No tears.
That was one of the first lessons a slave in Midnight ever learned. I had picked it up mostly from the shadows of other children who had lived in the cell before me, instead of needing to have it beaten into me time and again until that basic human instinct had been overcome. Even when I learned that my siblings had been sold to Midnight, or when I watched through Alasdair’s eyes as Shkei died, my sobs had been dry.
I saw the tears on this boy’s face, and all that I could think was, It’s not too late for him.
I didn’t decide. I didn’t even realize I had dropped my bow and was running until I was at the boy’s side. If anyone saw where I came from, I just gave away our position, but I couldn’t just watch this boy burn as he cried.
I pulled the child into my arms. His tears, silent salt trails, dripped onto my shoulder as I tried to decide what I could do with him. Where—
I spun toward a noise from behind me, to find Gabriel Donovan a few feet away. His dark eyes narrowed as he surveyed the area, trying to locate the source of the attack. I couldn’t defend myself with the boy in my arms; I could only hope the trainer would assume I was on his side, not an enemy.
An arrow hissed toward him, but he dodged before it could strike full-on. The arrowhead cut a thin strip across his arm, but the impact wasn’t direct enough to trigger the fire, which only ignited when the arrow hit the foliage beyond. The failed shot was enough for the vampire to locate the source of the attack, though. I heard a scuffle as he rushed into the woods.
Others appeared outside—Jaguar, Jeshickah, Taro, Varick, more shapeshifter guards—and the fight began in earnest. I turned toward the woods, intending to hide the boy with the sakkri, who was least likely to actually engage in bloodshed.
I never saw the blow coming. It hit me from behind, sending me stumbling forward as the world darkened. As far as I could tell, I never struck the ground.
AISLINN HAD PASSED the magical toxin on to the other slaves each day for a week through a few drops of blood in the communal stew. When she uttered the invocation Alejandra had taught her, the power rolled like thunder spreading from a bolt of lightning, and the riot began. The other slaves—and not a few of the shapeshifter guards—reeled against hallucinations and fought shadows, unable to understand even the trainers who waded among them to try to regain control.
Many of them died there, necks broken, before anyone noticed the fire creeping in from the north wing.
When it reached them, the stench of smoke was acrid, cloying. Flames powered by a mix of magics—falcon, Azteka, Shantel, Triste—flickered in a dramatic rainbow of colors. Tapestries, carpets, and priceless wood carvings burned yellow-orange, but the granite and marble walls and floors burned vibrant green and silver blue, low licking flames that seemed almost harmless unless you came close enough to hear the way the air whistled into them and feel the way your flesh started to sear.
Human bodies, when the magical fire caught them, also burned in shades of red, yellow, and orange.
In the east wing, slaves who were not currently on duty were resting when the smoke first began to seep down the hall. They had heard the commotion from the south wing, but ignored it because it came with no orders. They had seen guards running back and forth through the halls, but that too was meaningless to them, since those guards shouted no commands.
Likewise, when the smoke became thick, none of them struggled. There were no windows, but it would not have occurred to these bred and broken slaves to open one even if there had been.
—
I didn’t want to watch that. I struggled toward consciousness—
—
Sara spun as she sensed movement behind her, nearly too late, then pulled back as tamer flames than those that devoured the stone face of Midnight engulfed a shapeshifter who had been unlucky enough to side with his vampiric employers.
She recognized the power that had cast that fire. It seemed Lila had retained her witch magic when she had taken a vampire’s blood.
“Are you all right?” the once-witch asked.
Sara nodded sharply, hardly able to face the black eyes gazing out of the face she had once known so well. She had called this woman Auntie Lila when she had been a child. She had called Lila’s twin children, Rachel and Alexander, her cousins.
This wasn’t the time or place, but she couldn’t keep the words inside. “We thought you were dead,” Sara accused. “Your line was declared extinct when you disappeared with your children. Are Rachel and Alexander with you? Did you make them what you are?”
The last words were uttered with horror and disgust, emotions she saw mirrored on Lila’s face, as if that possibility were just as obscene to her as it was to Sara.
There was no time to continue the conversation as the vampires began to arrive.
Alejandra flung a coil of magic at Jaguar, who collapsed like falling leaves, but that still left the other trainers. Lila turned to contain Taro, and Sara saw an opportunity to go for Jeshickah. The Mistress of Midnight was stalking the woods, looking for the source of the magic raining down on her empire, and hadn’t noticed the hunter with a blade raised behind her.
She had her arm lifted to land the killing blow when the sakkri’s prophecy came to her mind: “Sacrifice is not failure. All hesitation is not in vain.”
Remembering what Nathaniel had said about vengeance, and how killing this creature would endanger all witches, Sara paused a heartbeat before she could have destroyed the creature responsible for this empire. In that time, Jeshickah sensed the danger and spun to defend herself.
—
There had to be a way out—
—
There was a point shortly before dawn when the fighting seemed to pause, like a wave receding. The world seemed to take a breath. Midnight’s allies looked around and realized it was over.
Shevaun was the first of Nathaniel’s group to step forward. The blood on her hands belonged to the slaves she had killed, and the ash on her skin was residue from burning Jeshickah’s personal home to the ground, but Theron didn’t need to know that. He assumed she had been on his side all along as she encouraged him to move on. They disappeared together.
Seeing the momentary pause, Alejandra dropped the bow she had been using and risked stepping out of her magical concealment. She threw Jaguar’s arm over her shoulder, and bent her back to carry the semiconscious vampire away.
Nathaniel clasped Taro’s hand to help him stand, and pointed out that Varick had already gone. It was time to find safer ground.
—
I struggled to open my eyes, which felt gummy, as if someone had glued them shut while I slept. I lifted a hand, which felt as heavy as the stones of Midnight itself, and wiped tarry fluid from my face.
Blood. Thick, half-dried blood, probably from the body that lay across my own.
As I fought to get out from under the dead shapeshifter on top of me, I discovered a knife still lodged in my chest, under my collarbone. My swiftly healing flesh had tried to push it out, and it clattered away when I brushed at it, but the wound—and the blood I must have lost through it—explained why I had been unconscious so long and why I felt so exhausted—
Sunrise.
The fact hit me like a blow, and I pushed myself up so quickly that I retched and the world spun. I fell back to my knees, gagging, as I took in the scene around me.
Only one pair was still fighting, but it wasn’t us against Midnight anymore. Jeshickah had thrown Gabriel up against a tree and was accusing him of being involved in the attack. I saw her bury a dagger in his chest, close enough to the heart she probably meant to kill him before someone else grabbed her wrist, shouting, “Jeshickah, think! He wasn’t behind this. His prizes burned, too.”
His prizes burned, too.
Ashley.
Hara.
Alasdair.
I hadn’t saved them. I had let them burn.
The horror that washed over me was almost enough to numb my recognition of
the woman who dared to seize Jeshickah’s arms, pulling her away from Gabriel before she slaughtered the trainer. She had thrown back the hood of the cloak that concealed her identity when she stood with the rest of us.
Now, every line of her face was familiar, and eerily similar to Jeshickah’s.
Our employer, the woman who as far as I could tell had instigated, funded, and emboldened the fall of Jeshickah’s empire…was Jeshickah’s own sister, Katama.
And if she sees you looking, she will probably kill you to keep you from ever speaking, my common sense warned me. I didn’t know why Katama had chosen this course, but she had been careful to keep anyone else from knowing her role.
But what was the point of going on now anyway? I had failed.
Not a single granite wall of Midnight remained. The molten slag, glowing white-hot, had nearly reached my prone form. If it had touched me, I would have had an instant funeral pyre. Had the boy survived, I wondered, or had he burned despite all I had lost trying to save him?
I was tempted to reach for the fire. To join Ashley, and all the other slaves I had consigned to death. If it hadn’t been for Farrell, I would have died there years ago. Why not now?
Because Kadee and Vance are waiting for you, you fool.
It sounded like the sakkri’s voice, but I saw no sign of her, and I didn’t dare risk drawing attention to myself by trying to stand again until Gabriel, Jeshickah, and Katama disappeared.
When I tried to shapeshift, nothing happened. Between the magic I expended the day before and the blood I lost, my body was too battered for me to complete the change, so I stumbled into the woods instead.
I found Sara sprawled on the ground, her neck at an impossible angle. There were several shapeshifter bodies in the regalia of Midnight’s guards, as well, but the witch was the only one of us I found left on the battlefield.
I had no supplies, and no way to get any. My clothes were plastered to my skin with blood and ash, and my only weapon was the knife I had pulled out of my own body. Nevertheless, I began the laborious walk toward the edge of Shantel land, stopping only briefly to drink my fill at a cold, babbling stream.
By the time I made it to the rendezvous spot, it was late afternoon, long past the hour when we were supposed to meet. The remnants of a campfire, now cold, greeted me. I felt utterly isolated before I spied a figure leaning against a tree, his eyes closed and chest rising and falling with the gentle rhythms of sleep.
I paused a moment, watching Vance sleep. He alone, it seemed, had waited. Had he known I would come? Hoped? Or just hadn’t known what else to do? Kadee was probably still busy at the Shantel fleshwitch’s hut, tending to the wounded, but Vance hadn’t had a task to complete after the fire started.
Gently, I shook him awake.
At first, he gave no response except to blink his eyes as if he were struggling to bring them into focus. Then, when he recognized me, he threw himself forward and wrapped his arms around me.
“They said you were dead,” he said.
“It’s easy to make that mistake about a white viper,” I said, trying for a lighthearted tone, but failing. “Did…did anyone else make it out?”
Vance’s gaze dropped, and he shook his head. “Nathaniel waited for hours for Aislinn. He said she had insisted on trying to save Hara, and that might delay her…but she never came. Kral says the fire spread to the back quicker than we anticipated. A couple of guards tried to get out that way, but then the tunnel collapsed, and no one else…” He trailed off. “I guess Gabriel tried to get back in, but the entrance was already blocked.”
I nodded absently. Vampires normally had the ability to just blink out of place and appear elsewhere, but Jeshickah liked to control people coming into her domain, so she had witches design spells to make it impossible to come into Midnight that way.
His prizes burned, too.
“He was trying to save…Ashley,” I said. To Gabriel, anyway, she was Ashley.
“The sakkri says he loves her.”
I made a strangled sound, half laugh, half scream. What Gabriel thought he felt was probably what had saved Alasdair from complete annihilation, but a trainer wasn’t capable of love, not really. He never could have done the things he did to her if he had been.
“Kadee is all right?” I confirmed, though I was already sure. Vance wouldn’t have been talking about trainers and slaves if anything had happened to her.
“She’s helping the Shantel,” Vance said. “They’re…The sakkri never came to the rendezvous either. Only Nathaniel, that falcon girl Keyi, and I showed up.”
The sakkri must have been lost, or else she would have returned, but I doubted everyone else was dead. Most likely, they had decided they didn’t need or want to meet again. I knew Alejandra had taken Jaguar, and Shevaun had gone with Theron. Even if our arrangement had mostly been for mutual convenience, I was glad he had someone with him in the aftermath.
What of the others? Had Averill survived to take this story back to her kin? Would Lila live to see her children again? Was Silver’s line already consolidating his empire?
My head spun.
“Sit down,” Vance warned me. “You’re so pale you’re practically blue. Are you hurt? I should have asked earlier.”
I sat and let Vance take care of me. He helped me strip off my blood-encrusted shirt so he could make sure I didn’t have any other wounds, and refused to let me walk anywhere until he had rekindled the fire and served me the reheated remains of stew the others had made and eaten hours earlier.
I smiled as I tasted it. “Squirrel,” I said.
Vance looked at me quizzically for a moment, and then he laughed. The first meal we had ever shared had been squirrel stew.
“I’m ready,” I said, once I had eaten my fill and felt a little stronger. “We should let Kadee know we’re alive, and then decide what to do next.”
Please don’t leave me, I thought. Vance and Kadee had other options. Better options, probably, than I could offer them—especially if Midnight was really gone. How selfish would I have to be, to encourage them to remain together in the shattered remnants of what had once been the Obsidian guild?
As selfish as I was when I spoke my prophecy a little over two decades ago: Someday, my sister, you will be queen…and this place, this Midnight, will burn to ash.
It had been a lie then. I had made it true. Is that enough to let you rest in peace, Farrell? You gave up everything and dedicated your life to this task. I did it for you.
I paused at the edge of the Shantel Family Courtyard as the truth crashed down on me. Past that wall was a civilization, a king and two princes. They were probably panicked about their lost witch, but they would also be celebrating. They were free, but I wasn’t. I had never been free. I still had sins for which I needed to atone.
“I need to go to the serpiente,” I told Vance.
“You need a few days of good food and deep sleep,” Vance argued. “After that, if you want to go fight Misha, Kadee and I will go with you. Until then, Obsidian or not, I won’t let you go anywhere.”
I quirked a smile. A child of Obsidian didn’t need or give permission, and Vance knew that.
Very well. I would stay a day, long enough to rest and heal. Then I would move on.
I didn’t want to go anywhere near the royal or even public areas of Shantel land, but I made use of their resources in order to bathe and eat, and accepted the clothing they gave me to replace my own ruined garments, as well as a sleeping roll and blanket, which I spread in front of my campfire.
I lay down alone, but it wasn’t long before Kadee and Vance joined me, guarding my back and sharing their warmth.
If only their presence could keep the nightmares away.
Over and over again, I watched Alasdair’s golden feathers falling to the ground: the trainer, shearing her flight feathers on one of her first days in Midnight.
When it wasn’t feathers, it was scenes from a serpiente royal bedroom. The rapid patter of feet, the sh
outing of guards, and a canister of oil and flame flew in an arc through the air. It shattered against the base of the bed, igniting the linens and canopy immediately.
Three-year-old Hara screamed.
She kept screaming, older now, as fire closed in on her from all sides.
Golden feathers. Black scales.
It all ended in fire.
—
When I woke, I first thought my face was damp from morning dew. Only as I blinked the sleep from my eyes did I realize I had been crying. I instinctively wiped the tears away before anyone could see them, then took a minute to marvel at the way my eyes felt swollen and I could taste salt on my tongue.
Like the ocean.
I had never seen the ocean. That was Gabriel’s thought.
I knew Vance wanted us to take more time to rest, but it was time to see my sister and Farrell’s son.
MISHA WOKE WITH a quiet gasp and a shudder, recoiling from the man in bed with her. In his sleep, Aaron instinctively tried to pull her back, but she shoved him away again. He grunted and rolled over, dragging the edge of the blanket to his chest as if he couldn’t stand not having something to hold.
She refused to think about what had disturbed her rest. These days, her dreams were always full of icy marble, black eyes, a smooth tormenting voice, and pain. It was bad enough waking from them when she was alone. After one of those nightmares, Aaron’s arms felt suffocating.
She had to steel her courage before leaving the royal bedchamber and stepping into the halls of the serpiente palace, reminding herself that no one would dare accost her now, or ever again. She was queen.
One of the guards outside the bedchamber shadowed her silently as she walked in long strides, trying to look as if she had a destination instead of as if she were fleeing her mate.
Most of the Obsidian guild had claimed an area called the Opal Hall, which was adorned much like a small dancers’ nest. As Misha paused in the doorway, Aika looked up from where she had been dozing, her swelling belly making rest increasingly difficult. It was also making both her and Torquil increasingly protective and therefore problematic. Once the babe was born, Misha suspected she would need to find a way to take them more firmly in hand.