The Inheritor.
Kell’s mind was slipping with the pain as he called it toward him, but as the cylinder rose into the air, his power failed, suddenly, completely. As if severed, stolen.
Snatched away by a thief.
*
Lila couldn’t move.
The floor gripped her legs in a stone embrace, bones threatening to break with every motion. Across the chamber Kell was trapped and bleeding, and she couldn’t reach him, not with her hands, couldn’t force Osaron away. But she could draw him to her. She pulled on the tether between them, stealing Kell’s magic, and Osaron’s attention with it. Power flared like light before Lila’s eyes, and the demon spun toward her, a moth drawn to a flame.
Look at me, she wanted to say as Osaron abandoned Kell. Come to me.
But as soon as those black eyes leveled on her, she would have given everything to get loose. To be free.
Kell was horribly pale, his fingers slipping over the blade of ice driven through his side. Holland clutched at a pillar and struggled to his feet. The Inheritor sat on the ground nearby, but before Lila could summon it, Osaron was there, one mangled hand knotted in her hair and a blade against her throat.
“Let go,” he whispered, and whether he meant her knife or her will, she didn’t know. But at least she had his attention now. She let the weapon fall with a clatter to the floor.
He forced her face toward his, her gaze toward his, felt him sliding through her mind, probing thoughts, memories.
“So much potential.”
She tried to pull away, but she was pinned, the floor gripping her ankles and Osaron her scalp and the blade still at her throat.
“I am what you saw in the mirror at Sasenroche,” said the shadow king. “I am what you dream of being. I can make you unstoppable. I can set you free.”
Across the throne room, Kell had finally summoned the strength to break free. The ice shattered around him and he collapsed to the floor. Osaron didn’t turn. His attention was on her, eyes dancing hungrily in the light of her power.
“Free,” she said softly, as if pondering the word.
“Yes,” whispered the shadow king.
In the black of his eyes, she saw it, that version of herself.
Unbeatable.
Unbreakable.
“Let me in, Delilah Bard.”
It was tempting, even now. Her hand drifted up to Ojka’s arm. A dancer’s embrace. Bloody fingers digging into ruined flesh.
Lila smiled. “As Illumae.”
Osaron wrenched back, but he was too late.
Ojka’s body began to burn.
The blade slashed blindly at Lila’s throat but she dodged, and then it was gone, tumbling from Ojka’s hand as the corpse went up in flames.
Smoke poured from the thrashing body, first the acrid stuff of burning flesh, and then the dark fog of Osaron’s power as it was finally forced to flee its shell.
The palace shuddered with the sudden loss of his power, his control. The floor loosened around her boots and Lila stumbled forward, free, as Osaron struggled to find form.
The shadows swirled, fell apart, swirled again.
The Osaron that took shape was a ghost of himself.
A brittle facade, transparent and flat. His edges bled and blurred, and through his spectral center she could see Kell clutching the wound across his front. Rhy, struggling to rise.
This was it.
Her chance.
Their chance.
She flexed her fingers, reaching for the Inheritor. It trembled on the ground and rose toward her.
And then it fell, tumbled back to the floor as her strength vanished. It was like being swallowed by a wave in reverse. All the power flooding suddenly, violently, away. Lila gasped as the world tilted beneath her, legs buckling, her vision dim.
Magic was such a new thing that the absence of it shouldn’t have hurt so much, but Lila felt gutted as every last ounce of power was wrenched away. She cast about for Kell, certain that he had stolen her strength, but Kell was still on the ground, still bleeding.
The shadow king loomed over her, hands splayed, and the air began to coil around Lila’s throat, tightening until she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.
And there, behind him, in a halo of silver light, stood Holland.
*
Holland couldn’t see.
The darkness was everywhere, raging around him like a storm, swallowing the world. But he could hear. And so he heard Kell being stabbed, heard Ojka burn, heard the Inheritor as Lila called it from the ground, and knew it was his chance. And when he drew on the binding ring, and pulled the magic of the other two Antari to him, he found a kind of sight. The world took shape not in light and dark, but in ribbons of power.
The strands glowed, flowing around and through Lila’s kneeling form, and Kell’s, and Rhy’s, all of it drawn in silver light.
And there, right in front of him, the absence.
A man in the shape of a void.
A void in the shape of a man.
No longer a puppet. Just a piece of rotten magic, smooth and black and empty.
And when the shadow king spoke, it was his own voice, liquid, susurrant.
“I know your mind, Holland,” said the darkness. “I lived inside it.”
The shadow king came toward him, and Holland took a single, final step back, his shoulders meeting the pillar as his fingers tightened on the metal cylinder.
He could feel Osaron’s hunger.
His need.
“Do you want to see your world? How it crumbles without you in it?”
A cold hand, not flesh and blood but shadow and ice, came to rest against Holland’s heart.
I am tired, he thought, knowing Osaron would hear. Tired of fighting. Of losing. But I will never let you in.
He felt the darkness smile, sickly and triumphant.
“Have you forgotten?” whispered the shadow king. “You never cast me out.”
Holland exhaled. A shuddering breath.
To Osaron, it might have sounded like fear.
To Holland, it was simply relief.
It ends, he thought as the darkness wrapped itself around him, and sank in.
VI
Lila was on her knees when it happened.
Osaron returned to Holland, like steam into a pot, and his body went rigid. His back arched. His mouth opened in a silent scream, and for an awful moment, Lila thought it was too late, thought he’d been too slow, hadn’t had the time, or the strength, or the will to hold on— And then Holland slammed the Inheritor’s point into his palm and said a word through gritted teeth.
“Rosin.”
Give.
An instant later, the shadow palace exploded into light.
Lila gasped as something began to tear inside her and she remembered the binding ring. She closed her hand into a fist and smashed the band against the stone floor, severing the connection before the Inheritor could pull her in as well.
But Kell wasn’t fast enough.
A scream escaped his throat and Lila scrambled up, stumbling toward him as he curled in, clawing at the ring with blood-slicked fingers.
Rhy reached him first.
The prince was shuddering, his body slipping between life and death, whole and unmade and whole again as he knelt over Kell, his ghostly fingers wrapped around his brother’s hand. The ring came free. It skated across the floor, bouncing once before dissolving into smoke.
Kell collapsed against Rhy, ashen and still, and Lila fell to her knees beside them, smearing blood on Kell’s cheek as she felt his face, ran a hand through his hair, the copper parted by a streak of silver.
He was alive, he had to be alive, because Rhy was still there, leaning over him, eyes empty and full at the same time, soaked in blood, but breathing.
In the center of the room, Holland was a sphere of light, a million silver threads laced with black, all of it visible, all of it unraveling into the air around him in silence that wasn’t silent at all but ringing in her ears.
And then, suddenly, the light was gone.
And Holland’s body folded to the floor.
VII
Kell opened his eyes and saw the world falling apart.
No, not the world.