Billions.
She glanced sidelong toward Reena, whose eyes were closed and whose lips were moving unnaturally fast.
Cassandra grabbed Reena’s arm, then snatched her hand back, hissing. Reena’s skin was so cold it burned Cassandra’s fingertips.
“Ronin,” she croaked out. “What’s wrong with her?”
The voices in Cassandra’s mind grew louder and louder. So loud they rattled her brain against her skull. Ronin clutched at his shaved temples, squeezing his eyes shut, as if he heard them, too.
She was about to release a scream as agonized as the one they’d heard earlier—yesterday? A week ago? Ten years ago?—when the voices stopped, and the mists pulsed. Prisms shimmered in her peripheral vision, but disappeared as soon as she turned to catch sight of them.
Reena’s lids popped open, revealing milky white in place of her familiar golden eyes.
Ronin shoved Cassandra behind him, muttering, “The chronomancer in…”
He trailed off and before Cassandra could ask what he meant, Reena’s lips spread into a chilling, rictus grin, wrinkling her cheeks. When she spoke, her voice rang out in a monstrous echo.
“Her eyes have been called. The paths converge. He is searching for a way in.”
“Reena,” Ronin growled, “what the fuck are you?—”
In a flash of orange and black fur, Reena shifted into her tiger, then dove into the mists, an iridescent shimmer trailing behind her.
Cassandra twisted out of Ronin’s grip, then gave chase, shouting Reena’s name into the shadows. Her feet pounded thedirt and her wings bounced against her back. The rainbow glow of Reena’s trail faded the farther she ran.
A strong arm curled around Cassandra’s waist and Ronin hauled her back against his chest, his fingers tangling in her feathers. “Let her go, Cass. Let hergo. We need to get out of these mists or we’re not going to survive. And we can’t help her if we’re dead.”
Cassandra collapsed in Ronin’s arms, too dazed to move. She raised a hand to her cheek, surprised to find wetness.
As soon as she recognized her tears, her suppressed emotions crashed upon her in a disorienting wave. Terror, anxiety, exhaustion, grief, agony, panic. So many, she could barely identify them all.
Those voices overtook her mind, morphing into screams so loud she clapped her hands over her ears.
Before she realizedshewas the one screaming.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cassandra’s consciousness slammed back into her body, jolting her limbs and nearly toppling her to the ground before she felt Ronin’s hands on her shoulders.
Her head pounded, her vision was blurry, and her throat felt like it had been scraped clean with a wire brush.
But the air was clear. Were they out of the mists? And where had Reena?—
Reena.
Cassandra swiveled, half expecting to see the tiger bi-form standing beside her.
But there was nothing but a moat that stretched out so far in either direction that it disappeared into the black mist. Above, the moon shone bright on a cloudless night.
“Where…” she attempted, the words barely a squeak. “Where are we?”
A few paces away, an obsidian bridge crossed the moat to an unexpected sight. “Is that a?—”
“It’s acity,” Ronin gaped.
It looked more like a sculpture.
On the far end of the bridge, rising up from the middle of nowhere, rings of buildings and cobblestoned streets spread outbeneath a domineering castle crafted from the same black stone as the intake tower. Two sharp spires threaded with red polemite pierced the sky like blood-drenched fangs.
