriage. The forest smelled like moss and something vaguely like pine resin.

They stood at the edge of a narrow path that wound between ancient trees. The canopy overhead was so thick that little sunlight made it through.

"This way." Lady Morvena gestured down the path. Her guards flanked Malik.

So running wasn't an option, then.

Too bad.

Malik really would have liked to run.

The deeper they walked into the woods, the more things just seemed…strange.

He caught flickers in the corner of his eye as if trees disappeared and reappeared, but he could never catch the moment it happened.

Was he imagining it?

"What is this place?" he asked.

"You'll see," Lady Morvena replied.

The path opened into a clearing where fae in dark robes moved with purpose around what looked like an excavation site. They'd dug deep into the earth, creating a steep-sided pit at least fifteen feet deep. Wooden scaffolding reinforced the sides, carved with glowing runes that pulsed with blue light. A constructed tunnel entrance at the bottom of the pit led deeper into the earth, its supports similarly inscribed with magical wards.

But it wasn't the tunnel itself that made Malik's skin crawl. It was what seeped out of it.

Darkness unlike anything he'd ever seen, not just an absence of light but a presence of nothing. It spilled from the tunnel and flowed against gravity to pool at the bottom of the pit.

"The shadow paths," Lady Morvena announced, gesturing toward the darkness. "Ancient ways beneath the surface of Veridia. Older than the Night Court itself."

Malik stared at the darkness. He'd read about the shadow paths. The Night Court had long tried to harvest power from them while the werewolves saw them as some sort of sacred entity that kept the world together and whole. The wolves knew how to travel along the paths to quickly get to anywhere within Veridia, but anyone who tried to do the same came out changed.

The wolves would not share their secrets.

The Court hated them for it.

What were they doing here?

Several fae stood on platforms built along the sides of the pit, using strange instruments to measure the darkness. They kept their distance. Even Lady Morvena and Darius stopped several yards from the edge.

"Why did you bring me here?" Malik made himself ask.

"The shadow paths play a role in keeping up the barriers between worlds," Lady Morvena said. "The very barriers you fell through."