Page 163 of The Shadowed Oracle
A sob welled in her. She writhed and kicked with phantom limbs. Begging again and again to be taken back. Back to the way it was before. Before she knew.
Then a scream sounded off in the distance.
Ingrid didn’t need to search for the origin of it. Those puzzle pieces still hung in front of her.
The screams. The neighbors had complained about the screams. About the noise. About the shrill shrieks Kyle had let out as he was being robbed of his life.
She remembered that. She remembered everything now, all at once. Remembered it all so vividly that there was no room for doubt. No holes to fill in. No alternative conclusions. As desperately as she wanted it to be a lie, she had to stare it in the face and call it what it was. The truth.
Her heart turned to stone.
Her eyes burned.
And she no longer fought the vision.
She watched as the hooded man fled back to his car, thudding into the driver’s seat mere inches from her. She looked at him like a stranger, but he was no stranger.
The hood came off, along with the rest of the blood-soaked jacket, and Dean Crassus sped off into the night, his face splattered in blood. Kyle’s blood. The filthy evidence of the life he’d just ended.
Sitting behind that wheel, utterly impassive, Dean was unrecognizable from the warm and valiant male she had just left behind in the present.
If she’d been in her body, she would’ve collapsed.
Why?she asked him.How?
Her vision shifted.
How could you murder Karis?
She was directly in front of him, peering into his dark irises.
Why did you lie to me?
Their surroundings faded, shadows infecting everything but those cold eyes looking through her.
Why Dean?!
Dean!
WHY!?
“WHY!?”
And then she was back in the present.
Back in her body.
Laid bare over the covers of her bed, staring at those same eyes, only worlds apart.
Epilogue
They’d calledit many names over the millennia. The Floating Kingdom. Western Capital. Onyx Empire. City carved into the mountain. Court of Twin Rivers. Realm’s End. Gannotar’s Holdfast. Stonetor.
Hydor.
It sat atop a cloud-scratching mountain overlooking the city built within the dark, steel-gray cliffs and between the narrow pass. The Rego River ran around it, through it, and in some places over it, the waterfalls feeding the fjord that housed the king’s fleet below.
Castle spires and pillars jutted into the sky like triumphant swords. A seemingly endless stone bridge with an arched span below for the passage of ships connected the base of the structure to the south sector of the city.
