Page 77 of The Fallen Kingdom

It might be a trick.

Kiaran’s call comes again, so close, and it’s laced with so much pain that my chest tightens just hearing it. I grab my sword belt off the ground and buckle it around my hips as I head to the mouth of the cave. He calls again, frantic now. It sends so much fear through me that I can’t think straight. My instinct is to run out there and find him.

Just take one step out and if you can’t see him, come back inside.

“Kiaran?” I call, stepping outside the cave. One step.

A portal opens, and I’m pulled right into it.

Suddenly, I’m in a ballroom. Men and women dance a close waltz all around me, just like in one of the fine assemblies in Edinburgh—

My breath catches in my throat. Iamin the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms.

I recognize the grand chandelier that casts the room in a glittering glow. The stained-glass lanterns that float by the ceiling, scattering red, green, yellow, and blue light across the gold-textured wallpaper. Skirts rustle around me as gentlemen whirl their partners around the room, every one of them perfectly in sync with the orchestra’s violins as they play a jaunty country dance. The one I remember from my nightmares.

The one that played the moment my mother was murdered.

Numb with horror, I look down at my dress. My dress.The dress. My fingers pluck at it to make sure—

Real. It’s real. But it can’t be real.

The last time I wore this dress, it was for my debut. Even the beaded rose slippers peeking out from beneath my skirts are the same. My breath catches in my throat.

“May I have the pleasure?” A gentleman’s gloved hand extends into my view.

This isn’t real. It’s not real. It’s not—

“My lady?”

The gentleman has a quizzical smile on his nondescript face. He seems harmless, but something isn’t right about him. There’s something unnatural about his features. His smile is a little too friendly. His skin a little too pale. A flash of color pulses in his eyes, gone so quickly I might have imagined it.

Then a flicker across his skin like a shadow passing across the surface of water. I wonder, for a moment, if I’m imagining him, but when I touch his hand, it’s warm. Solid.

I hitch a breath. “I need to leave.”

As I turn, he grasps my arm roughly. His fingers put a bruising pressure on my skin. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Unhand me, or I’ll break your fingers.”

Without waiting for an answer, I jerk out of his grasp and dart to the exit. Another gentleman blocks my path, tall and blond, but with an equally forgettable face. Thesameface? “My lady, I believe I have this dance.”

I have to get out of here.

“No,” I say. “Let me pass—”

He seizes my hand. His grip is so tight that I cry out.

“Stop!”

I struggle, but the gentleman yanks me into the middle of the dance floor. I lash out with my slippered foot, catching him in the knee, but it doesn’t even faze him. He wraps his long fingers around my wrist and pulls so hard that I stumble.

“It’s easier if you don’t struggle.” I almost pause at what sounds like a woman’s voice beneath his masculine baritone.

Move!

I grasp his hand—I’ll break every last one of his fingers if I have to—but he sweeps me into a waltz.

Just before I shove his fingers back, a painful jolt goes through me. Power, thick and oppressive and numbing. I have no control over my body. No matter how I try, my feet don’t listen. They don’t run. They don’t kick, or thrash, or do any of the things my mind isscreamingat them to do.

---