Page 2 of The Evernight Court

This is all my fault. I’m sorry.

My voice wasn’t working again, and my lips moved in vain. Storm slammed against the ground on the other end of the clearing, close to where Valentine’s limp body was. The other dragons were in the air, too—including Balthazar, the size of a fucking truck with his wings spread all the way.

But none of them dared to even go close to Storm. None of them dared to try to stop him from hurting himself. From spitting all that fire. From ruining all those trees.

My fault, my fault, my fault.

If I was never born, my mother could still be alive. And Missy could have had the life she wanted.

And Grey would still be here, alive and well and in his home. Storm wouldn’t be trying to pull his wings off hisback with his own teeth. He wouldn’t be biting the edges and pulling them by the claws, trying,so, so hardto pull them out.

The sight was too much.

I saw his face, half covered in blood, one eye missing. I saw his teeth as big as my fingers bite into the corner of his own wing. He was trying to fucking tear himself apart exactly the way I wished I had the strength to do.

But that was all I was able to endure before I passed out, hoping with all my being that I never woke up again.

I was in the bedroom.

Hisbedroom, lying onhisbed, all alone. The doors were closed, the lights low, the silence in the air deafening. The clock on one nightstand said it was almost noon. On the other was an orange tie that had once been around my wrist, next to a drawing of me. A minimalistic drawing with only a few lines, of my face, looking over my shoulder. Framed.

I wanted to scream at her, at myself, but my voice wouldn’t come still. I wanted to grab my hair and pull it all out of my head, string by string, but my arms were so heavy. I wanted it to hurt on the outside so badly, just to ease some of the pain in my chest, the pain that squeezed my lungs and didn’t let me breathe. The pain that pounded hammers against the pieces of my heart to turn them into dust.

For a good long while, I could only lay there, staring at my surroundings, remembering how, just hours ago, I’d been in his arms in this very bed. Naked. Completely infatuated by him. Finally beginning to realize that life might, indeed, be beautiful. That there might be something worth living for, after all. It didn’t have to be a struggle and a chase and a challenge all the damn time—I could stop and breathe andactually enjoy life. Be happy, even if it was for a little while. There was a fucking point to this—a point.

And now it was gone.

Storm’s roars were still in my head a while later when I managed to sit up. I could almost hear him grieving. Mourning.Crying.I made it all the way to the windows, the big, huge windows on the other side of the room through which Grey had first brought me here in his arms. I tried to see him, hoping maybe he was still breathing fire and setting trees ablaze so that I could spot him easier. Instead, just the dead darkness of the Whispering Wood greeted me. The angry clouds that shielded us from the rest of the world didn’t even give me rain—something to look at, to listen to, to distract my chaotic mind with.

I sat on the floor near the corner, held my knees to my chest with all my strength, and I counted the tears coming out of my eyes for a little while.

Eventually, I stopped counting.

Eventually they slowed down and even stopped altogether.

A part of me—such a big part of me—still refused to believe that what I’d seen with my own eyes had actually happened. The sky didn’t swallow people. It didn’t pull them with such strength that even Grey’s strong wings couldn’t keep away. It didn’t slam us all against the ground after—no, the sky did no such thing. Not a normal sky.

Except we’re in the Whispering Woods,I reminded myself. There was nothing normal about this place. There was nothing normal about any of the Seven Isles or the curse that was put upon it five hundred years ago. Nothing normal about sirens eating human men, and one of them losing her damn mind and ruining an entire continent.Normalhad no place here.

My eyes were closed, and I saw the whole thing, saw her face and felt her pain—Syra, the beautiful siren who wanted tochange the world and the way of her kind for the man she fell in love with.

A fucking monster in disguise, just like all of them.

So, of course, the sky could come alive andeatGrey—how could it not when Romin banished him? How could it not when he, as the eldest of the Evernight brothers, was the ruler of them, of the Court, of the Seven Isles, and his word was law?

Suddenly, I saw red.

Suddenly, my heart was beating a mile a minute, and I was on my feet, and I was moving. The jacket I’d taken out of Grey’s closet was off me, laying innocently at the foot of the bed. I didn’t reach for it, didn’t care for cold because I wasn’t planning to go outside.

I was planning to go find Romin Evernight and demand he bring Grey back.

It wasn’t fair. What he’d done wasn’t fair. It was wrong, plain wrong—and I wasn’t going to stop until he made it fucking right.

I barely saw the hallways of Grey’s tower. They were basically empty—the walls had no paintings or flowers or anything on them other than lamps. Plain white lamps to illuminate the way down the stairs and out the main doors, onto the ground floor of the castle that was common territory.

It was closer to the first tower—Romin’s—and though I couldn’t be trusted to know where I was going or which turn to take in the maze of corridors, my legs knew the way. They took me there within minutes, and guards opened doors for me, and then I was banging my fists against black wood with all my strength. It hurt so, so good. On the outside, just for a minute. I could focus on the outside.

And then Romin was in front of me.

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