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Frigid magic kissed the edges of her mind, cautious at first, as if Tenah might easily frighten. Then it speared into her, drawing a gasp of pain. Ames burrowed through years of compacted, secondhand toxins in her mind. She wasn’t sure what he expected to find, only that he wasn’t being gentle anymore.
She struggled against his unrelenting magic as he plunged her into a memory of the Void.
A tall, gaunt boy with silver eyes materialized before her. Something about his untamed auburn hair and deadpan gaze iced her bones. She knew him, didn’t she? Something horrible had happened to him, but the memory was so hazy.
Ames stabbed deeper.
Please stop! Please, please, please!she pleaded. Whatever he wanted to recover, it wasn’t worth this agony or the strain on his body when he clearly needed help.
In the memory, she reached out a hand to the boy. He drew back as if she was the monster, not the razor-toothed feingrot or sentient magic that thrived in the Void.
You must find the strength to fix this, Tenah,Ames murmured.
She shook her head, tears desperate to spill.Fix what? I don’t understand!
His magic retracted, and the memory slipped into the foggy recesses of her mind. She was back in the manor, panting as she stared down at her splayed hands on the worn floorboards.
Her head tipped up to Ames, and a ghastly wail tore from her throat. In the time he’d wasted sifting through her damaged mind, a panther-like feingrot had jabbed its barbed tail into his chest.
She waited for Ames to blink. To move. To crush the mind of the nightmarish fiend with the too-wide jagged smile and twisted horns.
A thunderous boom rattled the foundation of the manor. Dust and debris crumbled from the ceiling. Her father’s coppery dark magic pumped through the hall, freed from all restraints. Which could only mean…
Ames was dead.
Tenah’s chest hollowed out as if carved by a serrated knife. And the butcher? The parasite rooted in her father, puppeteering these monsters that didn’t belong in their world.
Feeling untethered from flesh and bone, she crafted a bolt of crimson flame and hurled it at the feingrot, but the lithe beast dodged it and bolted up the attic stairs. She started after it, prepared to melt it down to nothing more than ash.
Her body locked up when she reached Ames’s bloody corpse. She couldn’t leave him for another beast to defile. She shouldn’t abandon their guests to carnage. After all, this was her fault too. She’d lied to herself and to Ames about her abilities, all because she couldn’t fathom the idea of giving up on her family. She’d helped stow away a Corrupt. She’d allowed shadows into his lair, knowing the risk.
And now, who was going to put him down, this monster she’d nurtured? Their dead king? His slaughtered elite? The High Court, who had disowned them thanks to their king’s tyranny?
Her father had to be stopped. If that meant relying on the path of destruction, so be it. Let it guide her. Let it burn through the pain and guilt and grief that threatened to lay her out on the floor.
She had nothing left.
Draping Ames’s arm over her shoulder, Tenah ignored the flare of pain in her wrist and hefted him upright. Thankfully, the physical aspect of their training had paid off. She hauled his body to the untouched study and rested him on the sofa. She’d bury him later.
Her heart rate spiked as she paused at the study door and leaned her forehead against it. It wasn’t that she was afraid of her father. Ames had never allowed it. But without him to take the edge off her fear…
Her hands trembled as she pushed open the door and rushed the burning library, her own flames wrapped around her in defense.
Failure was not an option. No more shadows would die tonight.
But when she reached the library doors, her chest heaved as she glimpsed the fires engulfing her precious books. Decades of history and knowledge vanished in thick plumes of smoke. The ceiling mural had charred to nothing more than an ugly black scar. Beneath it, her father stood in a ring of elite bodies, clutching the King of Vozar by the throat.
She should have struck out, but the memory Ames had tapped into slammed into her once more. One blink, it was the king’s life her father held. The next, she stood in her father’s place, gripping the neck of the silver-eyed boy.
Tenah winced as his screams echoed through her mind.
The fractured memory retracted, and a flash of movement caught her eye. Renton stood a dozen strides from her father, his blade dripping black blood. It was smeared across his armor and the ends of his light hair as if he’d carved his way through hordes of enemies to get to him. He’d been slaying monsters, and what had she been doing—watching death claim lives unjustly?
In a shocking burst of speed, Renton vanished.
Tenah lunged forward. “No!”
Her father’s eyes snapped to her. When Renton reappeared behind him, he’d left a dagger sheathed under her father’s raised arm where armor didn’t protect.
