Page 49 of Shadow and Son

It was closed. The intricately welded metal doors that had once greeted every would-be champion of the Arcane Crucible were sealed. There was no shimmering light now, no gentle thrum of celestial magic. The Gate was nothing more than a beautiful frame taking up space in the center of the cavernous room.

But Elyria knew. She remembered.

Her spinning mind was awash with memories—the moment the Arbiter had first emerged from the Celestial Sanctum. Watching each champion, including Cedric, take their vow and stride through the Gate. Kit’s hand on the other side of a massive wall of ice, erected to keep Elyria from following her.

Choosing to follow her anyway.

Elyria recalled how this was the place where she’d had her first argument with Cedric. First of many, in fact. And with many more still to come, she hoped.

Rage built against the bond in her chest, making the tether vibrate, her magic surging and waning inside her, uncontrolled. The pounding at the door grew louder. All this time, she thought she had been kept in some dark corner of the world. Thought Malakar might even have taken her to some secret stronghold in Nocterrum or whisked her across the Sea of Sorrows to some new, foreign place.

She’d never considered he would have kept her in the very middle of the continent, hidden in plain sight.

“Here?” she whispered, eyes finding Malakar as he lifted his head, his expression shifting from dark concern to amusement in an instant. “I’ve been at Castle Lumin this entire time?”

“What, you did not realize on your little sojourn through my palace earlier tonight?” He laughed, a soul-scraping sound. “My descendant was a clever man, I will say. Manipulating so much just beneath the surface. I thought about rebuilding his stronghold exactly as he had it. He had so many pieces in place already, after all. But then I thought that might make it a little too easy for others”—his gaze drifted to the doors, which shuddered with the force of another blow from the other side—“to find us. It was easy enough to pick up said pieces and move them around, just a touch. A nudge here, a tweak there. To give them new purpose. Glorious purpose.” Amber flashed in Malakar’s dark eyes as he strode back over to where Elyria teetered against her restraints. “The poeticness of it all, however, I will take credit for. Once I learned of the state of Castle Lumin, how it sat, abandoned and protected, I knew I had to bring us back to where it all began.”

Boom.

The crystal barrier in front of the doors was vibrating now, as though it was on the very verge of collapsing, but Malakar simply smiled and moved closer. And it was then that Elyria realized that her arms and legs were not the only parts of her that Malakar had wrapped in his shadowy shackles. She shivered, stretching her neck as the rope of shadow around her throat—a collar of darkness, identical to the one he had used to leash Petra—tightened.

“And where it will all end . . . for someone.”

Like it had been scripted, the barrier shattered, and Elyria felt a fresh surge along the tether in her chest—a bright, aching tug that made her gasp, before the doors burst open in a blaze of smoke and fire.

But it wasn’t Cedric who came running through the haze.

Elyria’s thoughts were slow, her vision blurring in and out of focus as she watched a fae with rust-colored wings soar into the room and land atop one of the cultists, immediately driving a dagger into the man’s chest.

She knew that fae.

Several sanguinagi jolted forward immediately to engage with Raefe, who had already leapt off the first cultist and was back in the air, hurling a fistful of fire into the face of another. The others lingered, bouncing on their heels as they circled tight to Malakar, forming a protective halo around him.

The dark sorcerer only moved slightly behind Elyria, dragging a finger along the edge of her blood-soaked blouse—possessive, threatening—and grazing over her bondmark once more with a gentleness that would have had her vomiting again, had she anything left to spew.

“Go,” Malakar commanded.

There were hisses of pain as the remaining sanguinagi smashed their palms against their medallions, piercing their flesh and conjuring weapons of red crystal with their blood. Xander bent down as he ran forward, sweeping his hands through Cornelius’s still-cooling blood, and used that instead. Elyria grimaced, as even through her half-conscious state, she knew that it was too many. Too many weapons, too much magic, too many cultists. And where was⁠—

A crystal scimitar sliced into Raefe’s leg. He plummeted to the ground with a yelp, a blur of gray eyes and rust wings and blond hair. The surrounding cultists stalked closer, weapons brandished, blood magic crackling in their palms, and never in a thousand years would Elyria have thought she would be rooting for the misguided fool who worked for her father and had thought it fun to burn marks into her flesh. But here she was, wishing and hoping and downright fucking praying for this asshole to come out on top.

Please, she thought, without words, without shape. Please.

The bond in Elyria’s chest lit up, burning.

Her eyes stung.

The smoke-filled doorway filled with light—sunrise peeking over the horizon, the birth of a new star. It was so brilliant, so blinding, that Elyria had to shut her eyes against the glare.

And when it subsided, when the bright burst behind her eyelids had dulled to a rolling orange, when she opened them again, there he was.

He walked through the bloody wreckage of the room, past the bodies Raefe had left littered by the entrance, like a star god. Light clung to him, seeped from him. It poured from the tips of his fingers, his palms, the seams of his armor. His hair was dampened with sweat, his face soot-streaked, his jaw shadowed, and his eyes⁠—

Stars above, his eyes.

Gone were those warm brown irises that looked like home, ringed with the thinnest golden band. No, they were entirely made of molten gold—iridescent, incandescent. They narrowed, blazing, as they locked on Elyria, taking in the shadow collar around her throat, the blood dripping down her sides, the grip of Malakar’s hand on her shoulder.

The way she shook.