Page 12 of Shadebound (Dark Fantasy #1)

I wasn’t supposed to still be in the arena tunnels.

They cleared the place quickly after the fight.

They swept the upper levels clean, warded the lower halls shut.

But there were always cracks in the system, always places people forgot.

I’d been in and out of the tunnels enough times to know the rhythm of the hooded guards, the timing of Hightower’s magical wards, and the way footsteps echoed off stone.

I knew enough to make myself invisible. And I also knew that the staff were lazy.

Hightower thought she’d broken the students already. She didn’t know most of them only pretended to be shattered.

And the truth was, despite the danger, I didn’t want to leave. Not yet. Not after what I saw this morning back in Salem.

The carriage magic had taken Jinx without warning.

One moment she was standing beside her sister’s grave, and the next she was caught in a web of darkness that sparked across the snow.

Her body arched against the spell, black-and-pink hair lashing across her face as wind howled around her.

Silent, but furious, even from a distance.

She didn’t scream, my dark delight. Didn’t speak beyond a few muttered curses.

She was simply dragged and swallowed by the magic without a chance to stop it.

I’d watched it happen from the edge of the graveyard, near the cracked stone marked with her surname. Though I wanted to protect her, I hadn’t moved. I never did unless she wanted me to. Or I could do so without being truly caught.

There was nothing I could do to stop old magic. It would have only ruined our game and killed me. I doubted she would have enjoyed that.

But I had some uses. Like seeing where her necklace fell just before she vanished into the haunted Mors carriage.

One second it was around her neck—a colour-changing stone dangling from a delicate silver chain—and then it was in the snow.

It caught the light for half a heartbeat, glinting like something alive.

But when the necklace turned black, she vanished entirely.

The courtyard went silent. The carriage floated away.

Boot tapping against the ground, I waited until the spell residue faded, until the last shimmer of light dissolved into the frost. Then I walked across the graveyard, knelt in the snow, and picked the charm up.

It was still warm.

Not from the sun—it was early, and the sky had been overcast since the storm started.

No, the heat was something better than sunlight.

The necklace had just been resting against her skin long enough to remember the shape of her.

To cling to some of her beautiful grey skin until I swore I could feel her heartbeat pulsing in the stone.

I felt it when I closed my hand around it.

It knew her and recognised the wrongness of being touched by someone else.

It knew that my hands were not designed to hold something made of love and magic.

I hadn’t let go of it since, though. Because it was hers .

Now it sat in my palm as I moved through the tunnels beneath the arena.

I should’ve returned it. That had been the idea, hadn’t it?

Sneak into her room. Leave it where she’d find it.

Some quiet, anonymous gesture. But every time I imagined her holding it again, I imagined her wondering who had given it back.

And I didn’t want her wondering about anyone else.

So I kept it. Just for now. Until I could find a way to tell her it was me.

Sometimes I imagined her finding me instead—her eyes on me, her hand reaching for the necklace still warm from my palm.

She’d see I’d kept it safe, that I was the one who noticed what everyone else missed. Maybe she’d thank me. Maybe she’d stay.

Then I remembered thoughts were not for things like me.

The crypt was worse than I remembered. The air was thick and wet and sour.

Hideous enough to make my nose wrinkle as I breathed in air that had been exhaled by something long dead and left to stagnate.

Bones were built into the walls—not in obvious ways, not meant for display, but integrated.

Hidden. The architecture was clever about it.

A curved line of narrow bones reinforced one of the ceiling beams, delicate in their placement.

Teeth lined the lip of a window arch. Spine bones stacked like bricks beneath flaking plaster.

Most students never noticed, if they ever wandered down here in secret.

But once you did, you couldn’t unsee it.

Mors was literally built on death.

Which made it feel almost honest.

More honest that the voice I heard when I was halfway through my route.

I almost kept walking. Hightower’s voice alone wasn’t enough to make me stop. Not until she said the name that would always make me pause.

“Jinx Draconis is here. I think that proves I was right.”

I froze.

The crypt hallway curved ahead, leading to an old service stairwell that funnelled up toward the administrative wing. A heavy iron door sat partway up, carved with deep containment runes. It was slightly ajar. Enough that flickering golden light spilt through the crack. Candlelight, probably.

I crept closer, the soles of my boots silent against the stone.

“We’re in no rush,” Hightower said. Her voice was threaded with the kind of confidence that made my stomach twist. “Everything is proceeding the way it should.”

I hovered near the wall just outside the door, keeping my breath shallow.

She had no wards this deep. The magic didn’t settle right because there was too much bone.

Too much interference from older magic than Hightower herself.

Which meant I could listen without being caught, so long as I didn’t do something hideously rookie like sneeze.

She paused, then responded to someone else—but the second voice was too faint. I couldn’t hear who she was speaking to. Another figure, maybe. A projection? A magical link? The words were too warped by distance and stone to be understood.

Then Hightower spoke again, and I leant closer.

“The prophecy is in effect now,” she said. “We’ve seen the signs already. Things are aligning the way we hoped, and I have high hopes we shall reach our goal by summer.”

Another pause. More murmuring. I couldn’t catch the reply even when I strained. Then her voice again, calm enough to make me twitchy.

“Just be patient; let her settle in and understand the depth of Mors depravity. I think her soul needs crushing before you try to fix it.”

I held my breath until the silence returned. But I didn’t move right away. A good thing, seeing as the other voice became loud enough to make out, even with their distortion spell making it impossible for me to garner any information about them.

“Do you not need reminding of the prophecy?” They hissed. “There is not much time left for things to truly begin.”

“I know it off by heart.” Hightower replied before she recited the prophecy in question and then added, “You simply need to learn restraint.”

The quiet stretched for a moment, and I strained to hear more. But the conversation had ended or moved beyond my reach.

A chair scraped across the stone. My chest seized. Footsteps moved toward the crack I listened through. I pressed against the wall, clutching the necklace until the chain dug half-moons into my skin. The urge to run tangled with the urge to stay, to see the face of the other voice.

But I couldn’t risk it. If they saw me, they might think I was here for Hightower. They might think I was here for anything but looking after my dark delight.

The footsteps stopped. A shadow passed across the candlelight, breaking it for a heartbeat, then slipped away.

I let the air out of my lungs in pieces. The prophecy still seemed to hum in the walls, curling into the edges of my mind. I mouthed the words again, tasting them, letting them settle until they felt like mine.

My heartbeat was loud in the stillness. My fingers ached from clenching the necklace too tightly as I repeated the prophecy enough times until I memorised it in my mind.

When the dead claws the earth,

And nature turns black.

Death’s fated will break and

The silent will crack.

Mortavia will burn with shadow flame, Until two bound by shade mourn the silver beast. Then the blood of daughters cruelly slain, Shall bring forth the dusk’s dark rise.

Eventually, when I was sure I wouldn’t forget something important, I took a slow step back. Then another. Back into the curve of the corridor, into the dark where the candlelight couldn’t follow. The cold closed in around me again. The stone walls swallowed any trace of sound, even my racing heart.

The words clung to me as I hurried. Prophecies were not something I had an experience with, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think they held no merit.

Especially if Hightower thought that there were already signs in motion.

Like there was some grand mechanism ticking beneath the surface of this place, and she—Jinx—had just tripped the lever. And they were content to wait.

They had time. Thousands of years, what with how long most magical folk lived. There was no rush for them to fix Mortavia, or to corrupt my dark delight until she was a broken husk of nothingness. Or evil.

But I didn’t. Time was not my friend, and I had no patience when it came to Jinx’s safety. So it was with a renewed purpose that I slid her necklace into the pocket of my denim jacket, and silently hurried along the crypt.

To her . To warn her. Save her.

To help her if she had no choice but to fall prey to the shadebound curse. And if she didn’t want saving, well... I’d save her anyway.

That was my job, after all.