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And then I was a bolting Percheron, rearing up and battering anything before me. My feet, massive hooves pounding at the ground as magic warred within me, took control and threw me headlong, stampeding toward a destination that had no solid place on a map.

Just a name.

Sóna.

Sóna.

I had to get to her. I had to find her. Something had happened. Something catastrophically wrong had happened. I had never felt this before. I had never felt the pulse of insistent panic and fear that rode me and pushed me through the gardens, through the palace and hallways.

I had never known fear like this in my entire life. Not even when faced with an executioner’s ax.

I had breached the main hall that would lead down into the prison levels when a bolt of unseen lightning shot straight through me. My muscles seized, and barbed wire tore through every vein within me. Ice replaced my blood and hollowed me out.

My magic went still.

Deadly still.

And then snapped.

Chapter 33

Asledgehammer was pounding on my legs. When it got tired of my legs, it would slap me across the face, then beat my chin with a fluffy mallet. I hadn’t passed out. I was far too familiar with passing out, with the way my head pounded afterwards. No, I was gone. I was still settling back into my body. It felt like a stretched-out glove too foreign and, altogether, uncomfortable.

Cricket was wrapped around my leg. That’s what had called me back. The all-too-familiar sensation of her strong muscles flexing against me, and the soft slick feeling of her scales had drawn me across an abyss of emptiness.

“Crick, you bitch,” I croaked out.

My voice felt unnatural. It didn’t feel like it knew how to move any more. My spirit was still unfamiliar with telling it what to do.

It took more effort than I wanted it to for me to open my eyes.

Cricket was not wrapped around me. A black pulsing ink stain was, velvety fur pulsing against the deep wounds in my legs, suction pulling it tighter and then leaking blood out of an unseen hole behind it.

Ah, yes, a vampiric ink stain.

This made sense.

I laid my head back down and resigned myself to being a snack for whatever creature had found me in the deep dark and taken it upon itself to put my seemingly abandoned carcass to good use.

A growl rumbled around my leg, and I lifted and stared down as the smoke shifted and contorted into the wolfhound-like head I had grown to know and thought I’d never see again.

“Goose?”

The ghost lights streamed up from the chasm and circled us.

Goose. It was Goose. Goose was alive. I was alive.

Laughter gripped me. I couldn’t help it. It just swept in, filling the hollow pit within me, and I shuddered with it as it ripped around me and through me.

I was alive!

Goose was alive!

I was still lost in the dark, probably couldn’t move and had a spider leg through my shoulder, but I was alive.

Venom. Out. An echo of an echo whispered in the silence left by the death of my laughter.

I snapped my attention to the blob that was Goose, and it was easing off me. The blood of my wound leaked, slow and steady, down my shin. It was the deepest of the cuts, but it no longer felt like ice pumping into my veins.