Page 199 of The Stolen Throne
Then…it stops.
What in the dominions is Vos doing in there? Is Pella hearing this from where she’s keeping watch outside the door? Is he trying to get out?
With a blast of Tyndran air, snow erupts out of the room, and it doesn’t stop, piling up on the ground below the window despite the warmth of the night out here. A second later, two bodies launch out the broken window.
Pella and Vos.
She must’ve tried to stop him getting out. They grapple even as they fall, until they land in the pile of snow below. Vos is up first, wild-eyed and hands aglow. He stands over Pella, who I can’t see, still buried in the drift. Vos raises his hands, but a bolt of blue lightning knocks him a good twenty feet away.
Hakan. A second later, Pella emerges from the bank of snow. She’s barely standing when Vos rises like a ghoul from the underworld, the center of his chest burned and still smoking. Sniffing the air, he moves in that jerky, birdlike way the other Flesh Reapers do, then zeroes in…on me.
He sprints across the ground between us, foggy-eyed, his face a contorted mask of death.
Ah, hells. “Don’t make me do this,” I mutter as I unsheathe my knives, ready to defend myself.
Before he can get to me, though, Tziah gets between us, her hands raised, a wickedly curved blade she must have gotten from a fallen fighter in one. What if she smells of sickness, too? When she landed on Cain outside the palace, those things went for her…
Vos stares at her, then sniffs and growls like a vicious animal, the low rumble sending goose bumps over my skin.
But Tziah must see something that I don’t, because she moves not away but into Vos, wrapping her arms around his waist and laying her head on his chest.
“No!” Cain is across the field of the courtyard, but now he’s running for Tziah.
Vos throws his head back on a yell so feral, so full of conflict, that an ache for him sets up in my own chest. He shoves Tziah back and, glowing hands pointed down, freezes himself again, starting at his feet and growing the ice over his body, creating a clear block around him, reminding me of my glass tomb when I was trying to hold back the Shadows inside Reven the first time we faced down Eidolon.
Tziah falls to her knees beside him, head bowed, and places a hand on the ice. Reaching her side, Cain takes up a protective stance facing outward.
Before I can so much as move, a solid column of shadow erupts at the other end of the courtyard, obscuring the main palace building. Then the column morphs to black mist, dissipating to reveal a single man dressed in brilliant white.
Eidolon.
King Panqui didn’t play us for his own ends. What were his orders? Distract us until Eidolon arrived? Or kill us and hand over the corpses?
The fighting jars to a halt, and Cain looks over at me, his expression that of a warrior who will fight to his last breath, made even more fearsome by the smears of blood and dirt on his face. “Get us out of here.”
“Tabra!” someone screams.
I whirl, knife raised. Across what before this night was a beautiful courtyard garden but is now a battlefield, Achlys is slashing at shadow—what appears to be a solid arm of smoke—with the knife I gave her. Horus and Omma are fighting it with her. But the shadow blocks them all and wraps a tendril around Tabra’s ankle.
“Meren!” Tabra’s lips form my name as she scrabbles at the ground. The darkness drags her away.
85
Scattered
As if my sister’s cry was a signal, the fighting resumes, a clash of bodies and weapons and yells, even more frenzied now. I plunge into the tumult, running after Tabra, dodging and darting and trying not to be stopped.
Even from this far away, I can make Eidolon out. He stands, arms raised, the glow of his hands casting a purple light over everything. And to his right, not bound and not struggling, is…
I stumble over my own feet.
Mother goddess.
Reven.
Is that why I couldn’t feel my bondmate? Because Eidolon already took him?
The rope of shadow that has Tabra drags her to the king’s other side, standing her up and wrapping around her like a snake. Fear wraps around me the same way, threatening to crush me.
