Page 51 of Shadow Fall: Part Two

Are you? He laughed. All this effort and look where you are. You failed, Halwen. So much magic and—you!

I jolted, squinting through the bright flare of the net at Cronus’s shadow form, trying to see who’d earned that surprised tone.

“Yeah, me, asshole,” a horrifyingly familiar voice snarked. “Here. Catch.”

“Verena?” I yelled, struggling for air. Please, no. Don’t let her be here. Don’t let her—

Green light overwhelmed the blue cast of the net, the bright flare of my multi-hued magic, and even cut through the shadowy form of the titan. I blinked tears from my eyes, my heartbeat frantic, that verdant power all I could see.

The net tore away from me so suddenly it took me a moment to realise I was falling. More tears ripped from my eyes, blurring my vision but not enough to hide the truth. The shadow army was gone. Our allies were gone. Lili, my mates, Cerberus, the gods, Verena, the Damned Realm—all gone.

I crashed onto a sage-green Afghan rug, but it absorbed my impact like a trampoline, and propelled me back to my feet, the floor suddenly, impossibly solid.

What … the fuck…?

I stood in a massive, opulent sitting room made of a hundred different shades of green, with a diopside chandelier hanging above me, and a grand mirror spackled with age spanning the whole length of the wall above beautiful, pistachio-coloured sofas. The whole place had a stillness that raised hairs on the back of my neck. It carried no scent at all.

Wary, I took a step across the jade rug, flexing my fingers around the dagger I still had in my hand. I stopped dead after that single step, every muscle in my body going rigid. Collapsed in front of a roaring emerald fireplace—his mammoth body a mass of ink and jet and shadow against the verdigris of the floor—was Cronus.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

VERENA

The guard didn’t speak except to give brief, clipped directions as we crossed Hell, the journey cut in half by virtue of the hellstallion I liberated from a farm on the outskirts of Iarlon. The good news—we reached the portal to Earth in three hours. The bad news—I’d spent the entire journey with my back plastered to Walden’s front, his disapproval like a palpable third person riding with us. Also, my ass hurt after hours of riding.

My nerves were in ruins. Part of me thought we’d get to the Capitol and find corpses scattered over the lawn, my whole family slaughtered. The closer we got, the stiffer I sat, my entire body clenched with dread.

“There,” Walden said, the first word he’d spoken in an hour. “You can see it in the distance.”

I swallowed the acid taste of fear and looked beyond the purple mountains that sprawled around us, my breath hitching when I spotted the slight bluish glimmer. We were almost there, almost to the battle where Haley and the guys were risking their lives to kill a tyrant and make the world a better place to live.

“That’s strange,” Walden murmured, stiffening behind me, his knuckles whitening on the reins he held on to either side of my body. “The portals aren’t usually blue.”

The truth hit me like a bullet and a sharp breath caught the back of my throat. “That’s not the portal. Fuck, it’s the ghosts.”

“The ghosts were contained,” Walden disagreed with an air of unshakable confidence I was about to shake the shit out of.

“I’m telling you.” I twisted to glare at him. “That’s not the portal, it’s a horde of ghosts. We need to find another way around.”

“This is the fastest—”

“A group of ghosts almost killed me once already and I’m not going back for a second round. Find another way.” My voice was ice-cold steel. Shame I couldn’t say the same about my nerves; I wanted to tuck my tail and run back to the palace.

For Haley, Wynvail, Emlyn, Kai, Harvey, and Wane, I reminded myself. For my family of loyal, murderous weirdos.

I kept having to remind myself the lifetime I lived with them was fake, that Cronus created it to trick us, but every last minute of it had been real to me. They were my family, and I loved them.

I swallowed back my dread but couldn’t quite forget how it felt to be touched by the burning ice of a ghost’s hand.

“Fine,” Walden allowed after a fraught minute. Probably because he realised the portal looked fishy too; I knew it wasn’t because he trusted my word. “We’ll go through the mountain pass just ahead.”

“Thank you,” I forced through gritted teeth.

“Just avoiding another stab wound,” he muttered.

I hadn’t let go of my knife, though his blood had begun to dry on the blade. I filled my lungs with air when the horse veered into the narrow mountain pass, rock rising above us on both sides. Tension wound tighter with every step the horse—let’s call him Dave—made into the rocky pass, the mountains seeming to press tighter, closer around us.

The stone was going to topple. It was going to crush us, press all the breath from my lungs until I gasped and fought for tiny scraps of air. Exactly like it did in my trial.

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