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“People are dying. There’s no time to fucking think.”

“There might be an explanation.”

“An explanation? Are you—”Their mouth freezes mid-word, their gaze snagged on Poppy’s body on the floor. Hugo’s spear is still protruding from her abdomen, but it’s shifting, the end of it tracing small circles in the air. “We need to move.”

I’m not sure I can. My body feels so weak. Sluggish. Like I’m moving through water.

“We need to move now,” Ollinde repeats. “She’s breathing.”

“What?” Hugo asks, opening his eyes.

Orla grabs Hugo’s spear and yanks it from Poppy’s body. Poppy gasps a massive breath, her spine curling and head twisting backward.

Orla shoves the spear back into Hugo’s hands. “Saints. She is breathing.”

“Like I said, we need to fucking move,” Ollinde says.

Poppy’s lips peel back from gleaming white teeth. Pale clouds swirl in her eyes as a low hiss rises from her throat.

We run.

Hugo pushes off the wall, hands shaking as he grips his spear. Lonan shoves him forward and grabs my arm, lifting me to my feet and dragging me down the hallway. We spring for the exit, the end of the dungeons.

We’re barely through the door when Poppy tears after us, and the sound of her, the ripping of her vocal cords as she screeches, the pounding of all four of her limbs as she races like an animal, sends tears whipping down my cheeks as I run.

“Keep going,” Lonan shouts as he shoves me ahead of him. His scarlet-glowing sword is gripped in his hand, and he makes sure that all of us are through the doors to the dungeon before him.

He slams the iron gates that lead to the dungeon shut behind us and folds his hand over the lock. Poppy collides with the bars, reaching, screaming, tearing toward us. She grabs Lonan by the blazer of his suit, but he calmly closes his eyes and allows his Darkness to slither from his fingertips. It twists around the bars of the dungeon in long serpentine tendrils. The shadows touch Poppy’s skin, and she hisses, reeling back. A wall of Darkness blocks the door, and as the lock clicks shut, the bell of the clocktower reverberates through the school, echoing, penetrating even the depths of the dungeon.

Eleven o’clock.

One Hour Till Midnight

LONAN

There is an oath written on my heart. Binding. Unbreakable. To a girl bloodbonded to my brother.

“Swear it.”

We were nowhere near Gossemort that day. It was a place of shadows, a cave somewhere deep inside the border of Imaelhain, among the perilous mountains covered with snow and vengeful spirits. I could feel the Dark in the air, silt-covered walls pulsating with it. This was one of the deep wells, the birthplaces of ancient magic, where the Light was twisted, where everything went wrong.

A fitting location for this. My teacher brought me there to give me this assignment, invite me to take this vow. Everything about it was wrong. I made it anyway.

Because, Saints below, how could I not? It was her.

My teacher and I stood on damp, frozen stone that hung over the edge of the water—dark, inky, depthless. Still as death. Water is meant to move—ebb and swirl and drift. This water was like glass despite feeding into the sea, fluid despite the freezing temperatures. I knelt, and he had my sword. That beam of crimson Light was so strange in the hand that only ever wielded the Dark. He rested it against my shoulder, like he was knighting me. But I’m no knight. Never anything as noble as that. The blade on my shoulder was a threat, an induction into a cultus of violence.

It wasn’t what I’d given my life to prepare for. I should’ve been by his side, fighting the Illuminated Kingdom. He trained me for that. Saints help me, how the Dark burned in me, how passion and wrath and pain and love and hunger begged me to be a weapon in his hands.

And wielded for her? Her protector, avenger, shelter, and champion. I was his acolyte, but in my secret thoughts, I was hers to command.

Anyone would call me a traitor, but that is my truest treachery. I was sworn to Imaelhain, its flag, its Dark. But I would sell my very soul to kneel before her.

My teacher pressed the edge of the blade into my neck when I didn’t respond quickly enough.

“I swear,” I said, looking up at his solemn face, “I will protect Vesper Fontaine with my life.”

“And if you fail?”