Page 19

One Shot At This

Eidolon offers me a smug smile. “You think I haven’t been watching?”

The rage I’m clinging to stumbles. He’s been watching me? How?

“Thanks to you, I can make even more use of the souls I took from the burning lands.” He tips his head. “And the ones I’ll drag out of your body.”

Before I can reply, Scoria roars. Now she knows. He just confessed he’s the one who has been breaking the natural laws of death and stealing souls. The giantess disappears only to reappear before us and scoops Eidolon up in her rocky hands.

I wait for him to shadow himself away, but he doesn’t. His eyes bulge and he shouts, pounding ineffectually at her fist.

He can’t disappear. He can’t shadow. Her magic holds his soul here .

But I can’t let her kill him. Reven is still in there.

Darkness lashes out at her in a bone-smashing strike to her side. Razor-thin shards of obsidian rain down over me and Scoria howls a sound that is both anger and agony. But she doesn’t let Eidolon go.

“Meren!” she shouts for me.

“Help her, for goddess sake!” Horus yells.

I’m pulling Eidolon’s own power through me in an icy rush, which is when it hits me. Scoria can’t defeat Eidolon, not even with my help. The most I can do is try to protect her, stop him from hurting her, until she and I exhaust our powers and he breaks free and kills us both.

I could free Reven, though.

I’m not ready. I know that. But when has this world ever waited for me to be ready?

“Story of my life,” I snarl under my breath, even as the cold of Eidolon’s power builds within me. “Bene, help her while I work!”

I hate closing my eyes, but I have to. I need to hold onto my control, and I can’t do that if I’m panicking.

A thundering crash sounds overhead, followed by a new roar of pain. Bene, I think. I can’t look.

Instead, I picture my own band of darkness, pulling from the warmth of the shadows now left behind in the Shadowood. The forest has been freed from that army of trapped souls, and the darkness that remains isn’t the cold kind. The place was Reven’s safe haven. Mine, too. In my mind’s eye, my band of shadow is not hard and rigid, it is soft and flowing, like a ribbon of silk. But I don’t use it to bind Eidolon.

Instead, I shove that ribbon right down the bastard’s throat.

I know it worked when I hear his yell cut off on a gurgle. I reach into his hollow, frozen form and I search for Reven, for the only spark within a soul so evil it’s like light can’t exist within him anymore.

Another series of crashes sounds from overhead, followed by more roars—goddess, I hope Scoria is weathering this beating with Bene’s help. Horus grabs me, whirling me out of the path of something that is falling around us.

For just a hair’s breadth of a second, I lose focus, but that’s when I see it. The spark in the darkness.

Got you.

I try not to choke on my own relief as a sob wells up my throat. I focus on wrapping my ribbon around Reven’s shadowy shard of soul and yanking him out of the king.

Another blast booms overhead. Only this time, rock doesn’t hit me. A terrible thud followed by a roar directly over me tells me Bene is protecting me now instead of Scoria. Standing over me and Horus.

“Work with speed!” he yells into my mind.

My hold on Reven slips a little and he falls deeper into the king. “I’m not letting go,” I grit out through clenched teeth and wrap my own shadow around him tighter.

Then I pull as hard as I can, a shout punching out of me with the effort that feels the same as pulling on a rope. Until, finally, he comes up and out of Eidolon in a violent slide. Whatever force was dragging against me suddenly releases and I fly backward, landing on the icy ground, my head hitting so hard it leaves me dizzy.

I push myself to sitting as another boom of sound is followed by a terrible silence that descends all around us. Even the winds stop blowing.

“Eidolon’s…gone,” Scoria says, her voice thready. “I couldn’t…hold him any…longer.”

Vaguely, I’m aware that the giantess is struggling, weakened by that encounter alone. But I can’t focus on her because I’m staring at the form laying not five feet from me.

It’s Reven…but not.

With limbs shaking from the effort, I crawl across to him. A mere shadow of the man I love lays on the ground, his vague features etched from darkness, eyes closed, thick brows drawn in a frown as if he’s in pain.

I don’t know how the king makes his shadows real when he sheds them or…

I vaguely remember something about how over time Reven became more real until he was a fully formed man.

Bene, who is shaking from whatever Eidolon did to him, moves from standing over me to reach for Reven with a single talon, but his claw goes right through the shadowy form that is my bondmate, coming away with nothing.

Holy hells on fire.

I don’t know what being yanked out instead of deliberately shed did to him. Maybe he’s just a shadowy ghost, one Scoria will have to take to the afterlife. We’d find each other again someday, but that’s better than giving him back to the king. I don’t think I can make myself do that.

We can’t move him unless I can make him real. We don’t have time for that, though. Eidolon could return for him at any second.

“Reven,” I whisper. He doesn’t so much as twitch.

I take a breath. I can do this. I have to do this.

I close my eyes again, hands hovering over him. Combining what Scoria taught me with what I think Eidolon did to his army, I create that band of warm shadow again and picture it connected to him, my heart to his. I feed myself into the rope of shadow, into Reven. The part of me I give him is the part of me that is him. It’s a piece of the scars made of shadow in my side, the darkness that he used to heal me after I accidentally skewered myself with my own glass spear.

I remember every word of the healing ceremony he performed on me that night. I don’t have the elements to sacrifice, but I say those words anyway.

“I invoke Tyndra, goddess of strategy and the stars.” My voice shakes with the effort of what I’m doing. I don’t care. I keep going. “With no sacrifice but the fire in which all others will be made, I ask for your blessing of knowledge as we carry out the rite of shadow healing.”

Behind my eyes a flicker of fire ignites orange in the dark. I crack open my eyes to find Horus there with one of the lanterns we brought.

“Keep going,” he says.

I don’t dare look at the form laid out on the ground before me. I swallow. “I invoke Tropikis, the goddess of healing and life-giving plants. To you I offer a sacrifice of water.”

Horus digs a canteen from his pack and the drip sizzles as it hits the fire inside that lantern.

“Darkness is about compromise, filling the voids left by light. I ask that you let it lead to blessings.” I pause. Trying to remember what came next. “I invoke Wildernyss, the goddess of the arts and storm. To you I offer a sacrifice of wood.”

Horus looks around almost frantically, then pulls one of his arrows from the quiver on his back and holds it over the flame.

“I ask that you let this man’s loyalty to the shadows that bind be a blessing in your eyes.”

The next one is easier. “I invoke Aryd, the goddess of magic and the moons. To you I offer a sacrifice of land.”

Holding the shadows steady with one hand, the sparking heat of my own power flows through the other and with a flick of a finger, sand chips off Bene and floats through the air to the flame. “Patience is the truest form of blessing, as is a life tied to shadow. I ask that you bless him with this gift.”

A life tied to shadow is already his. Mine now, too, but I’d give everything for him. For my Shadowraith.

“I invoke Mariana, goddess of music and the sun. To you I offer the sacrifice of metal.”

Horus flips the arrow and puts the arrowhead over the fire.

“Passion is the beating heart of life. We ask that it be a blessing to all who dare let it in.”

Now I move. I lean over the form on the ground but only dare to lower my gaze to him once I’m close. He’s still a mere shadow. Nothing has changed. This isn’t working. Stomach clenching, I lean over and brush my lips to his in a chaste kiss, then gasp.

Because he’s warm, as if I’m touching flesh.

I whimper with the desperate longing I haven’t let myself indulge in.

“Finish it,” Bene urges in a thready voice.

I take a shuddering breath. “I invoke Savanah, goddess of fertility and animals. To you we offer the sacrifice of air.”

I gesture around us, and Horus waves the lantern in the air. After the seventh time, I signal him to stop. “And I ask you to bless our sacrifices with our vow of honesty.”

Honesty. Last time Reven and I both had secrets, but this time…

“With these sacrifices and rites,” I say, “I bind this man with shadow and flesh.”

Pain rips through my side and I pitch forward. Blood splutters out of my mouth onto the snow-covered ground, a red stain in the white. But I force myself to keep going. Even hunched over, I let the darkness be taken from me as parts of him start to turn more real.

“Damn you all to the hells,” Eidolon’s voice booms out.

The whispers of his Shadows turn into a ruckus inside my head. I look up from under Bene’s belly just in time for the king’s first volley as Eidolon wields a scythe made of shadow, slicing through the air at Scoria and Bene both.

Fear has me reaching out like I could stop it from happening. “No!”

With the last of what I have left, I shadow us all away from here. Not far away. We disappear and then reappear a second later on the other side of where that swinging scythe was headed.

I flop to the ground as unconsciousness tries to drag me under. Vaguely, I register that Eidolon has disappeared again. Maybe he didn’t expect me to have learned this much about his power yet.

He’s gone, but not for long.

“Have to get…” My mouth won’t work, and goddess forgive me, my eyes won’t stay open. “Get us away.”

That’s the last I remember.