AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She shut it off at that point. Before she leapt into the Gate, before she left Hunt and Ruhn behind. She didn’t want to relive that. To show what she could do. To reveal the Horn or her ability to teleport.
Bryce opened her eyes. The ball remained quiet and dim. She put it back on the floor and rolled it toward Rhysand.
He floated it on a phantom wind to his hand, then touched its top. And all that had been in her mind played out.
It was worse, seeing it as a sort of memory-montage: the violence, the brutality of how easily the Asteri and their minions killed, how indiscriminately.
But whatever she felt was nothing compared to the surprise and dread on her captors’ faces.
“Guns,” Bryce said, pointing to the rifle Randall fired in her displayed memory, landing a perfect bulls-eye shot in a target half a mile off. “Brimstone missiles.” She pointed to the blooming golden light of destruction as the buildings of Lunathion ruptured around her. “Omega-boats.” The SPQM Faustus hunted through the dark depths of the seas. “Asteri.” Rigelus’s white-hot power blasted apart stone and glass and the world itself.
Rhysand mastered himself, a cool mask sliding into place. “You live in such a world.”
It wasn’t entirely a question. But Bryce nodded. “Yes.”
“And they want to bring all of that … here.”
“Yes.”
Rhysand stared ahead. Thinking it through. Azriel just kept his eyes on the space where the orb had displayed the utter destruction of her world. Dreading—and yet calculating. She’d seen that look before on Hunt’s face. A warrior’s mind at work.
Amren turned to Rhys, meeting his stare. Bryce knew that look, too. A silent conversation passing between them. As Bryce and Ruhn had often spoken.
Her heart wrenched to see it, to remember. It steadied her, though. Sharpened her focus.
The Asteri had been here—under a different name, but they’d been here. The ancestors of these Fae had defeated them. And Urd had sent her here—here, not Hel. Here, where she’d instantly encountered a dagger that made the Starsword sing. Like it had been the lodestone that had drawn her to this world, to that riverbank. Could it really be the knife from the prophecy?
She’d believed that destroying the Asteri would be as simple as obliterating that firstlight core, yet Urd had sent her here. To the original world of the Midgardian Fae. She had no choice but to trust Urd’s judgment. And pray that Ruhn, that Hunt, that everyone she loved in Midgard could hold on until she found a way to get home.
And if she couldn’t …
Bryce examined the silver bean that lay smooth and gleaming in her hand. Amren said without looking at her, “You swallow it, and it will translate our mother tongue for you. Allow you to speak it, too.”
“Fancy,” Bryce murmured.
She had to find a way home. If that meant navigating this world first … language skills would be useful, considering the extent of bullshit still to be spun. And, sure, she didn’t trust these people for one moment, but considering all the questions they kept lobbing her way, she highly doubted they were going to poison her. Or go to such lengths to do so, when a slit throat would be way easier.
Not a comforting thought, but Bryce nonetheless popped the silver bean into her mouth, worked up enough saliva, and swallowed. Its metal was cool against her tongue, her throat, and she could have sworn she felt its slickness sliding into her stomach.
Lightning cleaved her brain. She was being ripped in two. Her body couldn’t hold all the searing light—
Then blackness slammed in. Quiet and restful and eternal.
No—that was the room around her. She was on the floor, curled over her knees, and … glowing. Brightly enough to illuminate Rhysand’s and Amren’s shocked faces.
Azriel was already poised over her, that deadly dagger drawn and gleaming with a strange black light.
He noted the darkness leaking from the blade and blinked. It was the most shock Bryce had seen him display.
“Put it away, you fool,” Amren said. “It sings for her, and by bringing it close—”
The blade vanished from Azriel’s hand, whisked away by a shadow. Silence, taut and rippling, spread through the room.
Bryce stood slowly—as Randall and her mom had taught her to move in front of Vanir and other predators.
And as she rose, she found it in her brain: the knowledge of a language that she had not known before. It sat on her tongue, ready to be spoken, as instinctual as her own. It shimmered along her skin, stinging down her spine, her shoulder blades—wait.
Oh no. No, no, no.
