Kell’s hands curled into fists. The marble beneath his feet trembled and began to splinter. Osaron flicked his wrist, and the night came crashing down on Kell. It crushed the air from his lungs, forcing him toward his knees. It took all his strength to stay upright under the weight, and after a horrible second he realized it wasn’t the air straining against him—Osaron’s will pressed against his very bones. Kell was Antari. No one had ever managed to will his body against him. Now his joints ground together, his limbs threatening to crack.
“I will see you kneel before your king.”
“No.”
Kell tried again to summon the marble floor, and the stone trembled as will clashed against will. He kept his feet, but realized by the almost bored expression on the other Antari’s face that the shadow king was toying with him.
“Holland,” Kell snarled, trying to subdue the horror. “If you are in there, fight. Please—fight.”
A sour look crossed Osaron’s face, and then something crashed behind Kell, armor against wood as more guards barreled onto the roof, Maxim at their center.
The king’s voice boomed through the night. “How dare you set foot in my palace?”
Osaron’s attention flicked to the king, and Kell gasped, suddenly free from the weight of the creature’s will. He staggered a step, already freeing his knife and drawing blood, red drops falling to the pale stone.
“How dare you claim to be king?”
“I have more claim than you.”
Another twitch of those long fingers, and the king’s crown sailed from his head—or it would have if Maxim hadn’t snatched it from the air with terrifying speed. The king’s eyes glowed, as if molten, as he crushed the crown between his hands, and drew it out into a blade. A single, fluid gesture that spoke of days long past, when Maxim Maresh had been the Steel Prince instead of the Golden King.
“Surrender, demon,” he ordered, “or be slain.”
At his back, the royal guards raised their swords, spellwork scrawled along the edges. The sight of the king and his guards seemed to shake the other magicians from their stupor. Some began to retreat, ushering their own royals off the roof or simply fleeing, while a few were bold enough to advance. But Kell knew they were no match. Not the guards, not the magicians, not even the king.
But the king’s appearance had bought Kell something.
An advantage.
With Osaron’s attention still on Maxim, Kell sank into a crouch. His blood had spread in brittle fractures across the stone floor, thin lines of red that reached and wrapped around the monster’s boot.
“As Anasae,” he ordered. Dispel. The words had been enough, once, to purge Vitari from the world. Now, they did nothing. Osaron shot him a pitying glance, shadows twisting in his pitch black eyes.
Kell didn’t retreat. He forced his hands flat. “As Steno,” he ordered, and the marble floor shattered into a hundred shards that rose and hurled themselves at the shadow king. The first one found home, burying itself in Osaron’s leg, and Kell’s hopes rose before he realized his mistake.
He hadn’t gone for the kill.
That first stone blade was the only one to land. With nothing but a look, the rest of the shards faltered, slowed, stopped. Kell pushed with all his force, but his own body was one thing to will, and a hundred makeshift blades another, and Osaron quickly won, turning the stone fragments outward like the spokes on a wheel, the dazzling edges of a sun.
Osaron’s hands drifted lazily up, and the shards trembled, like arrows on taut strings, but before he could unleash them on the guards and the king and the magicians on the roof, something passed through him.
A flinch. A shudder.
The shadows in his eyes went green.
Somewhere deep inside his body, Holland was fighting back.
The fragments of stone tumbled to the ground as Osaron stood frozen, all his attention focused inward.
Maxim saw the chance, and signaled.
The royal guards struck, a dozen men falling on one distracted god.
And for an instant, Kell thought it would be enough.
For an instant—
But then Osaron looked up, flashing black eyes and a defiant smile. And let them come.
“Wait!” shouted Kell, but it was too late.
The instant before the guards fell on the shadow king, the monster abandoned its shell. Darkness poured from Holland’s stolen body, as thick and black as smoke.
The Antari collapsed, and the shadow that was Osaron moved, serpentine, across the roof. Hunting for another form.
Kell spun, looking for Lila, but couldn’t see her through the crowd, the smoke.
And then, suddenly, the darkness turned on him.
No, thought Kell, who had already refused the monster once. He couldn’t fathom another collar. The cold horror of a heartbeat stopping in his chest.
The darkness surged toward him, and Kell took an involuntary step back, bracing himself for an assault that never came. The shadow brushed his blood-streaked fingers, and pulled back, not so much repelled as considering.
The darkness laughed—a sickly sound—and began to draw itself together, to coalesce into a column, and then into a man. Not flesh and blood, but layered shadow, so dense it looked like fluid stone, some edges sharp and others blurred. A crown sat atop the figure’s head, a dozen spires thrust upward like horns, their points faded into smoke.
The shadow king, in his true form.
Osaron drew in a breath, and the molten darkness at his center flared like embers, heat rippling the air around him. And yet he seemed solid as stone. As Osaron considered his hands, the fingers tapering less to fingertips than points, his mouth stretched into a cruel smile.
“It has been a long time since I was strong enough to hold my own shape.”
His hand shot toward Kell’s throat, but was stopped short as steel came singing through the air. Lila’s knife caught Osaron in the side of the head, but the blade didn’t lodge; it passed straight through.
So he wasn’t real, wasn’t corporeal. Not yet.
Osaron spared a glance at Lila, who was already drawing another blade. She slammed to a stop under his gaze, her body clearly straining against his hold, and Kell stole his chance once more, pressing his bloodstained palm to the creature’s chest. But the shape turned to smoke around Kell’s fingers, recoiling from his magic, and Osaron twisted back, annoyance etched across his stone features. Freed once more, Lila reached him, a guard’s short sword in one hand, and swung the weapon in a vicious arc, carving down and across and through his body, shoulder to hip.
Osaron parted around the blade, and then he simply dissolved.
There one moment, and gone the next.
Kell and Lila stared at each other, breathless, stunned.
The guards were hauling an unconscious Holland roughly to his feet, his head lolling as, all around the roof, the men and woman stood as if under a spell, though it might have simply been shock, horror, confusion.
Kell met King Maxim’s eyes across the roof.
“You have so much to learn.”
He spun toward the sound, and found Osaron re-formed and standing, not in the broken center of the roof, but atop the railing at its edge, as if the spine of metal were solid ground. His cloak billowed in the breeze. A specter of a man. A shadow of a monster.
“You do not slay a god,” he said. “You worship him.”
His black eyes danced with dark delight.
“Do not worry. I will teach you how. And in time …”
Osaron spread his arms.
“I will make this world worthy of me.”
Kell realized too late what was about to happen.
He started running just as Osaron tipped backward off the railing, and fell.
Kell sprinted, and got there just in time to see the shadow king hit the water of the Isle far below. His body struck without a splash, and as it broke the surface and sank, it began to plume like spilled ink through the current. Lila pressed against him, straining to see. Shouts were going up over the roof, but the two of them stood and watched in silent horror as the plume of darkness grew, and grew, and grew, spreading until the red of the river turned black.
III
Alucard paced the prince’s room, waiting for news.
He hadn’t heard anything since that single scream, the first shouts of guards in the hall, the steps above.
Rhy’s lush curtains and canopies, his plush carpets and pillows, all created a horrible insulation, blocking out the world beyond and shrouding the room in an oppressive silence.