Page 14 of The Bound Blood
“You want her to survive?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for my response. “Then don’t be the reason she doesn’t.”
He turns, moves to the stone wall behind him, and presses his palm to a carved sigil. A section of the rock shudders, then shifts inward, revealing a small box carved of bone and onyx.
Azrael lifts the lid.
Inside, resting on deep black velvet, is a circular shard of glass rimmed in iron and humming with something ancient andwrong. Shadows curl within it, moving even when the light does not.
“What is that?” I ask, voice low.
“A shadow-glass,” Azrael says. “A Veil artifact. Rare. Illegal. Dangerous in the wrong hands.”
“And in mine?”
“Necessary,” he replies. “It’s attuned to her magic. When the bond pulses, this will show you what you’re not supposed to see. What she might be hiding. Or what’s trying to find her.”
He holds it out.
“But you don’t use it near her,” he warns. “You use it fromafar.You want to protect her? Then learn to watch without touching. To fight for her without being by her side.”
My hand hesitates over the glass. This is the opposite of what everything inside me is screaming is the truth. But I take it anyway.
Because I don’t know how else to keep her alive.
SEVEN
LINDSAY
The cracksin the ground settle, sealing themselves as if the world is pretending it never came apart. My shadow self is gone, leaving only silence in her wake. But I’m not alone.
The Academy shifts again. Not with the violence from before—but something slower. Like time pressing in on itself, folding corners and edges until the familiar becomes uncanny. I find myself standing in the great hall again, though it feels hollowed out, a memory with the sound turned down. The mirror on the ceiling is gone.
Then I see them.
Kael. Nolan. Raiden.
They’re not quite real, but they’re not illusions either, not reflections in a mirror. They stand apart, suspended like stars in orbit. None of them speak, but I feel them. Their presence. Their pull attached to my chest.
I rub the spot attempting to ease the tension building behind my breastbone. And then their marks appear.
Kael’s palm glows first, like moonlight reflecting off glass. His hand is half-curled at his side, but the mark pulses silver and shadow from beneath his skin, etched in a way that doesn’t look natural.
On Nolan, it glows around his wrist, a golden intricate ring of unsteady light. It flickers as if unsure of itself, like it’s caught between fading and catching fire. His expression is unreadable, but that glow speaks for him. It reaches for me even when he won’t. A thread snaking through the space between us.
Raiden’s is the strongest. The light glows high along his collarbone, golden and steady—anchored. His breath rises and falls in sync with the tether, and I feel it in my own chest, like a second heartbeat.
The realization crashes into me slowly, terrifying in its certainty. I'm connected to each of them. I did this when my power lost control.
Not just Raiden now.
All of them.
Each one tethered to me by something deeper than magic.
Kael’s mark flares as he shifts his stance. Not toward me—but away. Like he’s pulling back like before. Hiding something. Closing me out.
My stomach drops as pain slices through me.
“No,” I whisper. “Don’t.”
