“Did you think that would surprise me?” Hana said. “When Spirit revealed that she wasn’t under Prince Gin’s spell anymore and the ‘empress’s’ body disappeared from camp, I put two and two together. My sister has always been a schemer. I figured she must have been up to something, and you weren’t a corpse; otherwise, you wouldn’t be worth stealing. So yes, I already know the empress is still alive. Why do you think only half the ryuu are here? The rest are already inside Rose Palace. And they’ve got the Hearts with them.”
Holy heavens . . . Sora’s chest clenched. She’d thought the ryuu would have to get past the Citadel first. But Prince Gin had been raised in the imperial family, too. He would know about the trapdoor in the Field of Illusions and the secret network of tunnels underground . . .
Empress Aki wouldn’t know he was coming.
Emerald dust eddied around Hana, then dove into her, saturating her with magic. She vanished.
Sora summoned her own whirlwind of ryuu particles. She absorbed them and went invisible too.
No one else would be able to see them fight. Or die.
Hana called on more magic, which rushed to her and formed itself into a hundred tiny daggers and flew at Sora.
She conjured a shield of her own emerald dust and deflected the knives, each one pinging against her shield.
“Not bad,” Hana said. “But basic.” She formed a sack with the magic and brought it down over Sora’s head, tightening the bottom like a noose around her neck.
Sora panicked and sucked in too much air, and suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen. She clawed at the balloon surrounding her. The noose around her throat kept tightening.
Can’t breathe. Can’t fight. Can’t . . .
As her brain fogged, the one thing she could think was how, when Hana was a tenderfoot, she always wanted to do whatever Sora was doing. If Sora was juggling apples, Hana wanted to juggle apples. If Sora was sparring against three others at the same time, Hana wanted to spar against three others.
If Sora was being suffocated by an invisible balloon . . .
On the brink of passing out, Sora issued one last desperate command to the ryuu magic.
Throw a bag over Hana’s head too.
A mirror-image balloon appeared and tightened itself around Hana’s neck. Her eyes bugged.
But Hana had a stronger killer instinct than Sora did. Instead of standing there and losing consciousness, she ran for Sora and butted her head straight into Sora’s stomach.
They both lost control of ryuu magic, the emerald particles bursting out of their bodies like a shower of glitter.
They both became visible, and the suffocating balloons around their heads exploded away.
They both flew off the top of the fortress wall.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Sora!” Daemon yelled. He dove off the fortress wall after them.
Everything around him went blue and bright, like lightning. Everything rumbled like thunder. Daemon felt sparks on his skin, electrical charges in his bones. It was terrifying and thrilling. Adrenaline vibrated through his veins.
For a moment, time slowed, as if the universe were stretching. Daemon flew off the wall like an arrow shot through water, straight and true but not as fast as reality ought to be.
He aimed himself at Sora to intercept her fall. Hana held on to her. But as Daemon reached Sora, he drew power from the buzzing light around him. He snatched Sora out of her sister’s weakening grip.
As soon as he touched her, the sparks on his skin enveloped Sora too. She gasped as the world went blue.
Daemon hugged her close to his chest, and they flew forward together, defying gravity.
He landed in a cypress tree, as softly as if his feet were made of air. He set Sora down on a branch.
Then all of a sudden, time sped up again.
Daemon looked back at the fortress walls. Ryuu and taiga bodies alike littered the dirt, the ground a deep red, as if paint had spilled down from the heavens. But the taigas had overwhelmed them. They began securing the ryuu who were still alive, blindfolding them to prevent them from using Sight when they woke from the genka, and shackling their hands behind them with iron gloves and cuffs so they couldn’t form mudras for taiga spells. And the remaining ryuu were fleeing, running back into Jade Forest.
Hana wasn’t there.
“Where is she?” Sora whispered.
“I don’t know.” He’d seen her fall toward the ground when he took Sora from her grip.
“But she isn’t . . . dead, right?”
Daemon searched for her again. “Maybe she’s invisible.”
Sora shook her head. “I’d be able to see her.” She collapsed against Daemon and exhaled. “She’s not there. She’s not dead on the ground.”
But an instant later, Sora snapped away from Daemon. “What in all hells!” Her eyes were wide, and she stepped backward on the branch, putting distance between them. “What are you?”
Daemon shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m me.”
Sora stared at him, mouth agape.
Their gemina bond was electric, like the times when he’d zapped Sora out of Prince Gin’s spell. But the energy now was even louder, so unruly it hurt his ears, and he didn’t know what was happening.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” He began to panic. Had Hana done something to him?
Sora reached out tentatively, almost as if scared. But then she touched his face. And stroked his hair.
A couple weeks ago, he would have wanted this. But he had just kissed Fairy, and everything was confusing, made worse by the crackling electricity in his bond.
And there was something about the way Sora’s fingers felt in his hair that wasn’t right.
He stiffened.
The caution in her touch, however, began to fade.
“It really is you,” she whispered incredulously.
“I . . . of course it’s me. Please, Sora, what are you talking about?”
She took his hand in hers and lifted it for him to see.
It wasn’t a hand. It was a paw, engulfed in brilliant blue light.
He gasped. “What did they do to me?”
She touched his face again. Stroked his hair. “The ryuu didn’t do this. I think you did.”
Daemon whimpered. He didn’t know what she meant.
A tear trickled down Sora’s cheek, but she was smiling. “You just flew across the sky,” she said, shaking her head in awe. “You’ve spent your life not knowing where you came from and worried that you weren’t good at magic. But that’s because you don’t need to use magic, like the rest of us do.”
“I don’t understand.” He couldn’t tear his eyes away from his paw. His paw.
“You don’t need magic because you are magic.” She waved her hand up and down the length of his body.
Daemon looked. He was a wolf. An actual wolf with paws and midnight-blue fur that lit up with a buzzing, bright light, as if he were surrounded by stars. But inside, he was still himself. He felt the same. He had the same memories. Even his voice was still his own. “What . . . ? How?”
“There’s so much more magic in this world than we knew,” Sora said, and he knew she wasn’t only talking about the ryuu. “Remember the Kichonan myths? The god of night brings all his children to Celestae with him, but they’re allowed to shine like constellations at night so their mothers on earth can still see them. Sometimes, though, the god of night’s children decide they belong down here, among people like their mothers, rather than in the heavens. And when they descend, they take human form and their constellations disappear from the sky.”
Suddenly, a brief scene—a memory?—flashed before him. Daemon was running in the dark, surrounded by stars. The sky rumbled, and the planets shook. His fur stood on end.
Sora’s mouth dropped open again, as if she’d just realized something. “It’s your birthday today, Daemon.”
He’d forgotten. There had been too much going on. “What does my birthday have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know if it does,” Sora said. “But there used to be a wolf constellation in the sky, and it disappeared eighteen years ago. I think you’re one of the god of night’s sons. You’re a demigod.”
Daemon frowned and shook his head. “That’s crazy.”
“Sometimes crazy is true.”
It would explain why he’d been immune to Prince Gin’s spell. Daemon wasn’t an ordinary taiga.
He shook out his fur. There was power in these lupine muscles, the kind he’d envied in his cub brothers and sisters when he was young. But now that he was an actual wolf, all he wanted was to be human again.
But maybe that was the point. Maybe he’d craved being human, and that’s why he came back to earth. But it also made sense why he loved being up in the trees and on rooftops, close to the sky. If it was true that he was one of the god of night’s children, there’d always be a part of him that missed his first home.
And yet none of that mattered right now. Daemon was a taiga—even if he wasn’t a typical one—and that meant putting the kingdom before himself. Whether he was a demigod or something else, figuring it out would have to wait.
To be honest, it was a little overwhelming, and Daemon was relieved to have an excuse to deal with it later.
“Come on,” he said to Sora. “We need to go after Virtuoso and Prince Gin.”
“We might be too late,” she said.
“Maybe. But remember? I can fly now.” He grinned and felt electric, both inside and out. “Get on.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine