Page 27

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I am frozen in time, fallen back into an old, familiar nightmare. The woman standing in front of me is a ghost in the moonlight, shadows parting around her to reveal black hair and white skin and…red. Red lips, curved in that same smile; gleaming red eyes and that red, red garnet at her throat. The world blurs around me, and I see her face from nine years ago, looking up from my father’s open chest, his blood staining her chin and her teeth as she beams at me.

An illusion, I think. The same one you’ve seen for nine years.

But this is nothing like the blurred hallucinations. She stands before me, clear in the moonlight, larger than life. The raw fear coursing through my veins tells me that this time, it’s real.

I should scream, I should attack with all the fury and grief of the past nine years, I should drive my crescent blades into that chest of hers where her demon’s core sits. But somehow, at the sight of her, I cannot move, my years of training and fighter’s instincts dissipating like ashes. Before her, I am, once again, the helpless child of nine years past, kneeling on my kitchen floor and watching as she eats my father’s heart and drinks my mother’s soul.

It lasts only one moment. In the next, I am moving to palm Striker and Fleet, my arm lashing out in a slicing cut—

—which she easily sidesteps. I turn, but she is gone again, and that’s when I feel her arms wrap around me from behind, the soft purr of her laughter as she drags me against her.

“Be still, little flower,” she murmurs, and the power in her voice is unlike any I have experienced. All the other mó’s magic feels like rivers, whereas hers is an ocean, crashing down upon me and wiping out any possibility of resistance. I instantly go limp. My blades clatter to the floor. She holds me, caressing a hand across my face and neck. “There’s a good girl.”

Terror claws its way into a scream that’s trapped inside me, but there is nothing I can do.

The Higher One who killed my parents is here.

She is in the Kingdom of Sky.

Yù’chén has gone completely motionless, in that unnatural way of his that comes from his mó essence. A muscle pulses in his jaw. “Let her go,” he growls, and I have never heard such a voice coming from him: feral and unrestrained, dangerous enough to remind me of what he is, what powers live inside him.

“Why?” The Higher One’s voice is as melodic as I remember it. I can imagine the curves of her beautiful lips, the twisted sparkle in eyes that enchant so wholly and absolutely. “Do you plan to bring her along, too? As your plaything?”

My body is frozen, but now it is as if my mind locks up as well at her words. I don’t understand. I can’t. But I’m looking at Yù’chén’s face as he stands directly across from me, his entire body tensed as though about to fight.

“Don’t,” he snarls at her.

“I would gladly give you all that you desire, Yù’chén,” the Higher One continues. “You know that.” The hands lift from my throat, and her voice commands in my ear, “Go to him.”

My limbs obey; I haven’t a choice not to. I straighten and begin walking to Yù’chén. He stands across from us, frozen; the wrath on his face shifts as another emotion penetrates it.

Fear.

His eyes flicker between me and the Higher One behind me, darkening with fury. When I reach him, he pulls me against him, but his muscles are taut, and I feel his heart pounding in his chest.

“Let her go,” he says, and his voice hitches, his defenses breaking. “Please.”

“But I already have,” the Higher One replies, the false confusion in her voice perfectly pitched to be mocking. “You want her, don’t you? I know you do; I saw what you saw in the forest, Yù’chén. After all, I was the one who led you to her when the huà’pí cornered her.”

The Forest of Nightmares, where Yù’chén confessed he had seen me dying in the arms of a mó. I recall now that I saw her, too, standing between the parasol trees, watching me through that gap between the realms. I thought her a ghost come to haunt me in the spike of my fear.

I was the one who led you to her.

Had she truly been there?

I’m suddenly shaking, nausea churning inside me. Was the vision I dismissed as a hallucination real? If so, how many others were, too?

Yù’chén’s fingers tighten against me, but he can summon no response.

“You want her, and you know exactly who she is,” the female purrs. “But the question is, Yù’chén, have you told her who you are?”

“Stop,” he begs.

“Does she know why you approached her in the first place? Why you’ve protected her all along?” She speaks faster, and I can tell she delights in this.“Why you helped her through the First Trial, why you did everything in your power to gain her trust, stole that sewing box and helped her send those gloves to her sister, all just to win her poor, gullible little mortal heart?”

I’m reeling from her words. Because those are memories that should be private, that should be mine, and mine alone. It is as if I am listening to a story told from another’s perspective, the truth between the lines now irrevocably written out. The moment I ran into Yù’chén in that clearing; when he saved me from Yán’lù and his cronies and accepted my ask of alliance; the cliff at Heavens’ Gates, when I thought I hallucinated her between the trees, and Yù’chén called out to me in fear and desperation as he used his magic to command me for the first time.

The sewing box. The gloves, the dance on the ocean, the journey to my home to save Méi’zi…I recall it all now, but differently. I see the hands holding the strings.

“If I let her go, would she still come running to you, Yù’chén?” The Higher One utters something, and the magic binding me in place, holding me against Yù’chén, loosens its grasp. I stumble back, ripping my hands from him, steadying my legs and my shaking breaths.

“Have you told her why you’re here and who you are,” the Higher One drawls, relishing her words, “my son?”

Whatever hope was left on Yù’chén’s face flickers out; his expression goes blank. I’m shaking so hard, I need to hold on to the wall to stop myself from falling down. As I look at him, I suddenly see everything that I have missed—the shadow of her on his face: the impossibly sharp angles to their jaws and cheekbones, the full red curves to their lips, her delicate arched brows rendered stronger and more masculine on him. I see it so clearly I do not know how I could have missed it in the first place.

Yù’chén is her son.

He is the son of the Higher One who killed my father. Who maimed my mother. The monster who has shaped my life and who is the reason I am here, in these trials, fighting to regain some semblance of it back.

It is a twisted circle, a sick hand of fate.

“àn’yīng,” he begins.

“Don’t,” I spit out, “say my name.”

The Higher One is watching with that same smile. “What a beautifully tragic ending to this love story,” she murmurs, stepping forward. The moon has shifted, I suddenly realize; the wards on this chamber are back up again, and I am trapped in here with them.

Good. Because I’m going to fucking kill them both.

The Higher One’s eyes flick toward me, almost lazily, as a cat might watch a sparrow. “Don’t move,” she says, and I’m frozen again, my blades halfway to my palms. She’s looking at Yù’chén, dark triumph on her face. “I think it’s time we finished this tale and began our new one, don’t you, my son? The one we’ve been waiting for your entire life?”

Yù’chén stares back at her coldly. “What if I told you I’ve changed my mind?”

The Higher One’s smile widens. I feel a sudden lash of magic directed at Yù’chén, and the next moment, he’s doubling over, his veins bulging from his forehead and his neck, his breaths heavy. He groans and bares his teeth, but the mó’s hand twitches, and he falls to his knees, his muscles locked and twitching against his will. She’s inflicting some sort of pain on him; a lot, from the way he’s shaking.

She watches him a few moments longer, and then I sense the magic fade. Yù’chén gasps and slumps over, barely holding himself up with his hands. His breaths grow ragged.

When I was small, the first time I saw this female, I’d had no experience with the mó. To me, they were all the same: beings with power so far beyond my imagination. As I learned about them throughout the years, I began to realize that there were different levels even within the mó. I understood why some were newborn, some were ordinary, and some the practitioners of my town named the Higher Ones.

This female is the most powerful mó I have ever seen.

She glances over at me as though sensing my thoughts. Her smile is heartbreakingly beautiful as she speaks: “I ought to introduce myself properly, as I have been waiting nine years for this moment, àn’yīng. My name is Sansiran.”

The name is like lightning in the tight space of this chamber. Sansiran. I know that name, spoken in hushed whispers by the greatest practitioners of the mortal realms. I know it for the fear that has haunted me day and night for the past nine years, sometimes distant and sometimes near, that the queen of the demon realm will come for us all.

Sansiran, the Demon Queen. Sansiran, the Empress of Fallen Darkness.

Sansiran, the Ruler of the Kingdom of Night.

“Thank you, my son, for creating gates through the immortals’ wards for our army to enter,” Sansiran continues, and I feel ice cracking in my veins, freezing me until my teeth chatter. The gate he lied to me about; the one he hadn’t destroyed the first time I asked him. The one we left open after returning this morning. And from what she said, it sounds like he made more.

The Kingdom of Night’s army is coming—through those gates.

“I was going to destroy them,” Yù’chén says. He’s looking at me as he speaks. “After tonight, once I was strong enough. But I never had the chance.”

“After tonight?” Sansiran repeats, amused. “When your head hangs from the front gates of the Kingdom of Sky, an example they like to make of us?”

Yù’chén draws a sharp breath, and I think of what he told me earlier, in this very chamber. When we are born, we are set on a path to walk. One drawn by our birthright, our status, our blood. I have known since the start what mine was meant to be.

I should have known there was only one path a demon could walk.

“Don’t do this,” Yù’chén rasps. “They don’t deserve it.”

“?‘They don’t deserve it’?” Sansiran echoes. Her features grow sad for a moment before turning cold with fury. “Did I deserve it, Yù’chén? Did I, a queen, deserve for the mortal emperor to use me for his pleasure as a bedthing, only to be discarded when he found out what I was?” She stalks toward him, and he doesn’t move, only flinches slightly as she presses a hand to his cheek. Her voice is softer when she continues: “Did you deserve it, my son? Did you deserve for your father to raise you in the shadows, scorning you for being a bastard of his creation? Did you deserve to be sentenced to death when he found out what I was, and what you were?” Her grip tightens; her nails, long, sharp, and crimson, dig into his skin. Yù’chén is still on his knees; he looks up at his mother in powerless supplication. “Never forget that this life you have right now is the one I gave you, twice over. One that I fought for and pulled from the clutches of the mortal emperor and his sword.”

My mind is struggling to keep pace with all that is being shared. Mortal emperor. Bastard.

The story fits with what Yù’chén told me of his life—that he was born in the Kingdom of Rivers, that his father was mortal. He had simply never mentioned who his father was. Who his mother was.

My mother was his mistress.

When he found out what she was—and what I was…he tried to have us killed.

My head spins; the world seems to slow to a stop.

Yù’chén is the son of the late mortal emperor. A halfling son, heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Night…and the Kingdom of Rivers, by blood. Half brother to Hào’yáng…with a claim to the mortal realm.

“So tell her, my son,” Sansiran finishes, her tone sharpened by cold rage and pure spite. She pulls her nails from his face and thrusts him away so that he is facing me. “Tell her what you have been here to do all along. Tell her how you have manipulated her mortal heart into trusting you. Tell her what you truly are, and see if she still claims to love you. Tell her. ” Her voice amplifies, and I feel her tremendous magic shudder in the air as it wraps around Yù’chén.

He struggles for a moment as though with an invisible force; unlike me, he can fight off her magic, if only temporarily. I see it as it takes hold and he falls still, his eyes dulled, his tone hoarse and resigned. “My mother wished the mortal emperor to take her as his empress, and for me to be his heir. When he refused, she began the war.” He swallows. “She killed him, but the mortal heir fled that night—saved by a man with ties to the immortals. Your father.”

The mortal heir—Hào’yáng. My father escaped the capital with Hào’yáng…and gave him over to Shī’yǎ in the Kingdom of Sky, where he would remain safe and hidden from the war.

“She tracked down your father and learned that he had given the mortal heir into the protection of the Kingdom of Sky,” Yù’chén continues.

“Oh, it was so difficult to wring that from him,” Sansiran says. “He watched me drink his wife’s soul rather than tell me. Then he proffered his own body.” Her eyes flick to me. “It was only when I threatened his darling girls that he admitted I would never find the emperor’s son, because he had put him in the one place I could not reach.

“Looking back, I should not have killed him out of anger,” she sighs. “I had no choice but to bide my time and wait. I was certain that a mortal with ties to the Kingdom of Sky would have left a path for his offspring, too.” She smiles sweetly at me. “I watched over you all these years, àn’yīng. I made sure you did not die. Not before you led us to the secret your father had kept.”

I can’t breathe. All those times I glimpsed her beneath the plum blossom tree, that shadow waiting in the night, I dismissed as figments of my imagination. As hallucinations from my trauma.

But the monster outside my window was real all along.

“I went through your father’s journals,” she continued, “and I learned of a way into the Kingdom of Sky.” She bares her teeth. “The Immortality Trials: the only time the immortals would allow mortals to cross into their lands. I made sure you found his journals and learned of the trials, too. By the time you were old enough to attend them, so was my darling son. When you finally left for the Kingdom of Sky, I sent him after you; I told him to earn your trust, to capture your heart, to do whatever he needed to do to find the emperor’s son hiding among these immortals, and to break the wards that kept us out. Wards that are impenetrable from the outside, yes…but not so much from the inside.”

I stare at Yù’chén. From the start, this was all a show. Everything he did was to deceive me into giving up Hào’yáng’s identity.

And he succeeded.

“I don’t have what you want,” Yù’chén says quietly. He won’t look at me, but his jaw locks as he looks up at his mother. “I don’t have the identity of the mortal heir.”

Is he lying, or did he simply not realize what I spoke of when I told him of the revolution Hào’yáng was planning?

Sansiran studies her son with a small smile. “You don’t have it, or you won’t tell me? Answer me, my son.”

In his silence, she moves so fast that I don’t catch it. A resounding crack echoes in the chamber as she brings her hand across his cheek. Tremors of dark magic emanate from her, forcing Yù’chén to fold in on himself. He hisses a breath as he rolls over on the floor. Blood darkens his lips.

Sansiran glances at me. “Fortunately, I knew my own son all too well. He is a fool, drawn to the weaknesses of his mortal heart. So I sent another to watch over him, in case he failed.”

Realization dawns on me. “Yán’lù,” I whisper.

“Unpredictable and violent,” Sansiran says, her lips curling in disdain. “Greedy, too, for he believed he would be rewarded if he was the one to hand me the name of the heir. My second-in-command fathered him and warned me of his beastlike tendencies.” She brushes at an invisible speck of dust on her sleeve, her fingers extended like claws, dark magic pouring from her in torrents. Sansiran barely looks at her son, writhing on the ground from the pain she inflicts on him, as she muses, “Better that he is dead, or I would have killed him myself. Perhaps there is reason to the Heavenly Order after all. Halflings are aberrations; there is no telling what monstrous traits they might harbor.

“But the halfling Yán’lù served his purpose,” Sansiran continues. “From the start, unknown to my son, Yán’lù watched him and reported progress to me. He threatened you and tried to find out the identity of the mortal heir from you. He failed, but he gave me one crucial piece of information before his death.”

I recall Yán’lù’s last moments. The fight on the shore, the way my jade pendant lit up. The black bristle he conjured with his dark magic.

Who’s watching over you? he’d asked from the very beginning…and I had inadvertently given him the clue: my pendant.

Sansiran watches me with a small smile, as if she sees the thoughts running through my head. “Thank you for leading us to our victory,” she says softly, and begins to cross the chamber to me. She is illuminated by the moon, so I catch the gleam of the jade pendant she pulls out of her sleeve. My jade pendant, the one secret I still hold that allows me to reach Hào’yáng.

The one I left behind in my chamber when I came to find Yù’chén.

“No,” I whisper.

The demon queen bends to me. “Call to him,” she says, and her smile is sweet as she slips the jade pendant back over my neck.

“No,” I snarl. “Never.”

She tips her head at me, eyebrows lifted. “No? I see. Well…what if my darling son asks?” she says, waving a hand toward where Yù’chén lies on the floor. The chamber fills with the hum of dark magic, trembling through the walls and rippling through the air, so powerful that the air echoes with the cracks of floorboards as they splinter.

Yù’chén tenses; his nails dig into the floor, and he squeezes his eyes shut.

“Go on, my son,” Sansiran croons. “Beg her. Let her prove how much she cares for you.”

She flexes her hand. Yù’chén’s body arches, and finally, a sound breaks from him. It might have been a sob or a gasp. Blood drips in a steady stream from his lips as he chokes out, “Please.”

I don’t know whether he addresses this to me or to his mother. I’m shaking, too, but I clench my teeth against the plea at the tip of my tongue. He deserves this—I know he does—but it doesn’t stop the ache in my heart as his voice rises to a scream.

Veins begin to darken his skin. His teeth sharpen into points, a forked tongue darting out between them. The whites to his eyes yield to black, leaving only a red, glowing pupil. Red-and-black scales bloom on his face as a horn twists from his forehead.

Sansiran flicks her wrist, and Yù’chén rises to his knees. She crooks her fingers, and her magic pulls his head up to face me, and I’m seeing him for the first time, his full demonic form that he has hidden from me for so long. His eyes—in their horrifying demonic form—are dull. His hair hangs before his face, from which a pair of red, pointed ears protrude. His teeth extend over his lips. His entire body is covered in red-and-black scales, his fingers grown thick and clawed.

There is nothing of his ethereal beauty left in his face. Like this, he is terrifying. Like this, he is the very image of the mó that have haunted my nightmares for nine years.

I know I must have flinched. And I know he must have seen it.

Yù’chén’s gaze is fixed on a spot on the floor.

“Look at her, at the disgust on her face, my son,” Sansiran purrs. “See how she would gladly watch you die for no reason other than what you are. She could never love a creature like you. You would do well to remember where your loyalties should lie.”

With that, she flings him back down, relinquishing her grasp on him. Slowly, Yù’chén’s ragged pants steady; slowly, the claws retract and the scales vanish and the horns and ears shrink as he morphs back into the form of a human.

Yù’chén is very still. Moonlight glistens, wet, on his cheeks.

I hear every clack of Sansiran’s silk slippers hitting the floor as she approaches. Feel the sting of her nails as she grips my face with her hands—the very hands that killed my father.

“Fine,” she says, meeting my eyes. “ I’ll ask.” Her voice hardens, amplifies. “Call him. Call the heir to the Kingdom of Rivers.”

The air trembles with the magic of her command. It wraps around me, plunging through my veins and my mind. And I am determined to fight it with every ounce of my being.

Easily, her magic twines around my jaw and pries open my clenched teeth. It unlocks my throat, and I make a choked sound as it forces itself through my chest.

The magic tears me open. The words fall from my lips.

“Hào’yáng,” I whisper to my jade pendant. “Help…me.”