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A fiendling.

It leaps, falling onto Lonan before he can react. I rush to him, arcing my scythe back. The creature knocks him to the ground. Lonan and the creature are a mess of shadow and claws. He’s fighting like it’s a drunken street brawl. Finally, the fiendling pushes Lonan to his back, crouching over him, and I have a clear shot. I sweep the scythe down, catching it on its belly. The fiendling screams, a sound like the depths of evil rent in two. It tumbles off Lonan, writhing on the ground.

Lonan pants, turning onto all fours and facing it. The fiendling screams still, and I want to shut it up. Anything else lurking in the school will surely hear it. Lonan scrambles forward on all fours, still holding his sword.

And then my heart stops.

Because Lonan plunges his hand into the Darkness, his palm coming to rest on the fiendling, somehow solidifying it.

It stills and hushes. Beneath the press of his hand, the shadows calm to slow, rolling waves. There’s a body. Saints, beneath all that chaos, there’s a body. I’d always thought of the Dark beings as ethereal, more concept than creature. Demons. Personified evil. But this—it has lungs, pushing up and down against a skeletal rib cage. It has a neck, a mouth. Two red eyes, no longer glowing bright, now dulled, bulge from the hollows of its skull, two or three times the size of normal human eyes.

Lonan’s hand presses down. He shushes it like a mother does a child. It makes a strange sound, like a wicked version of a whimper. Lonan grimaces.

“Rest,” he tells it. “Find hope in death. Your journey is done.”

What is he doing?

I’m frozen to the spot, my scythe hanging loosely in my hands as I watch the fiendling struggle, hyperventilating, before its breaths finally still. Lonan reaches up to a very real face—smoky, leathery skin covering a misshapen skull—and closes its eyes like it’s a member of his own family.

I don’t understand. I don’t want to.

A horrific thought occurs to me—that Lonan’s loyalty to the Dark might be beyond what even I or my godfather knows about. I’d flirted with the idea till now. He loved the Dark too much. He held secrets, played games, deceived the teachers and my friends. It’s the sort of thing valued in a spy.

“Traitor,” I breathe.

“You don’t understand,” he says. “You’ve been taught the fiendlings are monsters, and you aren’t wrong. But they weren’t always.”

I shake my head. “We know nothing about them.” They’re mysteries, Dark products of Imaelhain.

“Some do,” Lonan replies. “Some know the truth—that this is what becomes of a meiga who surrenders themselves completely to the Dark. Every fiendling in the Blood Woods was once just like us.”

Impossible. The thing bleeding on the ground could hardly be the same species as me, much less a meiga. “How do you know so much about this?” He shouldn’t. A Light meiga, a soldier of Gault, shouldn’t understand these Dark creatures so well.

“I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen what happens to a meiga when they cannot find the Light.”

Gault is the refuge of the Light, the Illuminated Kingdom. And there is one other, its twin, its opposite, where the Light does not reach.

“Imaelhain,” I whisper. “You’ve been in Imaelhain.”

The shadow that passes over his face is enough of a confirmation.

I should have known.

He’s something else, something no one, not even my godfather, must’ve understood. He doesn’t use the Dark reluctantly, and he doesn’t bend it for Gault. His is the Darkness of Imaelhain.

Lonan rises to his feet, towering tall over me. His eyes have gone icy.

“What are you?” I ask, taking a step back.

His steps follow me, allowing me no sanctum. “Vesper,” he says, voice full of warning. He senses it—my instinct to run. My scythe is alight. I know where the door is.

I can make it.

I charge for the exit. His shadows whip toward me, serpentine tendrils of night. They wrap around my legs before I’m halfway there, tripping me. I fall flat on my face and am dragged along the floor, back toward him, as he stands calmly between the fallen fiendling and the statue of the warrior. His shadows encircle me like snakes, binding me head to toe. They wrap around my mouth, cool silk keeping me quiet as he kneels down next to me.

Then he’s in my space, bending close enough that I can feel his cool breath on my face. Gently, he tucks stray strands of my hair away from my forehead so I can see him properly.

“I know how you like to talk,” he says. “Just this once, I’d like you to listen.”