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You’re not alone. The thought impressed on his mind as surely as if it had been spoken out loud. He curled his hands into fists and searched the still shadows around the edges of the room.
Cannot hide.
He edged away from the table and into the center of the room, turning in a cautious circle.
No escape.
The voice continued to twist unbidden thoughts into his mind. A gnawing fear grew in his gut, clenching his insides and pulsing through his veins. Heat and ice swept through him simultaneously. He senseda presence lurking around him, but nothing moved. No ripple of unseen movement. No churning in the shadows. No flickering of runelight. And yet the sense that he wasn’t alone only intensified. He peered into shadows, and shadows stared back at him.
A low rumble of cruel laughter invaded his mind. You need me, it rasped as Jael cringed away from the intimate voice in his head. You need me to keep her. To save her.
Anrid. Horror curled in his belly, mingling with the fear. He was moving before he realized it. His legs wove around the cluttered tables and drove through the doorway at the other end of the chamber.
You can’t save her. The voice prowled after him, relentless and inescapable.
“Get out of my head!” He snarled the words as he tore down the corridor and up the stone flight of steps at the far end. More laughter battered against him. It felt louder now, almost real, as if the voice had grown stronger and begun to slip into the real world from whatever place it called home.
Prison, the voice corrected him. Imprisoned. Set us free and we will save her. Let me out, and she can be yours.
He reeled against the wall, physically knocked sideways by the unseen presence. “She isn’t mine to keep!”
A staggering sense of need washed over him. Saying the words out loud made him admit how badly he wanted Anrid to stay, how much he wanted her to want to stay.
But she can be.
The promise filled him with a desperate sense of hope, of longing, but disgust and self-loathing followed on its heels. What the shadows promised wasn’t right. They couldn’t barter Anrid’s future as if she were an object to be traded. They had no right to make decisions for her, to alter the course of her destiny.
You’ll be alone, the shadows warned. They pressed against him, teasing his skin with the invisible authenticity of the wind. Forever, forever, forever...
That word boomed and echoed down the corridor, as real as his own voice.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Set us free, and you can everything you want, everything you long for.
He staggered onward. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t force the voices from his head. They grew stronger, and louder, banging against the inside of his head even as they echoed around him, like they were both inside and without. Panic began to override reason. How were they accomplishing this? Had they already escaped the Bifrost somehow?
He searched his connection to the magic for answers but received no response. Nothing at all. That familiar hum in the back of his mind…where had it gone? He let down all barriers to search for Anrid, to make sure she was okay. At first, he sensed nothing, nothing at all. But then, as if he’d flung open a door, terror cascaded over him and drew chills across his flesh.
He’d reached the stairs leading up to the sleeping corridor when a high-pitched scream reverberated against the walls of the tunnel. The shadows bucked with laughter and began to move in the real shadows of the stairwell. He stared up into endless, churning darkness, the runestones either broken or obscured by the shadows.
Anrid screamed again, louder this time. He felt the fear behind her scream.
Jael bolted up the stairs. They’d been trying to distract him, he realized, as panic drove him onward against all caution and reason. The cruel laughter only confirmed this suspicion. The Bifrost blazed into awareness, fueling his panic with terror of its own. Anrid’s emotions grasped for him through the bond of magic, terror and despair and protectiveness all rolled into one.
Protectiveness? Who was she trying to protect?
Jael threw open her bedroom door and stumbled into deeper darkness. Only then did reason return to him. He snatched a runestone from his pocket and traced a light rune, holding it up as light feebly burst into existence. The shadows growled in frustration and tried to push back, but Jael drove onward into the bedroom. Where was Anrid? Where was—
They cowered in the corner in a narrow circle of runelight cast by the runestone embedded on the wall above their heads. Anrid clung to Rig, his face pressed into her torso, arms clasped around her waist.
“Anrid!” he shouted, but she didn’t respond to his call. Couldn’t she hear him? He was right there.
He struggled to reach her, but the shadows curled around his ankles and bogged down his movements. Jael swung the runestone down at them, and they hissed and recoiled from the light. He reached out to the faint thrumming of the Bifrost and begged it for help. Desperation reached back at him, but then there was the faintest buzz of energy. It zipped through his veins like fire and tore down his arm and into the flickering runestone in his numb fingers.
The light blazed more brightly.
The shadows screamed and fled from him, only to converge on the others with renewed violence. Jael bellowed in horror and plunged after them, but they moved much quicker than he could. He watched as shadowy tendrils snatched at Rig and tore him from Anrid’s arms. They both screamed, Anrid clinging to his wrist with both hands while Rig kicked and flailed in midair. But the shadows tore him loose and flung him across the room.
Rig hit the opposite wall with a sickening smack and plummeted to the ground in a heap.
