Page 80 of Princess For All

What wasn’t fun?

Waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

“Inez?” James mumbled, his voice heavy.

“What’s wrong, my love?” Kristof worried, his voice sleepy too.

Shit. On top of everything, I woke him on the rare times he actually slept.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“Was it a vision?” he asked after a moment. “That’s normally the only time you wake in the middle of the night.”

“No.” I frowned. “I don’t know.”

“They reported all the volcanoes are fine and about the earthquakes, baby,” James mumbled, still sounding half asleep.

Yeah, that had been a hell of a report. The wholeworldhad apparently had varying degrees of earthquakes. Some places had been hit bad, but we couldn’t really know exactly because some countries were basically gone. Like Japan which used to get bad earthquakes—it was gone. From bombs and—it was an island. Once corrupted went there they were screwed.

Only two of our allies got hit with any worry and no one died. Injuries and damage only. Italy and China.

If it was Erebus, then why was no one killed? It had to be more than a temper tantrum, right?

So this was nature after all of the bombs and everything we did to the planet before the apocalypse. Climate change and how the winter wasn’t much of a winter now and all of the seasons had shifted—everything… Right?

Right?

“What if it wasn’t Erebus or nature, but Aether?”

James snorted in a way that sounded more like a snore. “Why? Telling us to check the ground? Send a vision like fucking email.”

I blinked at the smart man before looking at Tian who was guarding the door and lacked faith in everything like I did. “What if She couldn’t? What if something got cut off?”

“When was the last time anyone had a vision or anything around here?” Petre whispered. “Here specifically? The quick one you had of Keres arriving, yes?”

Kristof was fully awake and I shook James, letting him know this was real. My husband rolled out of bed and reached for me, and something about the way he did it reminded me—it triggered a memory in my mind.

Another time he’d reached for me like that.

“The mine,” I breathed, hearing the fear in my voice. “That mine you showed me that you found not far from the castle. How far underground did it go? Could the snakes scent that farunderground?”

“No,” the four of them said together, James fully awake now and already jumping out of bed.

Yeah, I was moving too.

We were dressed in seconds, and people were alerted on the radios because not five minutes later we were outside and more gathering. Travis looked mostly still asleep, and Vitor was amused, half carrying the younger shifter.

I went to turn to tell him something and almost pissed myself with fear at what I saw.

“Inez?” Kristof bellowed, snapping me out of my fear, but making me realize I’d been out of it for longer than I’d thought.

“I know where the ghosts have gone,” I practically whimpered, pointing to the castle. That wasn’t the full story. I was still getting ghosts, but I wasn’t getting all of them from what we could tell and certainly not ones I should have.

Kaitlin.

Eddie’s mom.

The other princesses.

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