Raja approved.
Across the street, a young vampire shoved another male violently against the hood of a parked car, the metal denting beneath the impact with a flat, ugly crunch.Fangs fully extended despite the humans crowding the sidewalk around them.Two demons watched from a nearby rooftop, their forms barely hidden beneath glamour, leaning over the ledge with the lazy patience of predators scenting blood in water.
The fractures were spreading.
Good.
The realms had spent too long pretending separation meant safety.
A familiar pulse brushed against Raja’s awareness then.The Nushtonia again.He could feel the book differently now that its bindings had weakened.Vast.Hungry.Thinking in ways it had not during his imprisonment.The old magic woven through its pages shifted restlessly across the distance separating them, examining oaths and fears and unfinished desires with patient curiosity.
And inside it, Raja smiled faintly.The djinn female still lived, barely, though she was unaware of her own fragility.
The Nushtonia had not consumed Myanin the way it should have.Instead, it circled her carefully, peeling apart memories and promises and old wounds with surgical patience.Shade remained beside her, stubborn enough to follow her into destruction rather than release what he believed belonged to him.
Raja understood that kind of obsession intimately.
The book liked them.That was dangerous.Because the Nushtonia never merely trapped people.It revealed them.
A car alarm erupted nearby, jerking Raja’s attention back toward the street.Several humans shouted as traffic abruptly stopped farther down the avenue, brake lights bleeding red across wet pavement.
Then the pavement cracked.Not explosively.Slowly.
A black line split the center of the road before spiderwebbing outward beneath the tires of stranded vehicles.Shadows leaked upward through the fracture like smoke escaping buried lungs, curling along the edges of broken asphalt before dissolving into the rain.
Humans screamed and the sound pleased him.
Raja stepped closer to the spreading crack and slowly crouched near its edge, the hem of his coat trailing through a thin film of water pooled across the curb.Darkness pulsed beneath the broken pavement, thick and shifting and hungry.He held one hand above the fracture, palm down, close enough to feel the cold breathing up through it.It wasn’t enough.Not yet.But soon it would be.
“You feel it too, don’t you?”Celise’s voice cut sharply through the rain behind him.
Raja rose without hurry.
She stood beneath the awning of a nearby building, dark hair damp around her shoulders where the wind had pulled it loose.Fury and fear warred visibly across her face.Exhaustion hollowed the edges of her glamour now.Shadows clung beneath her eyes, and the line of her mouth had tightened in a way it hadn’t the last time he’d seen her.
The magic was costing her more than she expected.
Good.
“You said the barriers would weaken gradually,” she snapped.
Raja regarded her silently.
Across the street, humans fled the cracked roadway as more darkness bled upward through the widening fracture.One man stumbled, caught himself on the side of a parked taxi, and ran without bothering to look back.
“It’s accelerating,” Celise continued, voice climbing.“Entire sections of the city are becoming unstable.Supernatural creatures are losing control.Demons, vampires, hybrids, the dead–”
“They are becoming what they were always meant to be,” Raja corrected softly.
Lightning flashed overhead.
For one brief instant, the shadows beneath the city moved visibly beneath the streets like veins beneath skin.
Celise saw it and fear widened her eyes.
Raja stepped toward her slowly, the distance between them closing in three measured strides.Rain slid silently down the black fabric covering his shoulders.
“You used a book filled with dark power to bring your sisters back from the dead.You didn’t consider the consequences of the book being more than it seemed?”His voice remained calm even as everything around them fell apart.“Then you made a blood oath with the ruler of the realm of the dead and a disgraced incestuous royal elf.Where in any of those choices do you see good life decision-making skills?”
