Page 37 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

Even so, a strangled whimper broke through her throat as she threw her arms around his neck. He pulled her to his chest tighter.

Over his shoulder, an ancient, haunting voice snarled, “You cannot have what is mine.” Its rage seared into them.

Amethyst and glittering navy light flared from inside the bedchamber. Foaming thunderclouds burst from the threshold, storming up the stairs.

Faster. Climb faster,Alora roared as the storm bubbled ten steps below.

Garrik burst into the atrium, bellowing to the others and rattling the mountain.

The storm, it was seconds behind them, raging upward and ready to explode into the room.

Thalon appeared across the atrium, eyes wide as he beheld them breathless, Alora in Garrik’s arms.

“Move!”Garrik ordered, and they ran through the Moon door.

Jade was on her feet, backpack strapped over her shoulders and daggers drawn as she frantically jumped off the furniture.

Thalon’s Earned clacked together as he slid to a stop beside her, and asked, “Aiden?”

“Somewhere in there,” Jade hissed, gesturing to the hallway filled with hundreds of doors. “Did you find a way out?”

Their Guardian’s face fell grim. “No.”

If they got trapped in here, in those hundreds of doors … That storm, with no way out …

Alora shut out the terror—as hard as Garrik slammed the door to the Atrium closed and settled Alora back on her own feet.

Steeling herself, and without another option, they ran down the hallway screaming for Aiden. Passing art galleries, ballrooms, small living spaces, offices. Rooms of clouds and night skies, with glowing light so bright they had to look away.

Behind, the atrium door exploded into a thousand splinters.

The storm devastated the room, shattering belongings before it surged into the hallway in wrathful pursuit, and that ancient, cruel voice snarled from within the storm clouds, “Darkness. You believe you could escape?”

Garrik—it wants him. Chased him.

She was falling behind. The rush and sweep of the mighty wind and death clouds filling the corridor?—

Garrik slid his fingers into hers and swung her forward. In front of him.

Alora grappled for a steady foothold as Jade called to Aiden.

From a door twenty steps ahead to their left, he finally answered.

They slid into the room, running. Aiden waved atop a dais, sitting in front of fifty rows of pews. Some sort of cathedral, she realized, before Garrik slammed the night sky-stained-glass door closed.

“What did you do?” Jade bellowed toward the dais, tearing a dagger from its sheath.

Holding his palm to his chest, Aiden gasped with a mischievous grin. “Me?”

Jade may have said something had their heaving, hysterical breaths not been drowned out by the storm consuming the glass door.

Mist and fog and power—terrible, endless, cruel power—seeped under and climbed the glassy sky so slowly now, as if itknewit had them trapped.

Glass shattered—but not from the door.

Aiden’s boots crunched the tattered glass of one of the five floor-to-ceiling length windows. The middle one, which once had been a stained-glass moon worshiped by faeries, had been shattered.

And on the other side … a winter storm covered the mountain.

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