What Lurks Between the Fates (Of Flesh & Bone, #3)(93)

Mab collided with the ground, lying upon it before she pushed to her feet and began to prowl toward me once more.

“I do not suggest that, sister,” Rheaghan said, stepping out of the tree line. “The aonnaigh showed itself to her. Even you are not fool enough to harm her after that.”

Mab scoffed, turning on her heel as Rheaghan came closer. I sheathed my sword as Mab disappeared into the tree line to go hunt something else, allowing the God of the Sun to take my hand.

“Let’s find your mate, and find you something to kill,” he said, guiding me toward the woods.

I summoned a star to my free hand, allowing it to drift in front of us and lead the way. The others had faded in my panic to save the horse—the aonnaigh.

“What’s the aonnaigh?” I asked, stepping over a particularly large root from a tree. My soul felt heavy, such a contrast to the lightness that had claimed me when I frolicked through the woods in my semblance of freedom.

How quickly the cage walls had come crashing down, watching the winged horse fly to freedom while I remained.

“A creature crafted from the darkness itself. All the stories state that Khaos crafted it from the night sky to be a gift for his wife, Nyx, when he created her from the stars. He meant it to belong to the one true queen,” Rheaghan explained, guiding me forward.

“The one true queen of what?”

The woods seemed less alive than they had when I’d danced through them earlier. Whether it was the near death of such a beautiful creature, or the shift toward danger, I couldn’t know.

Rheaghan’s stare felt heavy on the side of my face as we walked. “Everything.”

I swallowed past the implication in those words, wondering if I really wanted to face the reality they may present. That thread in the center of my chest pulled, as if Caldris knew I was looking for him. I could imagine his smile while he engaged in battle with some horror of Tartarus—feel his teasing thread of humor pulse down the bond.

“Then why would it show itself to me?” I asked.

“The Primordials have been missing for centuries. Perhaps they’ve hidden themselves within human vessels,” Rheaghan said as he swept a tree branch out of the way. He’d clearly been speaking with his sister following the revelation of the night before—her accusation that I was something impossible.

Caldris stood in between the trees, his armor and leather covered in blood. Already at his side, three creatures lay in pieces, the heads severed from their bodies. They were similar to the arachni that haunted the caves in Mistfell, but their bodies were even larger.

They were larger than I—their legs standing tall even as their bodies collapsed upon them. One shrieked, charging for my mate as he swept the legs out from under it with a clean cut of his sword.

The legs flung through the air as he shoved his hand up, snapping through flesh to grasp the creature’s heart and pull it free. It was still pumping blood upon the ground when the creature collapsed at my mate’s feet, the God of the Dead turning to strike me with a brutal smile.

Blood was splashed all over his face, adding to the brutality of his features. Only the gleam of his white teeth shone from beneath all that red as my star floated toward him, guiding me forward. I reached him, flinching slightly when the warm press of his blood-soaked hand touched my cheek.

We didn’t speak of the creature that had shown itself to me, or Rheaghan’s theory that I was somehow the embodiment of Nyx. Caldris reached down, grasping two of the spiders by the head, cracking their necks, and wrenching them in a circular motion until they came free. Then he opened the shadows, allowing Rheaghan to walk through first with one of the spider’s heads.

We followed.





31


Estrella


My room was too quiet after Nila left that night. My magic thrummed through my veins, the collar absent from my throat. After Mab’s presentation of the creatures to Tartarus, she’d only leveled me with a glare and a warning.

Escape attempts would only result in Caldris’s suffering and the death of human mates.

It was a rare moment of understanding between us. Mab didn’t want to keep my magic suppressed, because if she did, we would never come to know what I was capable of.

And she would never be able to use that magic to her advantage if we didn’t know about it.

I had so rarely engaged with it when I wasn’t in a moment of fear, when instinct wasn’t driving me to protect myself.

I settled deep into myself, standing in the center of my room. The fire roared in the hearth to my left, but I let my eyes drop closed and stared into that chasm of power. The monster waiting there cracked an eye open, lifting her head off her paws and purring in delight as I took a deep breath.

Darkness swirled around her as I raised my arms, holding out two flat palms in front of me. I thought of the depths of night—of the new moon and a cloudy sky. I needed a walkway, a passage to reach the other half of me. The memory of the shadow realm formed in my mind as the creature within me sighed, raising a single talon to gift me with the magic I requested. I became the shadows she held within her, melting into the night that formed at my palms.

My nightgown swirled around me, blowing back from the subtle night wind that passed through my room.

I opened my eyes.

The edges of the shadow realm were twisted, gnarled, and writhing like the leafless trees of the Pillars as I stepped forward, putting my first foot into the walkway. A wall of darkness blocked my path, pressing back into me as if it could lock me within my rooms. Pushing forward, I touched a single finger to the wall.