Page 26 of What Blooms from Death

“What really happened that night?” I wondered aloud.

Zayn fixed me with another long, searching look. “We’ve yet to figure it out,” he said. “All I know is, we’ve been trapped here ever since.”

Chapter Seven

Aleksander

“So,thisis an interesting development, isn’t it?”

I finished wiping a streak of blood from my arm before darting a look toward my cousin. “Which part?”

“All of it, really.” Zayn was practically bouncing as he spoke. In all the time we’d spent trapped in this hellish underworld, some things still hadn’t changed; he was still entirely too fucking excitable.

“We’re allawake,to begin with,” he said. “Which hasn’t happened in a long time, for some of us.”

I didn’t want to think about all I had lost during this most recent sleep, but I couldn’t help asking, “How long was I out for, this time?”

He hesitated.

“The truth, Zayn. Out with it.”

“…This last stretch was the longest one yet. Nearly a year, as best we could track it. We didn’t think you were going to wake again.”

My breath hitched.

A year?

How was that possible?

It felt as if I’d only been sleeping for a day or two, at most.

My tongue felt oddly heavy. My lips, numb. I couldn’t speak, so I busied myself with lifting the cloth I had pressed to my wrist, checking the stab wound underneath.

Still bleeding.

That chaotic beast had been impressively accurate with her knife.

“And all the princess did was touch you, she claims—and just like that, you woke up.” Zayn glanced at the woman in question, frowning.

We still had her—and the strange, shapeshifting beast accompanying her—surrounded by our soldiers. She would not escape. But she was keeping her distance from me, at the moment. Which was for the better, as far as I was concerned; the farther away she was, the easier it was to think.

“Interesting, as I said,” Zayn concluded, dragging his gaze back to me. “And she could prove even more useful to us, maybe. Given her magical affinity…” His tone shifted, a cautious hopefulness weaving into it as he quietly added, “She could be the very thing we’ve been waiting for, Aleks. Our way out of this hellscape.”

I bristled. “I wouldn’t count on that. She’s the reason we’re here to begin with, if you’ll recall—her and that damned, out-of-control magic of hers.”

His gaze danced between the princess and me, questions clouding his eyes, but he didn’t argue.

“It doesn’t feel like years ago that it happened,” I told him, shaking my head. “It feels as if I just woke up after that last night at Rose Point. I still remember everything perfectly clearly. And I’m assuming you do, too.”

I’d tried to save her father that night.

In return, she’d attacked me. Her magic had ripped my sword from my hands, cutting open the world itself in the process—and then her shadows had overtaken me and my guards and courtiers, pressing us down into the realm of the dead, trapping us here.

We’d come to in this strange hell, assuming she’d killed us. Yet, after a time, we realized something even more disturbing: We were different from the ghastly souls who haunted this place—at least, at first.

Buried alive, in a manner of speaking.

Some of our companions had eventually succumbed to the deathly air and energy here. They’d joined the pale, dead figures who pressed against the edges of a safe area we’d created—an area protected through what magic Zayn and I could manage to summon within this suffocating place.

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