Page 64 of The Eighth Isle

Valentine hit the floor on his knees the next second, and Shadow fell next to him, trying to hold himself up by his wings—but Syra still stood.

She still stood, a surprised smile on her face when she raised her hand and waved it at me, and the magic—all that fucking magic that nearly suffocated me—began to fade away.

Before the minute was over, Valentine was on all fours, coughing blood, and Shadow was barely beating his wings, and Syra was pushing back the hair that the energy of my magic had moved around her.

“That was unexpected—but so good!” she told me, and she walked around Grey to come closer.

“Don’t come near me,” I spit, ignoring the blood dripping from my nose again.

“Oh, don’t be dramatic. We live in the same castle. Let me look at you.” And she reached out her hand for me like she really thought I was going to let her touch me.

I moved back again. “You’re a monster,” I spit, and she stopped walking again. “I will find a way to stop you, Syra. I will walk out of this Isle together with Grey one way or the other.” My voice shook and broke, and I was already crying again, but these wereangrytears. These fueled me.

And Syra was absolutely unfazed. “You are not going anywhere until you have the baby, Fall,” she told me, and she sighed like I had exhausted her. Valentine made it back to his feet, and his left eye was lower on his face than the right, but that’s the only thing my magic had done to him this time before Syra stopped it. And with such ease, too.

“You won’t—”Get anywhere near my baby,I was going to say, but she didn’t even let me speak.

“Hush, now, lovely. You’re angry. I think you need to eat.”

She raised her hand in front of her face, kissed her fingers just like she’d done earlier, and she blew at me.

My body shut down the same second.

Grey,Grey, Grey, bleeding all over the floor…

My eyes opened slowly, and my head wobbled to the sides like it meant to fall off my neck completely. I blinked and blinked and there was light around me, and it was so bright that for a moment I considered I might somehow be out in the sun. For a moment, I considered Iwasn’ton the Eighth Isle with Syra, and I hadn’t just seen Grey bleeding all over the floor, not moving a single inch.

Alarms rang in my head, making me wake up all the way at once.

I wasn’t lying on a bed this time, but I was sitting in a chair all alone at the head of a table that could sit fifty peoplecomfortably, in a big rectangular room. Over me in the high ceiling hung two chandeliers full of crystals, and paintings of places I’d never seen before decorated the walls, and food—so much food!—was on white and silver plates in front of me, waiting to be eaten.

My stomach growled as if on cue to tell me just how hungry I was. My eyes couldn’t pick what to look at yet, all the soups and the meats and the vegetables and the sauces and the cakes—too much, too much, too much.

My body was shaking with weakness. Fuck, I really needed to eat something, or I wasn’t going to be able to make it out of here without collapsing.

But where was I? Where the hell had she put me?

The room was made of that same dark grey stone, with two windows at my back that showed nothing but trees and the night sky, the moon hidden away by big dark clouds. Plenty of light came from the chandeliers, and the candles placed all over the long table, as well as on the stands around the room, under the paintings framed in silver. It took me a few minutes just to stop my heart from beating so fast, and to convince myself to reach for some of that bread and eat it.

I needed food. If I couldn’t even coordinate my limbs properly from hunger, how could I ever hope to find Grey again and make sure he was okay?

That’s the only thing that mattered. That’s the only thing I’d allow myself to think about right now.

So, I ate a piece of bread as I cried, and some meat, even half a bowl of warm soup so that I wouldn’t need to be thinking about food for as long as possible. And when that was done, I pushed myself to stand, and my legs held me. I forced myself to breathe—and God, I was so tired. So fucking exhausted of constantly having to swallow and keep moving, ignore my body and force itto push through. Just push through until the danger passed—but that was just it: the dangerneverpassed!

“Find Grey,” I told the empty room. The rest was unimportant.

The corridors were dark—no chandeliers or lamps or torches out here. It seemed everything in this castle was unfinished, and Syra only furnished and lit up the rooms she needed—like that dining room that I was pretty sure I’d passed by while searching for Grey earlier, and it had been empty then. Just like the rest of these cold, dark, eerie spaces.

But I moved forward anyway, hoping to find her room again, to find Grey on the floor, bleeding—all alone. To feed him my blood and pull him to his feet and have him fly us out through one of the windows.

The hope was strong—it wasn’t over yet. No, it wasn’t over until I’d tried a hundred more times.

Except the longer I moved through the corridors—and half my attention was on keeping myself shielded so Syra didn’t hear me coming—the more certain I was that I’d never seen these rooms before. The more I was certain that Syra had put me in another part of the castle and I was never going to find my way back.

But…

I heard the footsteps far too late. I was in the middle of the wide corridor, this one long and empty with no doorways, just small windows close to the ceiling that let in a bit of moonlight.

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