With one last scared look at all of us, Jossie steps forwards and exits the carriage. Then she helps Kalem follow, with Gynith closely behind him. The trumpets continue to pierce the gloomy morning air, making the birds fly and scatter from the trees that surround the road. Briar jumps out of the carriage while Alistair stands by the door with a flinty glare aimed at the approaching Royal Party.
And here I am, petrified.
“Come on,” Alistair urges even though he himself is reluctant. “Let’s get this over with.”
I nod and come with him as he steps out, but I can barely feel my own heart beating. So many thoughts are running in my head. What if they see me? What if they see him? What if we get caught and they find out who I really am?
The Royal Party pulls level with us, and in perfect sync, we get to our knees and bow for the King and the Queen. However I sneak a glance up, just to satisfy my longing, just to see my father. And
We’re underwater, yet there’s fire everywhere. On my skin, on my lips, all over my body. And when I feel Alistair’s fingertips brushing the sides of my waist, I almost lose it. I gasp, but his lips close over mine, kissing away the soft sounds and breaths that escape me. A blazing trail is left at the spots he caressed as his hands slide on my back, gently tracing the length of my spine until he cups my bottom and pulls me towards him. I feel something hard and long pressing against me, and a thrill invades my heart when I realize what it is. I bob up from the water, wrapping my arms around his neck and deepening the kiss. I’m drowning in him, slowly losing myself in the warmth of his skin and the firmness of his body. I’m moving with him as he starts to kiss me more urgently, his hands going from slow and gentle to needy and hungry. And as I get submerged in the sensation of him, images start to flash in my head. I see a big black wolf in a f
“Alistair!” His name escapes my lips as I rush to catch him, but gravity gets there ahead of me. He’s splayed on the ground, his eyes shut but his mouth slightly agape, the red gash on his chest still soaking his shirt with blood. The sight of it makes my stomach turn, not out of disgust but of pure, cold fear that engulfs my body in one go. I get to him a millisecond too late, and when I’m finally kneeling by his body, my brain freezes up. What am I supposed to do now? Will I worsen his bleeding if I move him even a little? “Please help him.” I turn to Briar, but he’s already on his way. On the other side of Alistair, Briar kneels, quickly taking Alistair’s arm and draping it around his shoulders. Then, in one go, Briar lifts him up. “Take his other side, Lora. We’re close to the camp anyway.” He’s right. We are close, but every step carrying Alistair’s limp body is complete and utter mental torture. It feels like the camp is still a long way
I look at the other side of the grand ballroom and catch Jossie’s eye. We’re both dressed in the white uniforms of servers, both holding flutes of liquor on gold platters, going around the place to offer drinks for the hundreds of guests. Tonight is the night. Everyone is in position, and tension is high. But I would say luck seems to be on our side. Getting inside the Governor’s mansion was surprisingly easy. We just had to wear the uniforms and go our separate ways, then we instantly got picked up by the ones in charge of the logistics aspect of the party. In no time, after lingering at the back door of the kitchen, Jossie, Gynith, and I were steered inside and instructed to hold drinks for the guests. Meanwhile, Alistair and Briar are just patrolling around the mansion. Kalem and Scion are waiting outside, hiding inside the carriage that we’ll use to get away. Everything is set, right from the beginning. We had a good start and now it’s up to us to keep it
For a second my whole world turns black. The man lifts me up in the air and tries to press me against the cold marble walls, but I kick and thrash as hard as I can. He almost loses grip, but he quickly recovers and holds onto me even tighter.“Shh,” he croons by my ear, and instantly I feel bile rising up my throat. “Come peacefully now.”Being peaceful is never an option. Not when my life is in such terrible danger. I think of Alistair and the others, about what is possibly happening to them right now.I hope it’s just me. If they’re safe, I really have no complaints. I will take this situation with no problem. But the thing is, I have no idea if they’re safe, so I continue to struggle.Balling my hands into fists, I try to elbow the man’s ribs. I come into contact, feeling his bones collide against my joint, but he doesn’t seem fazed. In fact, the harder I struggle, the better he gets at holding me d
Steeling my breath, I brace myself for who’s about to enter. Everything seems to be slowing into a stop, even time itself. From the length of the staircase, I can hear footsteps and scuffles, low muffled groans and hissed commands. My skin drumming with pain, my eyes watering as I keep my gaze fixed on the bottom of the stairs, but I still feel a clearTwo figures come in, shadows at first, elongating with the flickering light of the gas lamps.The room seems to draw breath when I see that it’s Alistair.And dragging him into the dungeon is no other than Briar.“Ah, there you are,” Governor Celso calls out to him gaily. “Bring him here. Right in front of the lady.”The sheer shock from what I’m witnessing is enough to paralyze me. For a second I’m not entirely sure of what I’m seeing. It’s Briar. Our supposed ally. The one who helped Alistair many times. Yeah, he’s not a good person,
“No, that’s not true!” I scream at Governor Celso. In a spur of rage, I jump to my feet and aim for a slap, but he grabs my arm just in time and pulls me so that we’re face to face. He sneers, so I grit my teeth, take a deep breath, and spit on his face. “Scum.”His sneer doesn’t vanish, but I can see the fiery anger in his eyes. “Call me whatever you want. That doesn’t change the fact that you brought them here to me.” He wipes his face and grabs my neck, spinning me around to make me face Alistair and the others. “Now I can take them to the king, like you intended. You can thank me later, once we’re married.”He holds me in place, his breath at the back of my neck. Alistair is staring at me with his eyes shining with tears. Jossie is glaring at me. Gyntih and Kalem are not moving anymore, slumped on the ground and bleeding.“Please believe me,” I say, but my voice is bare
The first thing I register is the sensation of long sharp points lodging themselves in my right shoulder, seemingly slow in finding the depths of my flesh. Something warm is rushing into me, and it’s not just the breath of Alistair’s wolf form on my numb skin. It’s rushing into my veins, latching itself onto the very fiber of my being as my muscles freeze. I try to inhale, to at least gasp at the excruciating sensation, but my chest is hard. It’s not giving way to my breaths. Heat is spreading in my bones as though I’m being set on fire from the inside. I open my mouth and I immediately feel my voice rising up, building up my throat— Then I let out a blood-curdling scream that shakes up the entire dungeon as he pulls away. I fall on my knees. My hand instantly flies to the bitten spot, the area where my neck meets my shoulder. The blood on it is thick and sticky now, continuously flowing from the numerous holes that I can feel under my fingers. My sig
This has to be a dream.I force myself to get over my frozen state and give my arm a good pinch. I feel the sting of my fingernails digging into my skin. I count mentally from one to three, expecting everything and everyone to vanish, but after I blink rapidly, the scene is still in place. The flowers, the velvet bed, the chapel. Madame Mara, Simeon, and of course, Uncle Osman.And he’s walking towards me, his arms open for a hug. His face is slack with surprise and warm with affection. “Elora! I can’t believe this—”“How are you alive?” I blurt out, and immediately, hysteria starts to climb up my throat. “How are you alive? What’s happening? Why am I here?”Fake. This has to be all fake. I refuse to believe that this is not a hallucination that my brain is coming up with to maybe give me a good feeling before I truly pass away. This is too surreal.In a panicked daze, I start to touch the
⇼ E L O R A ⇼ Days passed. Then weeks. Before I knew it, a whole month had passed, and when I woke up earlier with this realization, I just felt like a gigantic weight had been lifted off my chest. Life goes on, I realize. No matter how bad the situations were, my life still went on. And so did the lives of the others. The past month proved that. I open my eyes and look at the ceiling of the guest room, which we have designated among ourselves due to the renovation and the reconstruction that we’re doing for the palace. Some of the people from other city-states are going in and out of the Capital to help, also to take part in the planning process of our biggest project ever: tearing down the walls from the palace and the Capital. From outside the window of the room I share with Alistair, I can already see the shrine of the heroes in the courtyard. It’s a ten feet tall marble obelisk with all the names of the fallen. I didn’t include
⇼ E L O R A ⇼A scream builds up in my throat and escapes my mouth, ringing inside the chapel and out into the forest.With my entire body shaking, I scramble out of the dark building, my skin still covered in goosebumps. I slip and slide against the marble floor and almost fall more than three times, but I don’t care. All I want is to put as much space between me and the monstrosity that is my uncle’s dead body, which was missing just hours ago.How did it get there? What is it doing there? Why did it look at me? Why am I here? How did I get here?These questions all swirl in my head like a deadly mix, making me whimper all the way back around the lakeside. Small stones are digging into my soles and I’m just slipping everywhere, but I keep going like a wild prey getting away from its predator. No matter how many times I blink, I can’t get rid of the picture in my head, the picture of Uncle Osman’s glassy eyes staring at me.My feet keep sinking in
⇼ E L O R A ⇼I want to scream, but no sound escapes me. It’s as though my voice completely vanished, and now I’m left here staring at my dead uncle as he grabs my arm and forces me to walk with him.And the weird thing is, I can actually feel his hand clasping my ruined wrist. It’s almost as though he’s more solid than anything in here, more solid than me. It’s like I’m a dream but he’s in a higher form of reality that conquers mine. This notion only gets stronger when I try to struggle but he just doesn’t budge. He’s solid. He’s stronger than me.“Why do you want to leave so bad?” he asks me, his voice as gentle and as good-natured as I remember. He points at the chapel with his other hand, and as if on cue, the lights from inside glow brighter. I can actually see silhouettes of people from the windows, and they’re not moving. They’re all just standing there, completely still.
⇼ A L I S T A I R ⇼“No,” I hear Elora whisper, and my heart just cracks for her. She sounds so broken and so lost that I forget just how confused and afraid I am. I go up to her side and put a hand on her shoulder, and she wheels around to face me. “Are you sure this is the place?”“Yes,” I say, my voice low. I point at the smear of blood scattered along the massive elevated platform in the middle of the circular room. “Kalem said that they gathered the remains of the King’s brother and put him in the catacombs behind the chapel, in the room at the end of the tunnel.”Even though I remember what Kalem said perfectly, I still look around just to make sure we are indeed in the right place. There’s no other room in the catacombs, just these hallways with cubby holes on the walls, each containing either porcelain jars or wooden boxes with peeling gold paint. Apart from the blood on the slab of rock, there
⇼ E L O R A ⇼Coldness creeps into my body, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. Madam Mara’s eyes are filled with nothing but pure and cold fear, the kind that will petrify you on the spot. For a vague moment I wonder what she actually knew, what she has seen and heard that still makes her shake like this even though Uncle Osman is already dead.But when she said he’s not human . . . I felt that was true.It was in the way he fought Alistair and I. We’re both Supernaturals, and I know we’re not used to fighting, but we should have been able to overpower him in a second, no sweat. But no. He was prepared. He was resilient. He was fighting back. And at some point he was even winning. It really wasn’t normal, and I was definitely thinking about it, but I don’t think I truly considered the possibility of it until Madam Mara came to me.And now she’s staring at me intensely like she’s going to explode
⇼ A L I S T A I R ⇼The sheer shock that thundered inside my body is enough to make time seem to slow down. I watch numbly as the Queen’s hand, still clasping the fork, draws closer and closer to her swollen belly. . . .I sweep closer, landing on my knees in front of the prison cell. I slide my hand through the metal bars just in time to move my hand right between the fork and her pregnant belly. She ends up stabbing my hand with enough force to let the tines sink into my palm with an abrupt squelching sound.The pain makes me gasp, but I take this accident as an opportunity to grab the fork and take it away from her.With my hand dripping blood, I turn to Jossie and Kalem, who are both horrified at the scene. “Do you have the key? Let’s take her—”“NO!” Queen Zuri shrieks, ramming against the metal bars. “It’s evil! Evil, I tell you! Get me out of here, please . . . I am begging you. Just take
⇼ A L I S T A I R ⇼The way to the prison cells of the palace is steep, dark, and incredibly eerie. Jossie and Kalem are right beside me as we walk along the narrow hallways leading down, but I feel alone. I feel cold. It’s as though this part of the palace is full of invisible hands, slowly pulling me under a pool of freezing water.After my talk with Elora, Jossie found me and informed me that I must oversee what’s being done to the new prisoners.“We need to know how we’re going to do all these things and just . . . make a process,” she said, her confusion very apparent on her face. “I honestly don’t know what we’re going to do with all these people, Alistair. I don’t know if we can trust them to be here when there are still soldiers around. Even the soldiers of their own city-state are here too.”“I understand, and don’t worry, I will find a way,” I told her then, pretty con
⇼ A L I S T A I R ⇼The Queen holds out her arms for me to bind them, but I’m empty handed apart from the cannon I stole from a guard just moments ago. I look at Elora, and she cuts off a strip from the hem of her shirt and ties it around the Queen’s wrists before pulling her up to her feet.Around us, the handmaidens all get to their knees, touching the ground with their foreheads as they face us. For a brief second I have to wonder what they are doing exactly, but then it occurs to me that this is their sign of surrender. They are changing their allegiance. They are showing that they are now ready to serve us since we basically dethroned the Queen and invaded the whole palace.To be frank, I don’t know how to feel about all of this. I want to tell them that it’s alright, that they don’t need to bow, but I can’t find the right words to say.Would it even be alright to show some kind of consideration or sympathy after I
⇼ A L I S T A I R ⇼ The path down has absolutely no amount of illumination, not even the tiniest one. The light from the throne room isn’t sneaking into the hole, which makes me think that it’s nothing but a black hole gaping at the floor of the dais, with nothing inside it. But Elora is just making her way down as though this isn’t a problem. I want to stop her and ask if she is certain, but the determination on her face and her slow deliberate movements are the answer for me. I peek down and notice that she’s holding onto metal bars and not just floating down, but this does very little to assure me. The darkness reminds me of shadows. And shadows remind me of my magic. The magic that killed those innocent guards. The magic that poisoned them to death, blackened their veins, and mangled their bodies. . . . “Are you going to follow me or not?” Elora’s voice, thin and fragile and barely audible, snaps me out of my reverie. I quickly nod