Total pages in book: 362
Estimated words: 347293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1736(@200wpm)___ 1389(@250wpm)___ 1158(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 347293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1736(@200wpm)___ 1389(@250wpm)___ 1158(@300wpm)
Eather throbbed in my chest, so intense that it stole my breath. The essence kept pulsing—as if I sensed death.
A warm hand cupped the back of my neck, startling me. I looked up to see Nektas crouched before me, fainter screams still causing me to flinch.
“Meyaah Liessa.” His rough, gravelly voice caused me to wince.
“Where is Nyktos?” Rhain demanded.
“He was summoned to the Pillars of Asphodel,” Rhahar said, his fisted hand at his chest.
His cousin stood beside him. “The souls can wait—”
“You don’t understand,” Rhahar interrupted. Nektas helped me stand. “He was pulled to the Pillars.”
Breathing raggedly, I felt my stomach hollow. I’d never seen the draken look so pale—so disturbed.
Rhain stumbled back and understanding dawned on his face. “No.”
Saion’s worried gaze darted between his cousin and Rhain. “What the fuck is happening?”
“As a Primal of Death, it is a summons he has no choice but to obey.” The corners of Nektas’s mouth were pinched white. “There are…” He looked away, his jaw clenching. He closed his eyes.
“Too many souls have arrived at the Pillars to be judged by them,” Rhain answered.
Saion stiffened. “What?”
“Souls,” I whispered, my hands trembling as I suddenly understood what had taken my legs out from under me. “Hundreds.” A shudder went through me. “Thousands of souls. So many I could hear them. I can still hear them. Can feel their deaths.”
“Fates,” Saion breathed. “What could’ve caused that?”
“A…a disaster in the environment?” Rhain suggested numbly. “Like a massive quake?”
“No,” I whispered, the nape of my neck tingling. “It wasn’t that. There was nothing natural about this. It was…” I inhaled sharply. “I have to go.”
Nektas’s stare snapped in my direction. “No, you do not.”
Shaking my head, I backed up, the essence thrumming. “I have to.”
Rhain’s eyes went wide. “Don’t—”
The part of me that still operated as if I were mortal simply clicked off. There was no hesitation, no overthinking anything.
Following the cries of the dying, I shadowstepped into the mortal realm—into a waking nightmare that had once been my home.
Lasania.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Death was everywhere.
It was all I could smell when I shadowstepped to different parts of the kingdom. All I could see. All I could hear amid the wailing of those who remained. No matter where I looked. No matter where I shadowstepped. Death had come in the moonlight, during the quietest, softest hours, and reigned with supremacy over Lasania’s capital. Neither wealth, power, nor age protected them.
And even though I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I knew. Gods, I knew whose screams I had heard first.
But I couldn’t believe it as I kept moving throughout Carsodonia and saw every one of their faces, each with waxy, stunned expressions. A bone-deep fury sparked.
Bodies hung from blown-out windows. They lay in their gardens in pairs, faces forever frozen in horror, and crowded the narrow streets of Croft’s Cross, having fallen one atop the other. They choked the Nye River and washed in with the tide, some getting snagged on the rocks while others got pulled back out to be forever lost in the Stroud Sea. Bodies dotted the beach’s white sand, their arms and legs twisted. They bunched in scattered heaps along the battlements, forms broken from the fall.
And all the while, shadows moved silently through the city like wraiths, seeking to hide. But I saw them. I saw all of them. And I felt others I hadn’t yet seen. I was not alone here.
My gaze lifted to the towers and turrets of the castle, and I knew. Gods, I already knew what I would find when I shadowstepped beyond walls that had done nothing—absolutely fucking nothing—to prevent the horror that had come this night. Still, what I saw in the courtyard brought me to my knees.
I saw them between the flashes of lightning—silver-and-gold strikes that tore through the night sky. Impaled to the walls of Wayfair just as the gods had been on the Rise outside the House of Haides, staked through the hands and chest with shadowstone. Their heads were tilted back, forced into unnatural poses that exposed their faces as if they wanted to be seen. Needed to be.
I didn’t want to look. A tremor started deep within me, and I made myself see them—see the faces of the servants and guards, maids and stewards I recognized. I saw the dark-haired, pale-skinned serving girl who’d baited me into a trap the day I returned from assisting Ezra at the Healers. I saw the cook Orlando, the mountain of a man reduced to nothing but lifeless flesh and bone.
I saw Lady Kala.
My mother’s most trusted Lady in Wait, who’d made that long walk with me through the corridors of the Shadow Temple upon my seventeenth birthday. Who was always with—
Long, blond strands danced in the wind, tangling with Lady Kala’s brown hair. My chest compressed. A citrine hairpin glittered in the sunlight. A pretty, once buttery-yellow gown now glistened with streaks of red, but I heard her voice as if her lips moved.