Reclaimed (Shadow Beast Shifters, #2)(71)

Once we left the room, it was again into the mindfuck of a house. “It’s ingenious,” Angel said, her eyes alight as she catalogued every twist and turn.

“Ingenious or insane,” I muttered. “Jury is still out.”

She just shook her head at me but couldn’t answer because the queen was talking. “Once we reach the highest point in my castle,” she called back, having just stepped onto a rather steep and winding marble staircase, “we will have to fly across to the wall. My guards can arrange transport for those…” She paused. “Lacking the skills to get themselves there.”

In this group, that was probably only me. But if she thought I was allowing Birdy to fly me anywhere, she was out of her mind. I’d argue at the top, though, because I was currently busy trying to walk up the longest, trippiest—literally—set of stairs in the worlds. There was no handrail, and they were shiny with zero traction, and a very narrow lip on the upward curve. It was the sort of stairwell that could have been the end of me if Midnight and Angel weren’t there to keep me on my feet. For a shifter who was not usually clumsy, it was an odd experience to be unable to gracefully ascend.

“Step closer to this side,” Ixana said, appearing in front of me so fast, I was fairly sure she’d instantly transported. She leaned over to point to the side closer to the spiral, which looked way too small for my feet to fit. I mean, surely she knew that, since she was near a foot taller than me and had bigger feet. “It’s another illusion to make the journey harder,” she explained as I narrowed my eyes on her.

She then let out a nervous chuckle, turning and hurrying away. Staring after her, I really wanted to disregard her advice and move to the farthest spot from where she’d told me to step, but I also knew the value of not cutting my nose off to spite my face.

With that in mind, I decided to swallow my anger and pride, pretend I was the bigger person, and try what she suggested.

Almost immediately, it was easier. She’d been right about the illusion, which hid small grooves, allowing me to find the traction previously missing.

Damn her.

I had no idea what her game was, but she was playing well.

“Almost there,” she called back a moment later. “You’re doing great.”

She might as well have given me a pat on the back and a “Nice work, honey.” I could hear the condescension in her tone, but since I was being a bigger person, I didn’t reply with equal sarcasm. My wolf let out a howl of annoyance in my chest, and I had to remind her we were above such things.

All class, baby. We were all class.

By the time we reached the top, I was almost convinced this was a devious plot to kill us through hours of stairclimbing, but apparently, it was just how high the damn snowflake was.

When we exited onto a platform, the views were beyond spectacular. Or at least the initial view was, with Ixana’s snow-touched kingdom spanning out around us, white and wintery, with snowflake houses, furred beings milling in the streets, and what looked like a… garden in the center. It was huge, and the entire setup reminded me of the images I’d seen of Central Park in New York City.

“This is Landor,” she said, waving her hands around, and the icy breezes that had been buffeting us faded. Everything here obeyed her command, and I wondered if it was the power of Shadow’s stone that allowed that. He’d said it was fairly useless until it bonded to the Supreme Being, but somehow, she’d figured it out.

I hadn’t seen the stone again since that first time. She knew that keeping her leverage hidden away was her best chance of getting what she wanted. That in itself, was triggering all of my red-flag warnings about the queen, and her end game here.

“I have about five thousand of my Clangors here,” she said proudly. “The beings made of my creation. It has taken more than a thousand years, but they’re perfect now.”

I held a hand up, and everyone looked at me like I was a fucking bug. Ignoring this, I said, “I have a question.”

Shadow’s lips twitched, and he shook his head, like he’d been expecting that all along. “Uh, yes,” Ixana said.

“Is everyone in the Shadow Realm immortal?”

Why I’d waited so long to ask this, I had no idea. Maybe I’d just assumed because of Shadow that they were, but it had been well established he was a special snowflake—ha, ironic, considering what surrounded us—so it stood to reason that maybe there were those who died of old age here.

“It varies depending on the being,” Shadow said, the rumble of his voice doing downright sinful things to me. “Many of the creatures are, and they pass this on to the royals who bind them. But the freilds, fronds, and other races all age and die.”

Ixana nodded. “Oh, yes, the rest of the realm’s inhabitants have a lifespan of maybe five hundred cycles.”

“About five hundred years,” Shadow translated her translation.

“So, you’re immortal because of what?”

He met my gaze, and his eyes were actually sparkling in a way that told me he was amused as fuck. “Combination of Inky, the Solaris System, and… yeah, even shifters help boost my energy. Your power recharges my own.”

Torin had picked up on that weakness. Warning him that he knew how to best the beast. What had his plan been, though? Kill all the shifters?

Knowing that stupid fuck, I probably wasn’t far off.