PART ONE: THE ASCENT
CHAPTER 1
Noa
The shadows were a living thing, something I could taste and smell. Pine and rain. Blood. The color of ash and dead trees, filled with the raucous, greedy screams from the birds and the breakable things that slowly died.
Through the strident noise, I heard a woman’s voice.
“Noa?”
My eyelids fluttered.
Shadows wavered like water when a pebble drops. Translucent light, growing brighter. From outside my gray world, other noises intruded. A steady beeping. The cadence matched the thudding of my heart.
I tried to breathe. Something thick and foreign filled my throat. Was I drowning? Being smothered?
My hands jerked upward—I managed an inch, no more, before soft bands tightened around my wrists. When I pressed with my hips, more bands tightened, chafing at my waist. Ankles.
Beneath my clenched hands, something cold and… wet?
“Noa,” the woman said again. “You’ve been gone a long time. It’s safe to wake up.”
“She can’t hear you.” A second voice, male, brusque enough to agitate the shadows and curl my fingers.
“Her hands are moving,” the woman said. “Her heart rate says she’s conscious.”
“We can’t take the chance,” the man shot back, sharp enough to startle the beeping machine, change the rhythm. “Put her back under.”
“Where’s the nymph?”
“Still gone. Along with the other one. You want another fire?”
Fire?
I’d been burning… creatures. Amal’s monsters. I remembered the mud, black with blood. The rancid carnage sticking to my lips, in my throat.
“Do it now,” the male ordered. “Or I’ll do it myself.”
My focus arrowed toward the scuffing of shoes against a floor. The scrape of metal. Then a spreading warmth. An uneasy rush in my veins, pushing me downward.
Even with my eyes closed, I sensed the lessening light, the moving shadows, and I was lost again. Where the birds cried and men battled. Glinting sunlight on steel; the sickening, sweet stench of blood and gore. Shouts from a distant ridge where flags snapped in the wind. Where trees swayed and branches twisted.
A form emerged from the gray, taking shape and speaking with Julien’s voice. My lady…
Pain, slicing like a knife plunge, clenching every muscle. My joints cracked from disuse. My useless body flopped, but the images in the shadows were wild and turbulent. Punishing. Men and creatures. Laura. Levi. Charcoaled grass and a rotten hill. Julien became a black smear that rushed through the air, ripping apart a grunting pig while I stared at the mud, red-tinted and heavy, splattering on my jeans.
The vampire’s voice again, echoing, eerily growling, Don’t make yourself a target… move.
I tried. Moving, that is, but my body was a numbed vessel and I was locked there for the ride. The memories, images kept flowing, flowing...
Bedisa.
Grayson’s voice. I recognized it, as if another blade was carving into my heart.
What the hell are you doing here?
Not pleasing Fate today.
