I gestured to my body. “Yes, that’s exactly how it feels.”
“Then we have to get it. It’s not too late!”
“I agree.” I stood, prowling toward her. “But after we get it, we’re coming back to this spot and finishing what we started.”
She trailed a finger down my chest. “Get your shadow back, Prince, and you can do anything you want.”
Other than not dying, that might just have been the best motivation yet. I turned to move toward my shadow, to follow the feeling inside of me.
It turned out I didn’t have to find it. The trees rustled around us. Leaves shook, branches rattled. The ground rumbled.
I stilled, heart pounding in my ears as the hairs on my arm raised.
Poppy slowly turned to look at me. “How is your shadow doing all of that?” She gestured to the forest around us.
“It’s not,” I murmured. “I think . . .”
Slowly, shadows emerged from the canopies, from behind trees. Oh, fuck.
“I think it brought friends,” I finished, right as the shadows attacked.
Chapter Forty-Seven
POPPY
The shadows swarmed us. Loch and I whipped around, back-to-back, as they formed a circle that surrounded us.
“How do we fight shadows?” I asked.
“Fire,” Loch said.
“Which we don’t have.”
“That’s correct,” he responded.
“They have to respond to something else,” I murmured, thoughts racing.
I heard the rasp of Loch’s sword as he unsheathed it. “Why does the shadow king want you so badly?” he asked, and I answered, even though I knew it was a rhetorical question.
“I don’t know. It must have to do with my gran, but I don’t understand it any more than you do.”
“Listen,” he said over his shoulder, “the best we can do is fight them off and run until we get somewhere where the light can protect us.”
I glanced around the dark forest, trees and bramble shrouded in shade. “I don’t know if the sun is coming out again.”
“Then we run and don’t stop until we get near a source of light—somewhere we can hide and make a fire, ward them off.”
That soundedlike a tall order, but I didn’t want to be negative when that was currently the only plan we had.
“Light is the best way to fight them, but we can still use other means to keep them at bay, to keep them from taking you. You’re what they want, and I won’t let them have you.”
The shadows closed in tighter, those red eyes glowing with a promise of destruction.
I swallowed, gut hardening. I thought of everything Leoni taught me in our weeks of training, everything Loch and Driscoll had taught me about using magic.
“I’m going to fly,” I said. “Draw them up and away from you.”
“Don’t you dare,” Loch said. “We face this together. You don’t go where I can’t follow, remember?”
