Page 99 of Darkness and Deceit
I barely hear him.
Because something’s wrong.
The shadows aren’t just shifting at the edges of my vision—they’re moving. Crawling. Sliding across the floor, curling up the walls, seeping through cracks in the stone like water.
But it’s not water.
It’s thick. Oily and dark and pulsing like it has a heartbeat of its own.
Not like Kai’s shadows.
These arewrong.
My feet stop. “Tony?—”
“I see it,” he says. His voice is clipped now. Focused. “I see it.”
We both turn at the same time.
The hallway darkens.
Panicked screams echo from below—climbing up the stairwells from the lower levels like a warning siren. I recognize that sound. That kind of fear doesn’t come from surprise. It comes from knowing you’re already too late.
Then we see it.
A wall of black turns the corner at the end of the hall. It pours across the floor in a fast, gleaming tide, coating everything in its path—like living tar, like shadow melted down into muscle and hunger. It doesn’t crawl. It flows. Fluid and intelligent. Fast.
“Run!” Tony yells, already pulling me backward.
I don’t know where we’re going—there’s no safe place left—but we run. We tear down the hall, taking turns too fast, almost slipping on the stone. The darkness floods behind us, filling the space with an oily hiss.
When we hit the stairs, we take them two at a time. Higher, higher, until Tony trips over a step and I grab him, yanking him upright by the elbow. I taste blood in my mouth, probably from biting the inside of my cheek.
The shriek of the thing reverberates through the stairwell, impossibly close.
“Keep going,” I hiss, urging Tony to run faster. He doesn’t let go of my wrist, and his grip is so fierce it feels like my bones might splinter, but I don’t let go. I’m afraid of what will happen if I do.
We cut hard left, down a corridor that’s so narrow Tony’s shoulder clocks a sconce and shatters it. Sparks spit onto the black-tide pooling at our heels; for a split second, the shadow recoils from the flecks of fire, but then it surges forward, swallowing the embers whole, hungrier than before.
“Where the hell are we going?” Tony gasps, tripping over his own feet.
My lungs are burning. My vision swims. I don’t have an answer—because there shouldn’t be a question. The academy is supposed to be warded against shit like this. This thing shouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t have gotten through.
“The academy’s warded,” I mutter without thinking. “It’s sealed. It shouldn’t have gotten in…”
“Yeah?” Tony pants. “Tell that to the ink tsunami chasing us!”
He’s right. And I know that whatever this is, it’s here for me. Every twist we take, it follows. Every floor we climb, it rises. It’s hunting me.
We bolt around another corner—this one ending in a sealed stairwell door.
Tony skids to a stop, nearly slamming into it. “Dead end,” he chokes out.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no?—”
I slam my palm against the door, trying to will it open. It doesn’t budge.
“Backtrack?” he asks, wild-eyed.
