Page 212 of The Incendiary

Did everyone else feel the silence? The calm?

The doors of the hall burst open. Screams of terror and panicked shouts erupted from the back, swelling into a horrified frenzy when shadows billowed in, their forceful entry displacing the back five rows of the crowd from their seats.

Bodies fell. Cries rang out as the crowd scrambled toward our end of the hall, away from the doors. Shera leapt onto the platform to guard me. Her silver fur was stiff in alarm until oddly… it wasn’t.

“It’s Molochai.” Simeon ran to my side, hands trembling. “The wards.” He positioned himself directly in front of me. “They’re down.”

“Completely?” I snapped.

Elias growled, “What?”

I pushed them out of my way, holding power ready at my fingertips as I moved toward the edge of the platform, staring into the thick, grim shadows that dove and leapt in a rampage.

“At the ready!” Elias roared. Every armed soldier obeyed.

The darkness cleared. A towering figure emerged from the corrupted, suffocating fog. Had Gemma not locked her steel grip around my forearm, grounding me, I would have collapsed onto my knees.

It wasn’t Molochai.

There, at the end of the hall, flanked by vicious, soul-devouring shadows, covered in blood, sweat, scars, and tally-mark tattoos, was Gavin Smyth.

His eyes were locked on me, and mine on him.

I acted before I knew if he was real. When armed soldiers lunged at him from all directions, I outstretched my hand and sent Sussurro’s wind ripping through the center of the hall, spiraling around him in a squall that blasted every single weapon and body away.

“Aryella,” Shera warned me mind-to-mind. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

But I surged forward, down the steps of the dais, unable to take my eyes off the feral, scarred warrior staring back at me. If I did, he would disappear into the shadows of this cruel, beautiful dream, never to be seen again. I needed to feel him, make sure he was real and not a projection of lost sanity that had been slowly whittling away inside me.

“Aryella!” Shera urged.

“Your Highness!” Elias called after me. “Ary, stop!”

“ARYELLA, LISTEN TO ME!” Shera roared in my head with otherworldly authority. Her voice hit me with the force of all twelve gods, ripped the air out of me, and stopped me dead in my tracks. “If they know the truth, they will destroy him!”

“I won’t let them hurt him!” I told her, panicked.

“You’ll have to kill them all to stop them! That’s no solution. You cannot go to him. You must think!”

But Gavin thrust his blades to the floor, the jarring clang both a threat and an echoing surrender. The desperate longing inside a harsh but living gaze that only ever softened for me begged me not to stop but to run. To him.

Elias approached my side and drew his sword to guard us. Gavin’s nostrils flared at the movement. At me in this opulent wedding gown and the claim my betrothed was making.

His hickory brown eyes darkened into pools of infinite onyx. At me, and at Elias standing so close. And the shadows—his shadows—thrashed around him in agitated fury. His lethal rage ignited parts of me I thought had died as he growled out three vicious words.

“I. Fucking. Object.”