TALON
Ipush through the cotton that fills my mind, blinking hard to bring my surroundings into focus.
The world returns in fragments. Cold stone beneath my body. Damp air, metallic and stale. The distant drip of water counts the seconds. I drag my gaze up, and the room comes into view. A wide crypt with vaulted ceilings and carved stone walls, lit by sputtering torches and faintly glowing mage lights. Old bones are stacked into niches.
Pain comes next—low and blooming at the back of my skull. Whatever they used to sedate me was strong enough to drop a Dragon.
With the pain comes an unwelcome stench. Rank. Sour. A reek of decay, steeped in vinegar and sweat. The scent sinks into my sinuses, thick and cloying, a stink no Dragon could mistake for anything else.
The smell of mage powers.
My stomach tightens in revulsion, throat closing against the weight of it. Normally a single passing, low-level mage doesn’t make me do much more than wrinkle my nose. Plenty filter through the Poison Apple, but it’s never been anything like this.
To my left, a row of mages hang strung up, slaughterhouse refuse on display. Chains bite into their wrists, heads drooping on broken necks. Some still breathe, barely. Others hang silent and sunken, their skin already slackening in death. Bite marks tear at their throats and arms. They’ve been drained to the marrow.
I grit my teeth as I roll my shoulders, testing resistance.
Chains.
Thick, iron, and etched with sigils I don’t recognize. My arms are spread and bound at the wrists, anchored to the wall behind me. I yank once—nothing. Again, harder—and fire shoots down my spine.
Magic-reinforced. Of course.
In the middle of the room, a long table is covered in glassware—beakers, flasks, metal instruments. They all shine gruesomely under the cold steel lights that have been set up around it.
Some of the containers hold blood—thick, vibrant, glowing faintly like liquid light. One vial pulses with blue. Another with green. Most are labeled, and I can make out the names of people and...mage levels?
Then I see a bloody, black scale on a large petri dish. My scale. The one those vampires had cut frommybody.
A figure works at the table quietly.
She’s petite, barely a presence in the room. Until she turns around. Her skin is porcelain-pale, her features sedate in a heart-shaped face. Black hair falls in a perfect sheet to her shoulders, and when she tilts her head, the cold lights glint off her fangs. A bloodsucking Midnight Fae.
But it’s her veins that stop me cold.
They pulse with color—violet, silver, and searing cobalt. Magic is alive inside her and trying to claw its way out.
She’s not just one of the Midnight Fae, she’s something else now. Some kind of magic abomination, but I’m not sure how.
“I was wondering when you’d wake up,” she says, her voice smooth, a silk ribbon wrapped around a blade. “I’ve been interested in you for a long time, and now I finally get to meet you.”
I don’t answer. The taste of ash and silver fills my mouth. But I know exactly who I’m facing.
Mal. The exiled princess of the Midnight Fae.
She steps closer. Her heeled boots don’t make a sound as she walks. Her dress is black leather, built in armored stitches, fused close against her frame.
“Hello, Talon,” she murmurs. “I've been looking forward to meeting you for a long time.”
“As have I,Mal.” I speak through gritted teeth.
The corner of her lips twitch before her expression returns to that implacable mask.
“Where is Aurora?” I demand.
One brow lifts. “I don’t know. She ran off, I suppose.”
That doesn’t sound like my girl. Though I pray that’s true, that she got away.
