Page 120 of Dream Reaper

Ava smiled at Brynja, a genuine smile that brightened her dark, somber eyes.

“Yes, exactly,” she said.

Clearly, these two had come to some kind of understanding or truce.

The lasses were teaming up against him now, it seemed.

Don’t fuss so much. You like a strong lass, and we both know it. And before you ask how I know it…I can read your thoughts, remember? I know everything, Jerrid. Dragon laced that word with so much blatant insinuation that Jerrid couldn’t have missed it if he’d been half asleep or in horrible pain.

He could almost imagine Dragon waving a claw in the air to dramatize the “everything” he claimed to know.

“All right, all right,” he grumbled. “Let’s go down to the cellars. We need to find the shadow before it finds us. Where do you think it has gone?”

The others exchanged worried looks but did not answer.

They spun and made their way back to the hallway, to the curving stairwell, and then to the main corridor and the small entrance hall. It barely took them five minutes to jog down to the lower levels. Ahead of him, Brynja banged on a wooden door.

“Ylsi, it’s me!” she called in a hushed tone.

The door wrenched open, a pinched and pale face peeking through the crack between the door and the jamb. The girl’s eyes widened in relief as she swung the door wide to let them in.

“You need to hurry!” she hissed, yanking Brynja by the arm and tugging her through the doorway. “Something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean—” Ava cut off as she crowded into the room behind Brynja.

Jerrid and the others hurried in too, leaving Prince Haryk in the doorway. The women and children huddled along the walls on makeshift bedrolls. Some of them were awake, but others were lying prone on the ground, limbs jerking as if they were having fits.

Ava dropped to her knees beside Roar and his mother.

“What’s happening to them?” the mother cried.

Jerrid leaned over Ava’s shoulder, his stomach clenching. The boy’s eyes rolling back in his head as he jerked and writhed on the ground. Half a dozen of the younger girls were experiencing the same symptoms, unresponsive to the cries and attempts to wake them.

Jerrid stooped and pinched the boy firmly on the arm, but he didn’t respond, completely trapped in his spasmodic episode.

“It has to be the shadow,” Ava breathed, her voice cracking. “It’s attacking us any way it can. And it went for the children first.”

A quick look around the room confirmed her theory. No one over the age of fourteen or fifteen had been affected. The nightmare truly was targeting the children.

His mouth went dry, the horror of it robbing the breath from his lungs.

This can’t be allowed, Dragon snarled.

For once, Jerrid agreed with him. He surged to his feet before he realized what he was doing, striding back toward the door to tell Prince Haryk they needed to work together to bring this thing down, to stop it once and for all⁠—

But the doorway was empty.

Jerrid froze in the hallway right outside the storage room, searching for signs of the dark elf prince.

But Prince Haryk had disappeared.

Panic clawed at the back of his throat as he tore down the hallway, wondering if they had somehow lost the prince on their hurried flight down the stairs. Or—he hated to even think the thought—had the prince turned chicken when confronted with his worst nightmare and tried to hightail it back to Eroth?

He would never think such a thing about a fellow soldier…but he didn’t know this prince.

And he had every reason to distrust the elves. They had never cared about human lives before, so why would they start now?

He leaped over the shredded door and skidded outside into the cool night air. Surely the prince couldn’t have gotten far. He skimmed the campsite, the tattered tents, and the shadowy trunks of the trees beyond.