Page 1 of Walking in Darkness

Prologue

Aria

Fear blanketed Aria’s spirit as she tried to figure out where she was. Where she had been taken. Her surroundings felt completely foreign.

It was quiet there.

Small and enclosed.

Too still.

Even colder than Faydor, though a bright orb of light hung at the horizon.

A shape was in the distance.

A man standing, facing away with his hands clasped behind his back.

A blond man.

Her stomach plummeted when he slowly turned around.

His smile was both placating and malicious as he stared across at her as if she were nothing more than an artifact to be studied.

It was the man from the diner, who had at first appeared harmless, though something about him had set Aria off-kilter. Her anxiety surrounding him had only increased when she saw him again outside the fast-food restaurant. But she hadn’t understood that he was truly something wicked until she followed the little girl out to the pond. Aria had jumped in to try to save her and had quickly realized it was atrap, her spirit and mind tricked as the little girl’s face began to flicker between the man’s and the child’s in the frigid waters of the pond.

He sneered as he began to speak. “I’ve ended your kind for twenty generations. Did you really think I’d stop with you? No, Aria. You must die like the rest.”

She was frozen where she stood, staring at the man, who grinned malevolently in her direction. Her heart drove in a frantic beat as she tried to process what was happening. Where she was and how she’d been pulled into an unseen plane she hadn’t known existed.

Howhewas here.

He was ... human. Aria had seen him in the flesh during the day.

Though she’d also seen him as part of the otherworld when the waters swallowed her in her sleep.

It was as if ... he was both.

Human and ethereal.

Like her and the rest of her Laven family.

The ones who, when they fell asleep at night, woke in a different realm, chosen to fight the evils planted in human minds by the Kruen who roamed the bowels of Faydor.

She took a slow, faltering step backward, terrified that there might be no way to escape this place.

It felt both confined and eternal. The walls were made of rippling darkness that shivered and wept, though they kept her wholly bound.

She took another step backward, and her back hit the lapping barrier that held her prisoner in this unfound sphere.

She wanted to weep when the man took a menacing step toward her, though at least thirty feet still separated them.

Apparently, she’d been a fool to believe her danger had ended when she had extinguished the Ghorl, the most powerful of Kruen and almost impossible to defeat. It had taken hold of her father’s mind, using her family as bait to lure her back so she would find her demise.

But she’d been wrong. So wrong.

She could almost hear Pax shouting for her from the other plane. Could feel his panic as he searched for her within Faydor, where they’d been hunting.

“What do you want from me?” Tremulous words fell from her tongue.