Sunlight cascaded through the windows, dampened only by velvet panels. The golden-white light set dust motes spinning about me, made me feel as if I had been trapped in one of my own enchantments. I swung the door to my suite open, all reason gone, all memory of the past and the future gone. All that mattered was this moment. Lily could be on the other side of the door. Somewhere, on the edge of the human universe, Ross talked and pleaded with me, spoke words of warning. But it was a foreign language.
Lily could be here. Miracles do happen. Dreams do come true.
Shadows from the hallway spilled into the room, a Darkling female stood on the threshold. Beautiful as a handful of starlight, she was almost too bright to look upon. I couldn’t see her features clearly.
“Ash. Let me in.” It was her voice.
Lily.
“No!” Ross yelled. Ross, my one human friend.
But humans were the enemy, the spoils of conquest, the fields ripe for harvest. No need to listen to the faithful pet. Not now.
I reached out a hand, ready to pull my wife closer, to bring her into the room and invite her inside. She leaned toward me, eager.
That was when I knew. Her scent was wrong.
It wasn’t her. The dead don’t come back. They stay in the cold grave, turn into stardust, blow away on the wind. They vanish into the unknown, the place of the forever gone and forever mourned.
I grabbed on to her flesh, this not-Lily creature and dug my claws deep into her neck, pressing so hard that her blood started to flow. She screamed, her visage melted; she fought and tried to get away, tried to make her flesh burn mine, flames erupting where my hand had reached across the threshold and into the hallway. My fangs grew and I wanted to lunge out, to bite her, to rip her arm from her body.
Imposter. Evil. Beast.
Then her disguise fell away.
Sienna screamed again, pleading with me to release her. I growled, considered tightening my grip on her throat until all life vanished, until she joined my dead wife.
“Give Lily a message for me,” I said, my words like fire, ready to kill.
“Life—and—limb.” Her words came out one at a time in a wet, choking whisper. Sienna begged for her life, tried to remind me of our code, to never kill, not human and not Darkling.
“Must preserve life. Must,” she said.
“Ash! Let her go! Listen—” Ross was at the window, staring toward the forest.
Just then a woman’s scream echoed from the woods, followed by the flapping of great wings and the folding of reality. And after it came another sound, like all the rules in the world were being broken at once, breaking branches, howling wind.
One of my humans was being hunted.
I tossed my cousin to the ground, where she lay gasping, one of her hands attempting to stop the flow of blood from her neck. With a snarl, I dropped my human skin and folded reality, then swept across the room to the window and threw it open. In an instant, I was flying toward the forest—past the human boys who had gathered by the side of the road—toward the throbbing black hole where a Darkling fought against a human.
Somewhere in the forest deep, shrouded in murky fog.
Another human was being harvested. And this time I knew who was to blame. ’Twas none other than my own dear cousins, Thane and River.
I flashed my wings wide, tensed my muscles, blended the color of my skin to match the mottled blue-and-gray sky. Leaning into the wind, I scanned the wood for movement. I saw something then, a haze that hung over a section of the wood like a misshapen bubble—a Veil of cloud. I measured the beginning and the end of the anomaly, knowing that once I got closer it would be near impossible to see the sharp edges.
Then I called my sister, Sage, to join me in the hunt.
Like an electric shock, my cry sparked through the trees, snapped and buzzed and sang. I felt it strike her in the center of her forehead.
Come!
Take the northern edge of the Veil, then move upstream.
I heard the whisper of her wings as she answered, taking flight almost instantly.
That was when I reached the Veil, felt it brush against my skin like the ruffling of feathers. I hovered at the top of the forest, until I got my bearings, then sank to the ground, watching as the treetops gave way to thick trunks and finally to a mass of ferns and bramble bushes. Meanwhile, heavy fog twined through the wood, tendrils erasing and changing the landscape as they drifted past.
I dared not believe what I saw.
Instead, I battled against this foul magic with song—an Evenquest sonnet, words that overlapped one another, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter that rang strong as a blade. My enchantment fought the Veil, one form of magic against another, until at last, the false landscape began to fade. Then I heard another song echo through the thicket, one with sweet, high notes, cadence strong as a warrior’s drum. It came from the creek, somewhere upstream.
Sage.
Together we would break through.