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Chapter 12
“Lay him down here!” Mrak shouted to his guards as we entered the great hall. Late afternoon sun shone through tall windows and cast everything in a soft red glow.
Dozens of shadow demons cleared the way, dispersing as they lay Karn on one of the closest tables to the door. Mrak shoved the guards away and immediately looked over his advisor’s wounds. I stood nearby, wondering if I should try to help or simply stay out of the area.
Karn gargled blood that streamed from his lips. Mrak moved fast, scouring every inch of him to find his wounds. The biggest one was obvious, spilling blood from a hole in Karn’s chest.
Blood dribbled down his chin. Karn reached up and grabbed Mrak’s wrist. “Night… steel…”
Mrak’s eyes narrowed at his friend, and he shook his head. “Tell me after. Save your strength.”
Onlookers joined in me watching Mrak close his eyes and hold his hands over Karn’s largest wound even as thick blood gushed from it. My breath caught in my throat as Mrak tried healing Karn.
I’d thought Karn untrustworthy. That his going to Sylas’s advisors was a bad idea at best. A traitorous one at worse. And now here he was, bleeding out before us, surrounded by the king he’s chosen to serve.
I didn’t know what to believe. My gut screamed that this was all an act—and rightly so because of how everything had played out until now. But it’d been Karn who’d opened the Shadow Sanctum. He’d given his blessing for me to turn into a shadow demon, an act that would help cement Mrak’s role as king.
A man is dying before you and you’re arguing his loyalties.
I pushed away my unease and approached the table. “How can I help?”
Mrak didn’t stop his magic once. It cascaded from his palms in waves. I’d never seen him so desperate to help or heal someone ever before—not even me while I was dying.
Nightsteel. Karn had uttered those words as soon as they had placed him on this table.
My gut churned.What do you know?I asked him, as if he could hear.
And then our gazes locked, Karn’s crimson eyes dimming with blood loss.
“Night… steel…” Karn ground out again.
Mrak let go of his magic only long enough to grab my wrist and pull it over the wound on Karn’s abdomen. “Heal.”
I nodded. Karn knew something. He knew somethingbig.
But more than that, Mrak wanted to save him. For better or worse, Mrak trusted Karn, and that meant I had to for the moment, too.
I released the breath my anxiety had held and let my magic flow from me. Like magnets, Mrak’s power and mine met, swirling together into a steady tide of healing magic. With both of us working in tandem, Karn’s wound stitched shut, the blood stopped flowing, and soon it was nothing more than a red spot on his abdomen only visible through the shorn cloth of his robes.
Karn’s chest stopped heaving. His breaths slowed. He lifted himself up with one hand behind him, then the other, and stared intermittently between his wound and us. “You…”
Mrak helped Karn swing his legs off the table. “My queen is powerful. Together, we can accomplish anything.” Then louder, so the audience that’d gathered could hear him clearly, “We will heal all the damage my brother has caused you. There will be justice.”
“Not before there is more death, brother,” a new voice bellowed through the room.
I swore every head in the great hall turned in unison toward the doorway that led back out into the courtyard. There stood a male shadow demon nearly a foot taller than Mrak, fully outfitted in armor and a large, dark blade at his back made from a material I knew all too well: nightsteel.
My gaze jumped to Karn and back again, so quick I prayed no one, not even Sylas, noted it.Nightsteel. It’d been a warning. A warning against that specific blade, though? Against Sylas following him back?
Mrak seethed. His body tensed as he glared at Karn for answers his advisor didn’t give.
My thoughts whirred as Sylas entered the great hall, a mocking look on his face. “It wasn’t enough for you to crawl back to Kithonia unwanted. You had to hole up in this abandoned palace, too?” He clicked his tongue. “Brother, really. I expected more of you.”
Mrak’s fists tightened and released. He was clearly considering how, if even, he should act. But then he threw caution out the window and charged Sylas. “Get out of here!”
Sylas drew his blade, and Mrak was smart enough to stop even as the blade nearly graced his chin.
Nightsteel had a particular way of easily destroying demons. That was why Lazarus had put so much energy and effort into lording over deposits of it and training feeders like me how to forge it. Lazarus had been preparing for war. And I’d been on the front line.
