The ridiculous thought, something that belonged to her life as a First Daughter rather than a queen and a heretic, was enough to loose a horrible, barking laugh.
Before her, Solmir stood in the path of that huge mouth, his own teeth bared in the rictus of a smile. He’d been wearing a coat before, dark and almost military-like, but now he’d thrown it to the side, pushed up the sleeves of the thin white shirt beneath. Black lines ran down his arms, like ink cascading from his heart instead of blood. Darkness pooled in his hands, blackening his fingers, his wrists. A thin line of ice shone across his knuckles.
The gnashing mouth of the wormlike monster was so close Neve could feel its breath.
Then Solmir opened his outstretched fists.
The darkness in his hands shot into the air, growing jagged and thorny, like he’d woven a net of brambles in his bloodstream and now cast it out. It fell on the monster, cutting into its gore-caked flesh, contracting around its body, and making it bellow.
But still the thing kept coming.
Fear was an unnatural emotion to see on Solmir; the angles of his face couldn’t carry it well. His blue eyes widened, and his cruel mouth opened, but he allowed himself only a heartbeat of shock before he thrust his hands out again, trying to call up more shadows. The ink that crawled slowly down his skin wasn’t quite as dark as before, more gray than black.
Magic, growing thin, running out. Neve still wasn’t exactly sure of its mechanics, the cold thing that her blood on a sentinel shard had called into her bones—only that it was tied to this place, the inverse of Red’s green and growing power. But she knew it still lived in her, chilled and thorned, made even more potent by the doorway they’d tried to open, the way they’d anchored her to that awful grove.
And she knew she didn’t want to be eaten by a monster with that many teeth.
Unthinking, Neve followed the same pattern Solmir had. Her hands thrust out, and without her trying, darkness flowed down her veins, her fingers bending into fists as it gathered in her palms. It felt like winter, like biting wind, making her center so cold it was almost burning.
The burning cold went down her arms, settled in her hands, and when it was too much to bear, her fists opened.
Her own net of spiny magic snared the worm-thing right as its jaws came close enough to touch.
The effect was immediate. Where Solmir’s thorns had seemed only to slow the thing down, Neve’s stopped it cold. It writhed, shrieking into the gray sky, growing smaller as it withered away from the places where Neve’s magic touched it. Curls of shadow spilled off its body, clouding the air, making a sort of chittering noise that was a strange, smaller echo of the worm-monster’s bellows. A crack, another burst of gibbering shadow, and the thing was gone.
The shadows that were left raced into the forest, and Solmir grimaced after them, raising a hand and then letting it fall. “Shit,” he muttered. “Well. We can get them next time. The power of a few shadow-creatures won’t make much of a difference.”
Neve stared wide-eyed at the space where the monster had been, her chest heaving beneath her nightgown as the darkness slowly faded from her veins. She was cold, so cold all over, water dripping from one palm where a thin scrim of ice had covered it. “I thought you said nothing could die here?”
“Did you see all those shadows?” He arched a brow, cool and collected, as if they hadn’t just thrown magic at a giant worm that apparently wanted to eat them. “Those were scraps of the lesser beast. Its energy transmuted. Anything that appears to die here isn’t gone, it just changes form.”
Her mouth opened to question him further, to make a snide remark about how maybe if she threw magic at him, he’d change into a form that would be less irritating. But the white-hot flash of pain in her head cleared her mouth of anything but a moan.
Knees in the dirt, hands at her temples. Neve felt simultaneously as if she were being compacted down and flying apart, her body both crushed and expanded. Pain flared in her head, her stomach, along her nerve endings, cold like she’d never felt before settling into her middle with a throbbing ache.
Distantly, she heard Solmir curse again, felt hands press into the sides of her face, not gently. Her vision was blurry, but she saw the flash of black in her veins, something sharp pressing against her skin with every pulse.
“Dammit, woman,” Solmir snarled. “You can’t fade on me yet.”
He settled into a crouch before her. “Down here, magic has a price, Neverah.” He said it so calmly, but his fingers were tight on her temples, like he was trying to anchor her, keep her from dissolving. “On the surface, the Shadowlands’ hold was weak because its magic was weak. But when you use its power here, this place hooks in you. Becomes part of you. And you can’t handle that. This was a prison made for gods and monsters, and you are neither.”