She’d been at this for hours, since dawn lightened the cracked glass dome above her. Hux had left reluctantly that morning, pressing her back against the cottage door for a kiss that had almost made them both late—his mouth hot and demanding, his hands settling on her hips with a possessiveness that still surprised her. The memory of his warmth still lingered on her lips, a pleasant distraction she kept pushing aside.
Focus. You can think about the lion later.
But her mind kept drifting. To the way he’d held her in the aftermath. To the words his father had forced out through magical restraints. To the impossible hope building in her chest—the idea that maybe, just maybe, they could break this curse.
The void roses caught her attention.
All of them. Every single black rose in the garden had bloomed at once. Their petals pulsed with wrongness, darker than dark, absorbing light rather than reflecting it.
Lunaria’s magic stuttered. She pulled her hands back from the orrery, staring at the roses.
They’d been blooming steadily since she arrived. But never like this. Never all at once, never with this intensity of?—
The Warning Bells screamed.
Not chimed. Not rang.Screamed—a sound like metal being torn apart, like reality itself protesting an intrusion. Every flower in the Warning Bell Bower opened its throat and shrieked alarm.
Lunaria spun toward the garden entrance.
The Memory Moss in the grotto flared to life, projecting images into the air without her touching it. Flashing, fragmented visions?—
A figure made of shadow, wrong angles and impossible geometry.
Void where a face should be, darkness that moved against the direction of light.
Hands that weren’t hands, reaching, reaching, reaching?—
The image dissolved. The Warning Bells fell silent.
For one terrible moment, the gardens held their breath.
Then the attack came.
They pouredout of the shadows between the trees.
Not creatures, not exactly. Things that existed in the spaces between moments, that slipped through the cracks in reality. They had no true form—just suggestions of shape, impressions of hunger, the feeling of being watched by an impossibility.
Void-touched. She recognized them from Aero’s descriptions, from the fragments of lore she’d assembled. Lesser manifestations of the Hollow King’s power, not fully real but real enough to kill. They moved wrong—stuttering between positions rather than flowing, existing in one place and then another without crossing the space between.
Lunaria didn’t hesitate.
Her magic blazed outward—starlight condensed into weapon form, celestial fire streaming from her fingertips. The first wave of creatures recoiled, shrieking in frequencies that scraped against her skull.
“Come on, then.” She planted her feet, Deia’s ring blazing on her finger. “You want to stop me? You’ll have to do better than this.”
They came.
The gardens rose to meet them. Vines erupted from the soil, lashing at the void creatures with thorns as long as fingers. The flowers she’d spent weeks restoring turned their faces toward the threat and burned, pouring celestial light into the darkness.
But the creatures weren’t quite physical. Her attacks passed through them as often as they landed—starfire scattering harmlessly through forms that existed half in this realm and half somewhere else.
Lunaria spun, ducked, channeled power through the ground beneath her feet. A creature lunged for her throat; she caught it with a burst of concentrated moonlight and watched it dissolve. Two more took its place.
Too many. There were too many.
She backed toward the pavilion, calling the gardens’ defenses around her. Constellation orchids opened overhead, raining petals that sizzled against void-touched flesh. The Convergence Circle flowers—the ones that only bloomed during the stellar alignment—burst into premature life, their light driving the shadows back.
A creature slipped through her guard.
