It was only a matter of time, though, before the Bloodborn forces flooded the streets to meet her. With the Rishan occupying the sky, she’d be forced to take the brunt of Septimus’s troops. She was ready for it. The crashes of unbridled chaos below shifted into the cacophony of battle, distant screams and clashes of steel mingling with the explosions and demon snarls.

She was evenly matched.

But not outnumbered. Not yet.

I prayed to the Mother it stayed that way.

Vale dipped close to me. “Highness,” he said, voice low and serious, and I didn’t even have to turn my head to know exactly what he saw by his tone alone.

We’d been rushing toward the castle, seizing as much sky as we could before Simon’s Rishan men would come to meet us. We’d made it far, now over the tall spires of the inner city—farther, honestly, than I had expected.

But the easy part had come to an end.

A wave of Rishan soldiers rose from the castle grounds like a thick plume of smoke—a rolling morass of wings and steel blotting out the stars.

My heart sank when I saw that wave of soldiers. Vale had only been able to guess at exactly how many Rishan warriors Simon had been able to accumulate. We’d hoped he was relying more on bravado and illusions than numbers.

This sight dashed those hopes. This was a real army.

Still, attacking by air meant we only had to deal with Simon’s limited Rishan forces. We’d prepared for this.

I scanned the lines, looking for the man I was really after—the only one I had to kill to end this, once and for all—but I didn’t see Simon anywhere in that sea of faces.

That surprised me. I was so certain he’d be at the front of the pack, ready to demonstrate his dominance. Hell, I thought he’d want to make sure he was the one to kill me himself.

My gaze lifted beyond the onslaught of incoming men, to the silver spires of the Nightborn castle rising above the bloodshed.

Or maybe he was cowering in his tower, waiting for me to come to him.

I could make that happen, too.

Simon’s soldiers gained speed, whipping through the air like arrows. And we didn’t slow, either, bracing to meet them head-on.

If they wanted a fight, they’d get a fight.

“Ready yourselves!” Vale bellowed, silver wings spreading beneath the moonlight, his own weapon bared.

An expanse of steel raised as our opponents charged for us, neither group slowing, neither group hesitating.

I was fucking ready.

I lifted my sword, and we dove into the wall of death.

57

ORAYA

I didn’t know that the tunnels extended this far beyond the castle grounds. I knew that Vincent hadn’t trusted me with everything, but sometimes, the extent of all he had withheld still threw me. He had always told me that the passages were through the castle grounds only. But Jesmine led us through a little shack on the outskirts of the city, and through a trap door in its dirty, fully furnished bedroom that led down into the tunnels.

I didn’t even have time to be bothered by this now. Of course Vincent wouldn’t have told me about tunnels beyond the grounds. He wanted me to stay exactly where I was, safely within the walls of his castle.

Why should I be surprised?

We moved swiftly, though the tunnels, narrow as they were, were inefficient for this number of people. We’d prepared ourselves for potential confrontation down here—we couldn’t know how much of the tunnel system Septimus had discovered—but didn’t encounter a soul. A stroke of luck. Any battle within these narrow passages would be a disaster.

The halls were too dark for my human eyes, but the Nightfire at my blade lit the way. I didn’t consciously intend to run—but my steps grew quicker and quicker the closer we got to the heart of Sivrinaj.

Once we encroached upon the inner city, we started to hear the clashes above.

The sounds started off muffled and dull, the distant rumbles of cracking wood and crumbling stone, the sporadic blasts of explosives. Ketura’s troops, traveling over the streets above us, breaking down the barriers between us and the castle with the help of the demons and the Nightfire explosives.

The sound raised goosebumps on my arms—in anticipation, not dread. This was what we were supposed to be hearing. That, at least, was the sound of progress.

Soon, those echoes grew louder as the tunnels grew wider and better lit. We were reaching the inner city, moving steadily toward our final destination.

That was when things started to change.

The noises from above were now loud enough to vibrate the walls, the worst of them sending waterfalls of dust and dirt falling from the ceiling, the Nightfire flames shivering with the impact. A knot of unease started in my stomach, though I told myself that we were expecting things to get harder as we progressed—we were prepared for this.

But when a particularly loud BOOM made the ground itself lurch, sending both Jesmine and I stumbling against the walls, we exchanged a wary glance.

Jesmine walked faster, shouting urgent commands to those that followed us, but my steps faltered.

It wasn’t the sound, exactly, that did it. It was something deeper, something in the air itself, that I couldn’t put a name to. It buried under my skin, more persistent than the anxiety of battle. A force pulsing against my magic. A toxic smoke clinging to the inside of my lungs.

It was silent, it was invisible, and it was everywhere.

Fifty years ago, a volcano on one of the Nightborn islands erupted, killing every living thing on it—every living thing except for the birds, which all disappeared six hours before, flying off in one sky-darkening flock.

Was this, I wondered, what the birds had felt like that day?

I doubled my pace, catching up to Jesmine, then overtaking her. She shot me a look that had me wondering if she’d felt what I did, too. I’d never seen her show anything close to fear. And still, this wasn’t fear—not quite—but it was close enough to be almost as unnerving.

“Did you—” she started, but I cut her off.

“We need to get up there.” The words flew from my lips before I knew exactly how true they were. “We need to get up there, now.”

58

RAIHN

I’d lost track of just how many men I’d killed. I was in the Kejari all over again, thrown into senseless, indiscriminate, unending violence.

Maybe I wasn’t any better than Neculai, or Vincent, or Simon after all. Maybe I was just another cursed king.

Because I fucking loved it.

I barely felt the scream of my muscles or the bite of my wounds. Something more primal took over. Rational thought disappeared. My magic surged in my veins, grateful for the opportunity to finally be set free, fully unleashed—and this was what it wanted to do. Kill. Reclaim. Possess.

I wasn’t relying on sight anymore, and that was a gift, because I couldn’t see anything even if I’d tried. Through the smears of black blood in my eyes, my field of vision became nothing but fragmented flashes of wings and weapons and steel buried in bodies. The blinding black-white of my Asteris followed my every stroke. Defeated enemies hurtled to the ground like limp rag dolls, falling onto the roofs of the buildings below.

Time, physicality, space ceased to exist. I thought about nothing but the next strike, the next kill, the next inch of ground I could gain toward that castle—my castle.

Until him.

The shift was immediate, so strong it actually managed to knock me from my bloodlust—so strong it made my muscles freeze at the most inopportune moment, interrupting my counter against the Rishan soldier attacking me and earning me a vicious cut over my shoulder.

I grabbed the soldier, skewered him, and let him fall to the ground, but I wasn’t looking at him anymore. Instead, my gaze flicked up.