Page 111 of The Evernight Court

It took me a good moment to get my legs to move again. I was too shocked to scream or call out or do anything at all but get closer because I wanted to see with my own eyes. Ineededto see for sure that I hadn’t just lost my mind, that I wasn’t just hearing things, that this wasn’t just my imagination playing with me.

And when I was close enough that Storm’s wings blew my hair back, I climbed the smaller rocks until I saw behind the big one.

Until I sawthem.

Grey and Valentine were facing one another, barely ten feet apart. They were both alive.

Twenty-Seven

I heldonto the edge of the rock in front of me when my legs threatened to let go.

Grey is alive.

Tears in my eyes, but I was too shocked still to call out, begging my body not to give up until he saw me. Until he came and picked me up and took me home.

That’s when I realized that I hadn’t actually believed myself until this very moment.

That day in the mirror room, when I saw his silhouette, a part of me hadn’t really believed that I’d find Grey or even that he really was still alive. The hope I’d clung to was so, so weak, and I only knew it now when I saw him there, covered in blood, his jeans torn, his wings a fucking mess—but he wasalive.

And he sounded pissed.

“…whatever the hell you think you’re doing!” Grey spit. “This isnotmagic you mess around with. Do you really need me to remind you of that?!”

“I know what I’m doing. Please spare me. Why won’t youjust die yet?” said Valentine with a coldness to be envied, one he’d never spoken to me with before.

Grey’s side was turned to me, so I barely saw it when he grinned. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere until you stop the fucking nonsense and get us out of here.”

Valentine grabbed his hips and lowered his head like he was suddenly exhausted. His hair was disheveled and his clothes dusty—but that was it. He looked perfectly intact, not a drop of blood anywhere on him.

“I feel it, you know. Your mother really was right,” he said, and for some reason every hair on my body stood at attention when he mentioned Genevieve.

“Aboutwhat?” Grey said, his hands in tight fists by his sides, and by now the initial shock had passed somewhat, and I was fairly certain I could produce enough voice to call out his name, but…

“About Fall.” I stopped with my mouth halfway open. “About vampires. She has this theory that we’re not much different from sirens at all. They have fins and fangs, we have wings and fangs—same, same.” Valentine shrugged, and he seemed so perfectly at ease—like he was home, back at the castle, in his tower, not in this ruined place.

“And just how when sirens eat the heart of a man they love they get incredible power, vampires can do the same when they drink the blood of a woman they love, too.”

Grey stopped moving entirely for a second. “We’re not sirens,” he whispered.

Valentine laughed. “That’s exactly what I said—but you being alive proves it, unfortunately. You drank Fall’s blood before you came here, did you not?” He gave it a second, and when Grey didn’t answer, he said, “Of course, you did—you’re still alive because of it. You love her, so her blood gave you much more power than normal blood would, just like it did me.”

Every thought in my head came to a halt. I moved, trying to get closer, to get to Grey and to Valentine, to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but then something moved close to him, and it distracted us all—Shadow.

Shadow suddenly appeared right there by Valentine’s side and sat on his shoulder just like always.

“Took you long enough,” Valentine said, not surprised in the least.

Meanwhile I pushed myself up as far as I could on that rock because I wanted to get to them, too. They had to see me. They had to know I was there.

“Grey,” I said and hardly any voice came out of me, but it was enough.

They both turned to me at the same time.

“Watch out!”

Something moved behind me now, and I barely had the time to push myself to the side before a gigantic monster, much bigger than the ones that had chased me in the woods, landed right atop that rock I’d been holding onto with all my strength. Red eyes on me and those large jaws full of razor-sharp teeth were coming for my face.

A scream slipped out of me finally, but the creature never got to sink those teeth in me. He was thrown to the ground beneath the rocks the next second, and Grey’s dirty, bloody face filled my vision.

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