ARWEN
MADDOX SNARLED AS HE TOOK in my wounds. My undoubtably pale face. The dead guards and toxic flame and glass-strewn chaos
reigning over the atrium. “What the fuck happened?” “We were attacked.”
He knelt, his eyes narrowing. Flames crackled behind his thick head. “Lying whore.”
“No,” I pleaded. Tried to stand.
Mistake.
Wobbling on bloodless limbs, I fell to the floor, palms barely extending fast enough to catch me. My body screamed in pain.
“You did this.” His voice sliced through my dizzying thoughts. “You fucking did this.”
An unstable balcony in the hallway clattered down in a crash of smoke, sending nurses and handmaidens screaming. A column followed suit. The palace was collapsing.
Unbothered by the disintegration around us, Maddox grasped my shoulders and yanked me up with his meaty hands. I scratched and tugged away to no avail.
“Stop.” My voice was too hoarse to hear over the shouts and pleas and screams.
Then I got a decent look at him.
Maddox’s face was covered in ash. His ear, blown clean off. His nose was bleeding. “You’re going to be sorry.” Maddox swore, wrapping a single hand around my throat and squeezing, eliciting an involuntary whimper from me. “I am going to make you so,” he said, grunting and tightening his fist, “so sorry.”
I clawed and choked, my limp legs dangling, leaden beneath me. “Let her go,” someone called. “Let her go, Maddox!”
But Maddox was too rageful. I could see it in his beady eyes. His grimacing, blocklike face. Nothing would stop him from ending me. And it would be easy. I already had no air. A concussion, I thought. Some spinal injury, and burns. So many burns…
I could barely process Wyn as he barreled into Maddox and sent the three of us flying toward the stiff, unforgiving stone floor of what was left of the atrium.
My entire body wailed with the impact. I cowered—none of that brave, last full-blooded Fae left in me—as someone delivered blow after blow after bone-crunching blow beside me.
Please let it be Wyn.
I pried one stiff, blurred eye open.
Soft dark hair plastered to his head, face contorted with real, true conviction, Wyn knelt over Maddox and pummeled him with more fury than I’d seen from anyone in a long, long while. Years of fury. A lifetime’s worth. And something in my smoke-filled chest broke at the tears that slipped down his face as he raged and drove fist after fist.
“Wyn,” I croaked eventually, crawling toward him. “He’s dead.”
But Wyn did not falter. He slammed one bloodied, ashy hand after another into his rival until teeth scattered across the floor. I was never squeamish, but even I couldn’t bring myself to look at what remained of Maddox’s face.
“Wyn, please.”
Finally, some vengeance-spell broken by my ragged plea, Wyn released Maddox and stared at what his hands had done.
Eventually he climbed off his fellow guard and lifted me to stand. I swayed on my numb legs and Wyn course-corrected, allowing me to lean into him. “Arwen.” He sounded worse than ragged. “We have to get you to
—”
“Why?” I asked.
His voice drifted off as he observed the chaos. The devastation. The few guards funneling out past walls of fire, desperate for a reprieve from the growing blaze.
“Why…” I croaked again, finally casting my eyes over Maddox. The bloodied guard was a nauseating lump of blood and soot.
Feeling was finally coming back to my legs. Not my spine, then, thank the Stones. I held my palm to the burns across my back and neck. No lighte yet. It would be a while before any of my lighte regenerated. I’d used more tonight than I had in months.
“All I ever wanted was to do right by my mother,” Wyn said as I righted myself to stand. “She wouldn’t be proud of the things I allowed to happen within these walls.” Wyn shook his head. “The things I allowed to happen to you.”
The crash of something—a pillar, or lofted ceiling—sent us careening back and down into the ground. Soot and wreckage filled my mouth and eyes. And heat. More fire, more ruinous flame.
“We need to go,” Wyn managed around the thick, gray air. “Where is Kane?”
Wyn’s bloodshot eyes locked onto mine. “He’s here? In the palace?” As if on cue, somewhere, a dragon roared.
Before I could make sense of it—had Kane regained his lighte? Had he found the blade? Or was that a victorious, celebratory Lazarus?—a wild lick of fire lashed out at us. Supernaturally hot and scalding my flesh. Engulfing us, burning—
And then we were moving. Running, as best I could, before the flames could maul us. Sprinting, despite the pounding in my head and all my sizzling burns.
“Wyn,” I panted as we ran past burning columns and melting flesh, “what is the fastest way out of the palace?” He knew what I meant. Where no guards will see us. I had to get out, had to find Kane—
“There isn’t one,” Wyn shouted. “They’re already hunting for you.”
Flames blazed through my vision. Walls of it tunneling, blooming around what was left of Lazarus’s atrium. Swallowing the carcasses of the settees, melting every candle, warping the shards of vases and frames.
“Gods above,” Wyn breathed.
The heat was unbearable. Eons past discomfort. My heart slowed, tired of pumping so fast for so long.
“Think,” I urged him. “You’ve been a kingsguard here for years. There has to be something. One of those hidden passages?”
“The broom closet,” he said in the end, already moving toward a nondescript door that might have otherwise blended into the bloodred walls, and dragging me behind him.
I dodged over groaning, melting men in silver armor. “It won’t protect us forever. Eventually we’ll be kindling.”
“Trust me,” he called back.
But the door was locked. Wyn readied his hands at the frame, lighte curling—
“No.” I seized his wrists. “If you blow the door we can’t defend ourself from the flames.”
“Gods damn it,” Wyn cursed. “Then there’s nothing else, Arwen. Not if we can’t get inside without blasting it open.”
But I’d watched my brother and Halden pick the lock of Powell’s shed a hundred times. I sank to my knees, heart racing, and fished Wyn’s hairpin from my curls. The metal glinted in the glow of the surrounding flames, and I nudged it carefully into the keyway despite my shaking hands.
Agonizing seconds ticked by in which I wondered if this was the worst possible detour to being burned alive…
“Arwen…”
“I can do it,” I bit out, “I just need one more—”
But then the door clicked open and Wyn and I tumbled inside before slamming it closed.
Darkness engulfed us both. And cool, trapped air. Dusty and stale but still—cold air.
Wyn and I sighed in unison.
The closet wasn’t really large enough for us both. It only held three brooms, propped against a wall of shelving stuffed with cleaning supplies, buckets, and rags. The cramped space was lit only by the warm, flickering light of the blaze outside, slipping in through the crack at the bottom of the door.
“Now what?” I asked, willing my fear to quiet its ringing in my ears—I couldn’t panic. Not now.
“There was a false wall in here years ago…” Wyn’s warm, ragged breath fanned over my face in the small space. “One that led to a tunnel that took you to the city center. An escape route for Lazarus in case the castle were ever breached.”
My mouth had gone bone-dry. My hands trembled at my sides. My burns stung.
When I heaved for no reason at all, Wyn finally turned back toward me. I only knew he had from the echo of his feet shifting in the gritty dirt floor. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, walking past him. My heart had settled itself in my tonsils. I dry heaved again.
“What is it?”
Tightness seized my chest with the scuttle of something across my foot. “I get anxious in enclosed spaces. It’s fine.”
No sooner had I said it than a simple turn yawned the tunnel open widely before us. The rocky catacomb was dimly lit, but where the light was coming from I wasn’t sure—not moonlight from above us, not candles
—but I sucked in great heaves of air regardless. I nearly leaned over to brace myself against my knees.
Critters scurrying and the sound of shifting sediment echoed, but I was too relieved to have some space, some light, some air that I hardly noticed.
Moss—or perhaps severely mildewed fabric—lay in tufts in one corner. A stone well crumbled in the opposite one. I couldn’t imagine how stagnant, how putrid that primeval water might have been. And from some other corner, a clatter—
Dinner scraps clinking. Bones—
Wyn drew in a breath.
Either this had not been the right route, or Lazarus had employed some kind of safeguard to block his only exit to the city center. Some kind of—
A withering, earsplitting screech rocked the cavern and silenced my thoughts.
“We need to go back,” I heard myself say. “Now.”
Wyn grasped my hand and we ran for that tunnel. To go back the way we’d came, back up that immortally dark corridor and back out into the flames.
But we weren’t fast enough. The creature was already there, waiting for
us.
Grinning.
