Page 1 of The Evernight Court

One

The Evernight brotherswere coming for me.

The three of them—Romin and Emil and Tristian—were walking toward me slowly, their dark unblinking eyes on me, yet I still wasn’t moving.

Because I was still searching for Grey.

Amazing how he—and the Blood Call—had turned my entire life upside down once more within the night. Incredible how little it had taken for me to submit to him the way I had, to trust him, tounderstandhim like we’d been lovers across timelines, and we’d finally found each other again.

Incredible.

And now he was gone.

Even though I searched for him, I knew he was gone. I’d seen how that vortex in the sky swallowed him whole. I’d seen the look in his eyes. I’d felt his desperation that matched my own.

Gone.

Yet the world was somehow still whole. I was still alive. The woods around us still whispered, leaves and branchessnickering as they moved to a wind only they could feel, mocking me. Laughing at me.

At my goddamnjokeof a fate.

Somehow, I made it to my feet. Somehow, I began to understand that the way the brothers were striding over to me and the way they were looking at me, nothing good was going to happen when they actually reached me.

“No,” I thought I whispered, and Emil was the first to smile.

“Calm down, Fall,” said Tristian, walking by his side.

“Calm down. It’s ov—” Romin started, his wings half spread on his back, but then they stopped.

We all stopped when the ground groaned like it had finally caught up with the events of the past few minutes and had decided that it wanted to break apart, after all.

A moment later, though, I realized that it wasn’t the ground that was making that terrible sound.

It was a dragon.

It was Storm, who’d risen in the air from wherever he’d fallen in the woods, who was roaring so loudly that the whole world heard him and breathing so much fire at those dark clouds in the sky that for a moment, they seemed to be fading away into nothing, and allowing the blue of the sky to seep through.

Then Storm began to slam against the ground—on purpose.

It was the most terrifying, heartbreaking thing I had ever seen in my life.

Even the Evernights were backing away as Storm slammed his huge body against the trees, breaking them to pieces, sending splinters of wood toward us like fucking bullets. Before the minute was over, he’d set every tree close to him on fire, and his roar had filled my ears andwiped my mind of anything else. All I saw was fire, and all I heard was his gut-turning roar and all I felt was his pain.Mypain.

Storm felt it, too. Storm had seen it just as well as I had. Grey was gone. His master, the man who’d raised him since he’d hatched, was gone. He was all alone now.

And so was I.

“Get her out of here, now!”

It could have been Romin who spit the order, or maybe one of the others—I didn’t really care. I couldn’t tear my eyes from Storm, all that fire, the way he was thrashing and slamming his claws and wings and head and tail onto the ground and the trees—like he wanted to hurt himself. Like he wanted it to hurt physically as much as it hurt on the inside.

And if I wasn’t so damn paralyzed, I’d have wanted to do the same.

Hands around my arms.

Storm, I’m so sorry…

They dragged me back and my legs moved somehow, even though I wasn’t in control of my body at all.

---