Queen of Shadows

The soldiers came in like an unending wave, their hollow eyes lit with bloodlust.

Even down here, Aedion could hear the people screaming in the streets, either from the explosion or the magic returning to flood their land. That wind … he’d never smelled anything like it, never would again.

They’d taken out the tower. They’d done it.

Now his queen would have her magic. Maybe now she’d stand a chance.

Aedion gutted the Valg commander nearest him, black blood splattering on his hands, and engaged the two that stepped in to replace him. Behind him, Rowan’s breaths were rasping. Too labored.

The prince’s magic, draining with his blood loss, had begun faltering moments ago, no longer able to choke the air out of the soldiers’ lungs. Now it was no more than a cold wind shoving against them, keeping the bulk at bay.

Aedion hadn’t recognized Lorcan’s magic as it had blasted from him in near-invisible dark winds. But where it struck, soldiers went down. And did not rise.

It, too, had now failed him.

Aedion could scarcely lift his sword arm. Just a little longer; just a few more minutes of keeping these soldiers engaged so that his queen could remain distraction-free.

With a grunt of pain, Lorcan was engulfed by half a dozen soldiers and shoved out of sight into the blackness.

Aedion kept swinging and swinging until there were no Valg before him, until he realized that the soldiers had pulled back twenty feet and regrouped.

A solid line of Valg foot soldiers, their numbers stretching away into the gloom, stood watching him, holding their swords. Waiting for the order to strike. Too many. Too many to escape.

“It’s been an honor, Prince,” Aedion said to Rowan.

Rowan’s only reply was a rasping breath.

The Valg commander stalked to the front of the line, his own sword out. Somewhere back in the sewer, soldiers began screaming. Lorcan—that selfish prick—must have cut a path through them after all. And run.

“Charge on my mark,” the commander said, his black ring glinting as he lifted a hand.

Aedion stepped in front of Rowan, useless as it would be. They’d kill Rowan once he was dead, anyway. But at least he’d go down fighting, defending his brother. At least he would have that.

People were still screaming on the street above—shrieking with blind terror, the sounds of their panic growing closer, louder.

“Steady,” the commander said to the swordsmen.

Aedion took a breath—one of his last, he realized. Rowan straightened as best he could, stalwart against the death that now beckoned, and Aedion could have sworn the prince whispered Aelin’s name. More shouting from the soldiers in the back; some in the front turning to see what the panic was about behind them.

Aedion didn’t care. Not with a row of swords before them, gleaming like the teeth of some mighty beast.

The commander’s hand came down.

And was ripped clean off by a ghost leopard.

For Evangeline, for her freedom, for her future.

Where Lysandra lunged, slashing with claws and fangs, soldiers died.

She’d made it halfway across the city before she got out of that carriage. She told Evangeline to take it all the way to the Faliqs’ country house, to be a good girl and stay safe. Lysandra had sprinted two blocks toward the castle, not caring if she had little to offer them in their fight, when the wind slammed into her and a wild song sparkled in her blood.

Then she shed her human skin, that mortal cage, and ran, tracking the scents of her friends.

The soldiers in the sewer were screaming as she tore into them— a death for every day in hell, a death for the childhood taken from her and from Evangeline. She was fury, she was wrath, she was vengeance.

Aedion and Rowan were backed up against the cave-in, their faces bloody and gaping as she leaped upon the back of a sentry and shredded his spine clean out of his skin.

Oh, she liked this body.

More soldiers rushed into the sewers and Lysandra whirled toward them, giving herself wholly to the beast whose form she wore. She became death incarnate.

When there were none left, when blood soaked her pale fur—blood that tasted vile—she paused at last.

“The palace,” Rowan gasped from where he’d slumped against the stones, Aedion pressing a hand to a wound in the Fae warrior’s leg. Rowan pointed to the open sewer behind them, littered with gore. “To the queen.”

An order and a plea.

Lysandra nodded her furry head, that disgusting blood leaking from her maw, black gore in her fangs, and bolted back the way she’d come.

People screamed at the ghost leopard that shot down the street, sleek as an arrow, dodging whinnying horses and carriages.

The glass castle loomed, half shrouded by the smoking ruins of the clock tower, and light—fire—exploded between its turrets. Aelin.

Aelin was still alive, and fighting like hell.

The iron gates of the castle appeared ahead, strung with reeking corpses.

Fire and darkness slammed into each other atop the castle, and people fell silent as they pointed. Lysandra raced for the gates, and the crowd spied her at last, scrambling and bleating to get out of her way. They cleared a path right to the open entrance.

Revealing thirty Valg guards armed with crossbows lined up in front of it, ready to fire.

They all trained their weapons on her.

Thirty guards with bolts—and beyond them, an open path to the castle. To Aelin.

Lysandra leaped. The closest guard fired a clean, spiraling shot right for her chest.

She knew, with that leopard’s senses, that it would hit home.

Yet Lysandra did not slow. She did not stop.

For Evangeline. For her future. For her freedom. For the friends who had come for her.

The bolt neared her heart.

And was knocked from the air by an arrow.

Lysandra landed on the guard’s face and shredded it with her claws.

There was only one sharpshooter with that sort of aim.

Lysandra loosed a roar, and became a storm of death upon the guards nearest her while arrows rained on the rest.

When Lysandra dared look, it was in time to see Nesryn Faliq draw another arrow atop the neighboring rooftop, flanked by her rebels, and fire it clean through the eye of the final guard between Lysandra and the castle.

“Go!” Nesryn shouted over the panicking crowd.

Flame and night warred in the highest spires, and the earth shuddered.

Lysandra was already running up the sloped, curving path between the trees.

Nothing but the grass and the trees and the wind.

Nothing but this sleek, powerful body, her shape-shifter’s heart burning, glowing, singing with each step, each curve she took, fluid and swift and free.

Faster and faster, every movement of that leopard’s body a joy, even as her queen battled for her kingdom and their world high, high above.

76

Aelin panted, fighting against the throbbing in her head.

Too soon; too much power too soon. She hadn’t had time to draw it up the safe way, spiraling slowly to its depths.

Shifting into her Fae form hadn’t helped—it had only made the Valg smell worse.

Dorian was on his knees, clawing at his hand, where the ring kept glowing, branding his flesh.

He sent darkness snapping for her again and again—and each time, she slammed it away with a wall of flame.

But her blood was heating.

“Try, Dorian,” she begged, her tongue like paper in her parched mouth.

“I will kill you, you Fae bitch.”

A low laugh sounded behind her.

Aelin half turned—not daring to put her back to either of them, even if it meant exposing herself to the open fall.

The King of Adarlan stood in the open doorway at the other end of the bridge.

Chaol—

“Such a noble effort from the captain. To try to buy you time so you might save my son.”

She’d tried—tried, but—

“Punish her,” the demon hissed from the other end of the bridge.

“Patience.” But the king stiffened as he took in the gold ring burning on Dorian’s hand. That harsh, brutal face tightened. “What have you done?”

Dorian thrashed, shuddering, and let out a scream that set her Fae ears ringing.

Aelin drew her father’s sword. “You killed Chaol,” she said, the words hollow.