Page 59 of Queen of Stars and Shadows

When I don’t respond, she raises a hand, and agony like I’ve never felt before lances through my body. It feels as if I’m beingtorn into a million pieces, just like Valaron. It feels like I amending.

She releases it, and I gasp.

“Are you ready to admit it now?”

My voice is weak and hoarse, but I force myself to respond. “I will not submit to you. Not ever.”

She laughs, and pain becomes my entire existence. I can feel the life draining from my body, feel my consciousness slipping away…

“Not too much. I want you awake for this, girl. I want you to feel every ounce of delicious agony.”

“You’ll have to kill me,” I gasp.

“Actually, I don’t.” She chuckles, and the sound climbs up my spine like blades. “I can trap you in a prison in your own mind, enduring endless suffering, watching your people endure endless suffering, watching Valaron fall over and over and over until you slowly go mad. But I can keep your body alive, decade after decade after decade. Centuries, even, with your very long fae life. How does that sound?”

And the last thing I see is all three demons closing in around me, their darkness shrouding all else.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Zyren

When my eyesopen, I realize that I am dead.

There is nothing but gray in every direction, swirling clouds of it that undulate slowly. Bodies litter the ground at my feet, blood the only splash of color in an otherwise colorless world. It’s silent and still.

I broke my promise.

I told Sarielle I would see her again, and now I never will.

Fury rises within me. After centuries of living the most dangerous life possible, guardian to dozens of fae, protecting countless lives from every imaginable threat, fighting in battles, facing nightmares, I had been killed by none of those things. What had ended me was a curse. A curse because I dared to fall in love.

The injustice of it makes my inner nightmare growl and claw for the surface. I’ve always kept that part of me suppressed, always worried I’d lose myself to my darkness. Sarielle had told me not to fear that part of myself, told me I could find balance, but I hadn’t listened. It had all been for nothing. All my inner hatred for all these centuries, and none of it mattered. I’d finally found love, and that had been my undoing.

Well here, now, in the end, I’m not going to hide from myself any longer.

I let out the beast that’s simmering just below the surface.

It surges upward, and I feel my eyes change, watch as my fingers sharpen into claws. Shadows swirl up and around me, and dark wings of black mist unfurl from my back. I’ve experienced these changes before, but this time I don’t hold back. This time I let the fullness of my magic flood through me. I feel the strength and the wild fury.

And I don’t lose myself. I’m just stronger, in body and in magic.

Instantly, I can sense the other nightmares in the vicinity. The giant mass that is Astherius, plus dozens of smaller creatures farther away. Confusion tickles the corners of my mind. Are they all dead, too? Are we all somehow in a shared hell made only for nightmares?

But then my mind floods with something else.

Memories.

Everything that had been lost to me comes back, so fast and so brutal it seems my mind is a great maelstrom over the ocean.

Flying through the rift over the Court of Memory.

Making love to Sarielle, admitting my love to her for the first time.

The ice forest, the demon.

The weeks of travel, Avonia’s forces on our heels.

The wedding by the lake, Xinius binding Sarielle and I to each other, completing the spell to save Valaron.

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