His jawline twitched and his hand flexed at his side. “You don’t control Valgarde.” His voice was a deadly whisper.
“Yet,” she clipped, that one word a clear threat as she pinned her cold gaze back on Hadrien. “I’ve always been a fair queen, so I’ll give you a choice. Give up Valgarde without a struggle.” She paused and tilted her head. “Or I take it—painfully.”
“No!” I gasped out.
The queen’s gaze snapped to me. She wasn’t as tall as I’d conjured in my imagination, but her eyes pierced. Pale as a skull and without any feeling.
“Quiet, girl,” she snapped. “Or you’ll join the others.” Her mouth curved into a vicious slash of a smile. “A pretty little sculpture in my garden.” The false pleasantness was undercut by a threat. “I already have quite the collection.”
A sound rolled out of Hadrien that wasn’t human, more of a pained, animalistic roar that emerged from deep within his chest, so raw and edged with pain that it shook the ground beneath my soles. Three years of grief and anguish and guilt seemed to coil in that heart-wrenching sound, which vibrated through my sternum and wrapped around my heart.
As he took massive steps toward her, the gray marble lines in his skin rippled and glowed, turning a fierce crimson, like blood surging through veins. His wings spread wide behind him. I gaped in awe, never seeing anyone so radiant. Powerful.
Magnificent.
All three of her soldiers raised their spears and closed in. My breath quickened as I turned back to the queen. I couldn’t bear what she was preparing to unleash on Hadrien.
She raised one hand without looking back at them. “Leave him to me.”
They obeyed without a word and lowered their spears, but remained vigilant.
She turned to Hadrien with a victorious expression already carved on her face. “Your answer?”
“I would never agree to any arrangement with you.” His voice lowered, seething with rage. “Not in this life. Not in any life. You will never set foot inside my ancestral home.”
“Fair enough,” she said with a cool arch of a brow.
She twisted her hands and I instinctively stepped backward.
Whatever strange circular gesture she made wasn’t like any magic I’d encountered. It didn’t resemble the green magic I worked with to nurture living things or Hadrien’s shifter magic with its grounded pulse. This kind pulled, took, drained.
She spread her hands wider in a slow twisting motion, and the air between her palms darkened. A concentrated mass of something dark, churning with steel-gray webs, a mass that seemed to pull the light toward it and swallow it whole.
The cold deepened as an icy frost coated the green tops of the garden, and my heart panged at the damage.
The hair on my arms stood and my teeth ached with an unsettling rattling. The mass between her hands grew, pulsing slowly, and the smell reached me, a rancid scent with hints of iron and burning ash.
The scent of something terrible to come.
My throat tightened and my ribs clamped around my lungs.
This energy she’d conjured was dangerous, poisonous, as devastating as a low-moving brushfire devouring the forest.
Every thought I had went silent.
The queen cast her hand back and hurled the dark mass at Hadrien.
“Hadrien!” I leaped in front of him, not processing what I’d done until I saw that grave, insidious ball of dark energy coming right at me.
CHAPTER 25
HADRIEN
The queen had grown even more powerful than when I’d last seen her three years ago. Her power was now so palpable that I could feel it slither in heavy energetic waves across the feet separating us at Valgarde. Pressure rose against my chest, as if she were pressing her icy hand on me. Triumph gleamed in her eyes as she drew on dark magic to silence me forever.
I drew on all my gargoyle strength and magic. But it wouldn’t be enough to shield us all—and not at all sufficient to protect Valgarde from the queen. I’d lose my ancestral home to Mireille, letting down those who came before me, but I’d learned to resign myself to that inevitable fate as the poppy had hardened.
The mass of dark energy that churned and grew and coiled between her long fingers forged into something devastatingly bleak that promised total darkness. It didn’t surprise me. I expected this from Mireille.
