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“She does like to break things.” A new voice—Cassius’s.
Panic jolted through me as I took the first step on the obsidian staircase.
“You’re dead!” I called. “The both of you!”
Silenced echoed, punctuated only by the chittering sound of shadow bats. They swooped in close, knocking my hair out of place, but otherwise not bothering me.
I climbed the stairs two at a time, which was hard to do because they were large and high—meant for shadow demons, not me. But I wanted to be done with this place already. I wanted to be free from this tower and my thoughts—from being human altogether, if it meant I could forget Lazarus and Cassius and all the pain they’d inflicted on me. Of all the trauma they’d causes.
Another dozen steps. More chittering. I was almost on the first landing when something grabbed my arm.
I turned back, ready to swing with a punch, when Lazarus’s form appeared behind me. He looked and sounded real as he laughed cruelly. Hell, he evensmelledreal, with blood and oak scents swirling around him. Just like he’d been in life.
Lazarus grinned and lifted my hand to his mouth. Licked my wrist. I tried to pull away but couldn’t break free before his two sharp, white fangs pierced my skin.
I screamed and tried to wrench my hand away, but Lazarus held fast, slurping and drinking from me as though he’d not had blood in days. His venom saturated my veins with power and pleasure, an euphoria unlike any other. My toes curled, and a moan passed my lips, one I hated and craved at the same time as my body fell against the stone wall with fragility. I glanced down to where Lazarus’s bloodlust connected he and I, but the image struck me deep in my heart.
This isn’t right.
Lazarus had never fed from my wrists. He’d never risk damaging the hands producing nightsteel weapons for him.
I roared and wrung my hand from his grasp. Lazarus’s form dispersed like a shadow—or would have, had I not grabbed hold of his shoulders and turned fast. I threw him off the landing. When his body hit the floor, though with an audible thud, only then did his form fully disperse into shadow, matching the rest of the tower.
My hands lit with magic of their own accord. Flames dancing in shadow curled up my wrists and arm, wrapping around me like a protective shield. The shadow bats flew around me, chittering away. But those chitters turned into voices—Lazarus again. Cassius. Their friends. Random vampires who’d fed from me. Leif—his voice cut the deepest, all full of disdain.
It was in that moment that the fire magic—myfire magic—around me burned. The power seared into me, blazing through the tunic and pants I wore and through to my skin until I was naked and screaming in agony. I fell to my knees as the shadow bats flew closer.
“Get away from me!” I shrieked as I batted them away, all the while still being incinerated by my own magic.
But they didn’t go away. The creatures circled closer. Grew louder. All of my enemies’s voices penetrated my mind. My torturers. Their voices building and building until all I heard were reprimands, taunts, and their disgusting moans of pleasure as they bit into my skin. Skin that was burning, sending an awful stench to my nostrils. My magic was devouring me alive. The same magic that had saved me time and time again.
“Stop!” I roared and grabbed hold of the fire on one arm with my opposite hand. The fire lifted from my arm and turned into a sphere in my palm. Its shadowed flames churned fast, gaining power. “You don’t control me anymore!”
I threw the sphere of shadowed fire at the creatures. They squealed and cried out as they died. Finally, the voices stopped. The chittering, too. The rest of the shadow bats were scared of me now—or at least, I hoped they were.
Silence at last. It weighed heavily on me as I pulled my naked body from the landing. My clothes were gone, scorched as real and fully as the charred parts of skin all over my body. But it didn’t hurt. Nothing did.
Maybe this was a trick of the shadows, too.
The fires rose around me, shadowed and wispy, as I ascended more of the twisting staircase. Every time I passed a spot where a shadow bat once existed, it was like their remaining life essence or power joined mine. I felt stronger with every step. Felt more powerful than I’d ever been before, even with Mrak’s extra magic coursing through my body.
Confidence swelled within me. I could do this. I knew I could now. And I was halfway up the staircase, too. Halfway to finishing this trial. To proving myself strong enough to be Mrak’s queen. Strong enough to be a shadow demon like him.
To never be threatened by any vampire ever again.
I took off running, bounding up the steps nearly three at a time. It stretched my legs, made every footfall a risk, but this renewed strength within me, this surety that I could survive, sprung me forward at lightning speed as if I was already shirking away all that previously made meme. The past Aisling. The human version of me, all small and fragile and made up of trauma and fear.
She was disappearing as fast as the staircase below me as I climbed.
“Aisling!”
My name pierced the air of the tower. It reached me through shadow and red hues and dying shadow bats.
The pain in the tone, the worry, cut right through me.
“Aisling!”
Willa. It was Willa’s voice haunting me now. Terrified. Hurt.
