It can’t be true. I control my own destiny.
And still, the visions come.
Keldarion, my husband, stands alone in Frostfang. Thousands of Winter soldiers lie dead around him. Dark creatures swarm him, an unending tide of the Below.
A scream tears from my throat, echoing through the chamber. My knees buckle against the cold floor. The rest of me follows, shaking and splintering.
Then I see her.
My mother, strung atop great green crystals, her body lifeless. Caspian holds out his hand and forms a glowing portal. A giant of a man with flowing white hair steps through, ears too long to be a fae of the Vale.Who is that?
I can’t watch this anymore. I am breaking. Shattering. Another vision slams into me like a dagger to the heart?—
My father, falling into a chasm of great briars and bark.
My breath hitches. The mirror nearly slips out of my trembling hands. Pain surges, too much to bear, as the visions keep coming, relentless. A spasm jolts through my fingers, and I clench hard around the handle. Surely it must be almost over…
The visions start again. The same ones, over and over and over again. Every few rounds, new horrors get added to the rotations. Astrid and Marigold crushed beneath the falling rubble of Castletree. My sister speared by shadows.
I want to look away. No one controls my fate but me, and yet… I cannot risk them. Not my mates, my friends, my family. I will exist forever in this nightmare.
I don’t know when I started screaming, only that my throat is raw from it, eyes blurred with tears of sadness and pain. I feel every death that flashes in this mirror as if it were my own. Over and over and over and?—
The glass shatters.
A briar spears through the mirror, splintering it into shards of light and darkness.
I fall to the floor, gasping. Silence crashes over the room, thick and heavy. A storm waiting to break.
And then I hear it.
The slow, deliberate step of boots against stone.
A part of me thinks I’m still trapped in the nightmare because the figure in the doorway is too terrible to exist.
Shadow and fire coil at his feet, writhing and snapping like caged beasts. The air around him crackles with power, wrath barely restrained. His eyes burn, twin coals of fury, bright green against the abyss of his face.
A monster of night made real.
The Prince of Thorns has returned.
21
The Prince of Thorns
I’m not particularly worried about the feelings of others.
Rosalina, my mate, is the exception.
Her pain, her sorrow, courses into me through our bond until there is a single thought in my mind.
I will not rest until everyone who hurt her has suffered tenfold what she has.
The mirror shatters on the floor. One of Vespera’s torture devices. I know it intimately, as I do the hood, the crown, and the string.
My mate gasps, her beautiful gown torn, face wet with tears.
With a deep snarl, I pierce Vespera with my gaze. Thorns sprout, dragging her to the ground, and shadows gag her sickening mouth. With a clench of my fist, an inferno of fire sprouts around the witch.
