Page 160 of Once the Skies Fade

But it wasn’t Matthias’s eyes peering down at me. Brennan stood over me, that mischievous smile of his beaming. My heart lit up at the sight of him, but not in the way it had before. Raven was right. The bond had altered my feelings.

Slipping my hand into Brennan’s, I let him pull me to my feet.

“How are you here?” I asked, dropping my eyes to his chest.

When he spoke, though, it wasn’t his voice. It was Graham’s.

“It didn’t have to be this way. You could have just picked me.”

My whole body trembled as I yanked my hand from his and retreated backwards, shaking my head. This wasn’t real. He wasn’t really here. This was just a regular, run-of-the-mill bad dream. Glancing around, I searched for any sign of Matthias, any hint he was sharing this dream with me.

“Matthias!” I called, spinning around in the trees, the forest becoming a blur as I turned and searched.

“Calla, wake up.” A voice pierced my consciousness, but it wasn’t his, and I resisted its command, desperate to remain in the one place where I could find my mate and talk to him and make sure he was okay.

“Calla, wake up,” the voice repeated, and something gripped my shoulders, shaking me as I clamped my eyes closed, not wanting to see anyone but my mate. “It’s me, Isa!”

Her name yanked me from my dream, and slowly I opened my eyes to find myself back in my cell and staring at my best friend.

“We have to move.” She started to haul me up to my feet, but then stopped, noticing my iron-clad hands.

“Where have you been?” I asked as she studied the contraptions encasing my hands and shadows.

“Explanations come later.” Her eyes snapped up to mine. “How do we get these off?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. The guards might have the keys? Who keeps the keys to the cells?”

“They wouldn’t make it that easy. You can’t conjure your shadows to help break free?”

“First thing I tried, and no, not without blinding pain. Even with the pain I don’t know if I can hold them steady long enough to free the lock.”

“Ursula?” Isa asked.

“Her or Warren maybe?”

“Okay,” she said, lowering my hands back into my lap and gripping my shoulder reassuringly. “I will find the keys, but until we can get those off, I want you to stay here.”

Before I could protest, she was at the door and slipping through the tight opening.

“Isa,” I called after her, and she poked her head back inside. “Where is he?”

My friend swallowed hard, her eyes darting back to the corridor. When she turned back to me, she didn’t meet my stare, shame pulling at her features as if all of this was her fault.

“Graham is taking him to Dolobare.”

Chapter 72

Matthias

Ididn’t know how many dreams I spent searching for Calla, but she never appeared. Did the bond have some sort of range? Maybe we simply weren’t catching each other at the same time. That was a far nicer idea than the alternative: that she simply wasn’t thinking of me.

We’d been sailing for what seemed like a fortnight, but based on the number of meals one of the crew had brought me—if one could call maggoty bread and flat ale a meal at all—it was no more than a few days. Four, at most.

Graham didn’t visit me again, which might have offended me had I not wanted to gut him with my bare hands. It was a colossal waste of energy to imagine all the ways of killing him, and it did nothing for my plummeting morale, so I tried to focus instead on Calla.

My mate.

Shadow Keeper. Queen.

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