“So long I waited. Hoped. Dreamed. And today it happens.” His hungry look returns.
My mouth goes dry, heart skidding to a stop as everything Kal has told me clicks into place. The Etherians imprisoned him here with the Vila, her spirit locked inside the medallion. He’s been waiting for another of her kind. Someone strong enough to—
“Kal, don’t—”
But it’s too late. With a manic grin, Kal picks up his boot and brings it down hard on the gem. There is the sound of glass crunching. An unholy wail. And then everything goes dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I don’t know how long I’m unconscious. Everything hurts, my muscles throbbing in time to the pounding in my head. There’s a high, tinny ringing in my ears, and a low, rumbling noise like a growl. A hazy shape floats over me. I manage to blink once, twice. But even that small movement is rusty and stiff.
“Mortania.” A voice croons. A soft touch brushes my forehead. My cheeks. “My love. Is that you?”
Mortania. The name is familiar. Is it mine? Heat surges behind my sternum and webs outward. I squeeze my eyes shut. Open them again. The hazy shape sharpens into focus.
Kal.
I am not Mortania. I am Alyce. The growl I heard when I woke is the storm breaking land. Sleet and hail ping against the stones of the chamber. Shards of the medallion’s strange glass remain on the floor, tendrils of hemlock smoke curling between them.
Kal frowns. “Mortania?”
Once again, a charge shoots through me. And I think I hear the echo of a voice, the same one that I’d heard in my Lair when Aurora and I had attempted to summon the Vila. It is screaming, but I can’t make out the words.
Kal rises abruptly, angrily from his place beside me.
“This is impossible.” He grinds his teeth, pacing. “I saw the magic enter your body. She should be here. She should be you.”
So I’d been right. He wanted to release the Vila’s soul into my body in order to resurrect her. I smile, the corners of my dry lips cracking. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. She’s not here.”
It’s a lie. Something is changed inside me. I can feel it in the humming of my bones. In the thickness of my blood and the molten, foreign current rushing like a second heartbeat through my limbs. But I take great satisfaction in the way Kal tenses, nostrils flaring. Centuries of plotting and waiting come to nothing.
His anger pours out of him. He picks up a cobweb-covered stool and hurls it across the room. It connects with the wall and bursts into pieces. A scrap of jagged wood lands dangerously close to my face. He does the same to a chair. Smashes a table as well.
“Alyce?”
Every fiber stills at the sound of that voice, half-smothered beneath the throes of the storm, but clear as day to my ears. What is she doing here? Laurel was supposed to come. Terror wraps its fingers around my belly and wrenches. Kal freezes, his head listing toward the door. He smiles at me, putting a finger to his lips.
“Aurora, ru—” But the shadows are in my mouth before I can finish, tasting of ash. Sliding down my throat, heavy and tarlike. I want to retch, but I can’t. My lips move, but no sound comes out.
“This is better than I hoped,” Kal says.
I reach for my magic, desperate to save Aurora from whatever he’s planning, but it’s buried too deeply beneath the darkness—as Kal’s had been when he was bound here.
“All I need is a little of her magic.” He roots around the chamber, tossing bits of debris right and left before settling on something. Not just something. It’s the spindle I cursed—the one that forced him to sleep.
Kal comes to me and I try to kick him away, but my legs are still shadow-bound. I can only knock my knees together. Huddle my body as far into the corner as it will go. But he grabs me by the elbow and hauls me forward. Pries my hands out of my skirts, spindle ready.
I sink my teeth into his shoulder.
He howls, scrambling backward and dropping the spindle. Kal examines the wound with two fingers. I’d bitten through the fabric of his shirt. The taste of his Shifter blood is in my mouth, iron and silt. I spit it into his face.
Kal wipes away the inky flecks with his sleeve. And then, so fast I don’t even see the movement, the back of his hand pummels into my cheek. Something snaps, a pain like I’ve never felt exploding through the fragile bones of my face. I cannot breathe. Cannot think. Stars trip and dance across my vision, and then there’s another pain—a sharp, swift puncture on the pad of my first finger.
“There.” Kal huffs.