I took that dare, of course. I kicked out—not skillfully, but hopefully enough to have her shifting position. She didn’t budge, and the other assassins wasted no time in grabbing my arms.
The girl smiled thinly.
“Nothing to smile about,” I told her. “You work for the bad guy.”
They turned me back toward the practitioner and pushed me to my knees. “What do you want?”
“To test you. To see what you are made of. This,” he said, gesturing to the haze, “is untouched Aether, direct from the other realm. The substance of the Aetheric, which allows souls to live even as their bodies die.”
“That’s not possible,” I murmured as goose pimples rose on my flesh.
“You can see it for yourself,” he said, his arms and fingers stiff and shaking with effort.
I didn’t need to see it. I could feel it. It grew hotter as it curled and condensed around us, and it seemed to add weight and substance to the pain in my heart, like a hot stone dropped into water to quicken the boil.
This wasn’t just a ghostfinder’s trick, or an illusion created with fast hands or good mirrors. This was pure Aether. Not justthe wisps that surrounded Anima, or the shadowed version that he’d trailed, but the actual stuff of the Aetheric. And he’d brought it into our world.
Maybe hewasa Luminae.
“How are you doing this?” I asked.
“I willed it,” he said, his voice shining with arrogance.
The lights within the Aether grew brighter, like the stars that occasionally fell over the stronghold, leaving a trail of fire in the sky. They moved across my skin, each pass increasing the pain in my heart, until tears slipped from my eyes. I screamed, and the assassins released me to fall into a heap on the floor, no longer worried that I might run.
“Please…stop,” I managed, barely squeezing out the words through teeth clenched against the pain.
“You will be tested,” he said again. “Maybe you’re telling me the truth. Maybe you don’t believe you have more power. But perhaps it hasn’t yet revealed itself, and we can dig it out of you. The more powerful you are, the more I can use you.”
Fire speared through my chest, like one of those falling stars had penetrated my skin, landed beneath my heart, and settled there. I tried to breathe through the pain, to keep from clawing my fingers through my skin to release the heat and agony.
The haze thickened to a soupy fog, the circle moving faster, growing tighter around me. I curled up and covered my head with my hands, trying to protect myself from it. But the pain only grew stronger, the fire hotter, and I wanted so badly for someone to dig out that flame and extinguish it.
“Stop,” I said. “Please.”
He ignored the plea. And things got worse.
More Aether flowed in, and the world became a scream. The power whirled like a dust devil, the very sound a flame thatsinged my skin. Something inside me cracked, and my body jerked from the shocking pain. I was breaking apart from the inside. No longer able to resist, I clawed at the skin above my breastbone, the scent of copper rising into the air as I ripped it with ragged nails.
“Breathe.”
I heard the voice in my head, not a voice I’d heard often but instantly recognizable.
“Luna?” I whispered.
“I can feel the Aether. What is happening?”
“Aetheric practitioner,” I whispered.
“I am the Luminae,” said the man in the room, believing I’d asked a question of him. Apparently he couldn’t hear Luna’s voice.
“No,” Luna said with absolute confidence. “He is no Luminae. Just a lucky fool. Breathe. I will find you, Fox. Keep breathing.”
The last was less a suggestion than a demand. I sucked in the biggest breath I’d ever taken. The air burned, but not as brightly as the flame in my heart. Another breath, and then another, and the circle spun and time passed.
And with a suddenness that had me dropping forward, the wind disappeared and the Aether dissipated, and whatever lights had blinked in that haze were extinguished one by one. The room was silent again. The candles flickered, unbothered by what had gone on.
Footsteps moved closer. I looked up.
