Page 250 of Feralheart

The corridor opened into a chamber. Ancient doors stood at its far end, carved with the same runes that covered the foyer walls. These doors had seen many centuries pass.

“You’ll find the Oracle inside,” Lord Holmen said, his voice gentle. “State your wishes, and they shall be granted. The Oracle is feeling magnanimous today.”

We stopped at the threshold.

Fen looked down at me, his gray eyes holding everything he couldn’t say out loud with the council and his mother watching. If we die, we die together.

I nodded once and checked the talon-blade at my hip, one of the few solid things I trusted.

Every instinct screamed at me to turn and run. That whatever waited inside would take everything we had left, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

But Tolross was dying.

Fen needed to know what had happened to his father.

Lyndie ached to help her mother.

And Reece had died believing this could mean something.

So I stepped forward.

We walked through the doors together because that was the only way any of us were walking through them at all.

Selira’s keening wail cut through the stone.

Mouth, she cried in my mind, her terror slamming through the bond. Scales know. MINE⁠—

The doors swung shut behind us with a boom that rattled my bones.

I spun.

Stone. No handle. No seam I could pry open.

The lock clicked into place.

Cutting off Selira’s voice.

Leaving us alone in silence.

CHAPTER SIXTY

ERADIN

The chamber stretched up and up, so high the ceiling disappeared into darkness that swallowed light. Empty except for the crystal column rising from the center. Rainbows throbbed through it in waves, echoing the unnatural rhythm of the floor beneath us.

My magic erupted, red lines blazing up past my shoulders in a roar of heat that drove straight through my head. Pain blazed through me, sharp enough my knees buckled.

Fen caught me, his arm around my waist, but I barely felt him. The light was pulling.

My magic didn’t strain toward it. It lunged, the way a drowning person gulps down air, and dragged the rest of me with it.

“Eradin.” Fen’s voice came from far away. “What’s happening?”

I couldn’t answer. My teeth were clenched too tight, my jaw locked against the scream building in my throat.

The thing in the column was alive.

My magic recognized it the way you did the scent of rot or the sound of a predator hunting you in the dark. Ancient. Frantic.