Page 103 of The Demon Tide

“Elloren,” Lukas purrs, his voice throaty as he leans in to nuzzle my neck, his grip firming around my thigh. “Let me take you...”

“No, Lukas,wake up.” I grip his black hair and yankhard.

He draws back, his expression bewildered.

“I’m here!Really here!” I cry out, suddenly desperate to break through. “A dream connection has opened up through our fasting!”

Breathing hard, Lukas’s gaze turns inward for a moment before he stares back at me, seeming dazed.

“Where are you?” I demand, noting, with mounting alarm, that the fastlines on his hands are also emanating a faint, gray mist.“Tell me where Vogel has you!”

The scene around us spirals away, the pressure of his body on mine lifting. We’re suddenly standing in the middle of a night-darkened valley, the stars like scattered diamonds against the arc of the sky. The bone-white peaks of the Northern Spine are wrapped around our backs, the Caledonian Mountains before us.

I know exactly where we are.

The valley that contains Gardneria’s Fourth Division military base, all the military buildings and structures stripped away. Only Lukas stands before me, both of us dressed in our Sealing greens and lit by moonlight.

“Elloren,” he says as an Ironwood grand piano shudders into being beside him, a violin suddenly in one of my hands, its bow in the other. “Play with me,” he offers, his voice suffused with emotion. “One last time, Elloren.”

“No,” I growl, hurling the violin and bow to the ground as I step toward him, grab hold of his shoulder, and shake him. “I’mhere. And I’m going to rescue you. Tell me where Vogel has you!”

His eyes widen with a look of profound realization, and I know that I’m finally breaking through. “I don’t know,” he rasps, clearly fighting the murky dream state. “A cave.”

“Where?”

He shakes his head again. “I don’t know.”

I press a hand over his heart. “Describe it!”

Lukas swallows and looks around with the expression of someone trying to think through the muzzy influence of strong spirits. “Dark stone,” he manages. “A catacomb—like a giant hornet’s nest. Shadow-corrupted Mage soldiers with gray eyes.” He closes his eyes tightly, as if willing himself alert. When he opens them once more, they blaze into mine with sudden clarity. “Elloren.” He grabs my arms, his expression turning almost violent in its intensity. “Get your powerunbound. Break the fasting spell. Get itoffyou! He’s tracking you through it!”

“Where are you, Lukas?” I demand again.

“Don’t come for me,” he growls, impassioned. “I’m atrap!”

A phantom hand grabs my shoulder and shakes it. I whip my head around to find the scene fracturing at the edges, fault lines forming to crackle inward toward the bleached Spine and moonlit field, shattering.

A cry of protest rises from my throat as Lukas and I grab fiercer hold of each other, his affinity fire surging toward mine as he gives me one, last tortured look before he, too, fragments to black.

I jolt awake, desperate for Lukas and gasping for breath, my Wand’s energy buzzing against my calf. A spider-tattooed man is jostling my shoulder in a night-darkened bedroom. Another man, tall and point-eared, looms, sapphire light pulsing over them both.

On instinct, I draw my Ash’rion blade and bring it to the spidery-man’s throat, my fingers sliding over the hilt’s runes, ready to stab him and blast off his damned head just as my dream-fog clears enough for me to realize where I am and who is before me.

My uncle Wrenfir is frozen in place, an astonished smile forming on his blackened lips as if he didn’t know I had it in me to fight so viciously and is vastly pleased that I do. I swiftly draw back my knife, heart hammering, and meet Or’myr’s urgent glare over Wrenfir’s shoulder. I move to speak, but they both cut me off with emphatic fingers to their lips. Or’myr points toward the bedroom window.

A riot of changeable sapphire light is flashing through it, cast up from the terrace below, and alarm seizes hold of my chest.

They motion for me to get up and I catch sight of three military rune skiffs landed there as I do, four more flying in. Heavily armed Vu Trin soldiers are disembarking, Fain striding out to meet them. Firming my grip on my blade, Or’myr hastily makes my bed as Wrenfir tugs me toward the bedroom’s door.

“Zhi Lo,” Fain’s pleasant voice chimes up from the terrace as we cross the room. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“This isn’t a social call,” a woman’s voice sharply returns. “We’re searching the premises.”

“For what?” Fain asks, sounding convincingly confused as we exit the room.

“Set up a runic net around the entire area,” the woman’s voice commands as I’m led down a curving hallway at a fast clip, both Wrenfir and Or’myr pulling wands as we go.

A door slams shut a story below and I flinch as boot heels sound, running through a hall then clomping up the stairs to this floor. Or’myr pauses before the purple-veined, obsidian wall, pulls a Noi rune stone from his tunic’s pocket, and presses it to the wall.

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