I snatched my lighter from the bag, then lit the arrow’s tip until a flame roared up in the dim light. Then, I aimed it just before the mob, and I let it fly. The humans started to scatter, pushing away from the flaming arrow. A few more fiery arrows, and they were scrambling over themselves to get away.
With the threat of flaming arrows raining down, the humans began to scatter at last.
Chapter 95
Thirty minutes left.
I glanced at the sky, which was darkening to a muddy purple over the Thames. As soon as the last of the sun rays fell behind the horizon, it was time to take on Baleros.
We’d never finalized our plan, and I had a bad feeling Ruadan planned to slip off on his own—that he’d be ready to simply give himself up if it didn’t work out.
Baleros was always one step ahead, and he’d be ready for Ruadan. No way in hells was I letting the Grand Master play into Baleros’s hands. Gripping my bow, I whirled. I needed to find Ruadan before he left, as the last of the orange light dropped behind London’s skyline.
Where was he? From here, I could see the other knights on the battlements, and Baleros’s flag flew proudly over us all. But everyone had their hoods on, and I couldn’t tell which knight was Ruadan. I strained my eyes, trying to search for his dark magic.
I sniffed the air, searching for the scent of pine and apples.
Where was he?
As the sun disappeared, there were just enough shadows to use the lumen stone. It glowed around my neck. I touched the stone, feeling the electric magic crackling through me. I stared at one of the inner walls, leaping to the walkway.
I landed hard on the stone, then peered over the wall, catching my breath. As I looked out over the courtyard, I gasped. Ruadan had already opened a portal in the middle of the grassy courtyard.
Worse, he’d already gone through it.
I swallowed hard as the portal began to close. Before I could waste another heartbeat, I shadow-leapt through the darkness, plunging into the icy waters. The portal closed above me.
I held my breath under the water, feeling my sword weighing me down. Light pierced the surface, cold rays cutting through the darkness. I kicked my legs hard, pushing myself up toward the light.
But something was wrong, and it took me a moment to figure out what it was. Why was there so much light? It was supposed to be night—that was the whole point.
Dread coiled through my chest, tightening my lungs. This wasn’t right.
I reached the air, gasping. I had a moment of relief—night still covered the sky, stars gleaming above me. Ruadan had opened a portal right into the Thames itself, and the ruddy bricks of Hampton Court palace loomed over the river.
Although it was still night, the palace itself blazed with an unnatural, golden light.
I treaded water in the chilly Thames, staring up at the palace’s grandeur over the grassy bank.
So, this was Baleros’s plan—light up the palace from the inside out, use the goddess’s fire magic to extinguish all the shadows. There was no way Ruadan could leap through the palace when it was lit up like a Christmas tree.
Where was he, though? I kicked in the water, swimming over to the river’s edge. Catching my breath, I hoisted myself out onto the damp grass. With the bright light of the palace streaming over me, I felt exposed. Still, I didn’t see any jackdaws roaming around, ready to blow me up.
A flicker of darkness caught my eye. Like a caged animal, Ruadan was pacing the riverside. His movements looked feral, and I didn’t get the sense he was quite as controlled as he normally was.
Baleros unnerved Ruadan just as he did me. He warped our ability to act logically, to defend ourselves. That ruthlessly pragmatic side—the survivor in us—got lost in the haze of emotions when Baleros was involved.
I crossed to him, shoulders tensed. I had the uneasy feeling that he might turn on me like a wolf about to die. The fact that he didn’t even notice me coming showed me how lost he was in his own fury. When I was only a few feet away from him, he turned sharply, his shadows devouring the golden light around him. From the darkness, his pale gaze seared me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked sharply.
I need to get the mist army before you do. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t die or turn yourself in.”
His magic slashed the air around him, a maelstrom of darkness. “What powers do you have that you could help a demigod? I’m not clear on that.”
There was an edge of steel in his voice. A challenge. His dark magic rippled over me.
“We have twenty-five minutes until Baleros unleashes the Plague,” Ruadan went on. “If I go into his palace, I’ll likely end up dead. If I don’t, half the city of London will die.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Do you know what it’s like when people die of the Plague? Flesh rotting with gangrene, swollen glands that split open and bleed—tokens of death. Lungs that stop working, vomiting blood—”
I clamped my hands over my ears. “I get it. Stop. I get that it’s terrible. This isn’t helping.” My head was spinning. I hadn’t been entirely familiar with the symptomology of the Black Death. Why would I have been? But this sounded … uncomfortably familiar. I’d seen this before. And, apparently, so had Ruadan. “How do you know so much about it?”
“It’s how my wife died.”
“I thought you said—” I nearly said my father, but I stopped myself. “I thought you said Adonis killed her.”
He shot me a sharp look. “He did. I told you about the legend, and it’s true. She died of the Plague—but I could see the dark magic on her. The magic had a certain scent to it, something Angelic.”
“What did it smell like?”
“Myrrh.”
The word set frost racing up my spine.
Myrrh. The scent of Adonis.
Some legends weren’t true. Others were. I schooled my features to calm.
“That’s why I think Adonis is working with Baleros,” he went on. “He must have escaped his realm. He’s not an ordinary angel. He’s practically a god. Maybe he opened his world. Maybe he came through the portal after me.”
I breathed in deeply. I could have sworn I smelled the scent of myrrh on the air here now.
My throat tightened. “But why would they work together?”
“It would make sense for them to form an alliance, wouldn’t it?” He paced over the grass. “They both want me dead. Baleros wants the World Key. Adonis will be hell-bent on vengeance for causing the death of his wife. He’ll want to stop me from killing him and his son. It’s why the cult we found was worshiping Adonis. Feeding him.”
Something cold and dark was cutting at me from within. “And you think only Adonis can cause the Black Plague.” I was clinging to shreds of hope. “You don’t think it could be a spell?”
“I think Adonis is the Plague.” The air had chilled to a wintry cold. “The plagues of the fourteenth century, the seventeenth century, the plagues that wiped out half of Europe. That was Adonis losing control of himself—every time. I’m sure of it. When I invaded his world, he created a plague then, too. I saw them die before me. The same symptoms—the buboes, the purpling skin and rotting flesh. That’s what I mean when I say he has to die. A creature like him is too dangerous for this world.”
All the air had left my lungs. It was hard to argue with this point. I’d seen it happen myself. I remembered what my mum had looked like.
A creature who killed half of Europe just by getting emotional. Of course such a monster could no longer stay on Earth.
Ruadan could never know the truth about me. Maybe we’d shared a moment in the sewers, and another in the forest. Maybe he thought he trusted me. But once he found out who I really was, duty would compel him to kill me.
And maybe he wouldn’t be wrong. What dark kernels of destruction were blooming in me, even now?
Sharp edges of pain pierced my chest, and I hated the fact that tears were starting to sting my eyes.
Ruadan was staring
at me closely, like he’d read my expression but didn’t know what to make of it. And worse—was his body glowing? The fucker was feeding off my broken heart already.
Anger ignited. I didn’t think about it before I swung for his face, before my knuckles connected with his perfect jaw. The sting of bone meeting bone was a satisfying release.
He touched his cheek, staring at me with a shocked expression. Still glowing, the bastard.
“What’s going on?” he asked sharply. “That’s the second time a woman has punched me tonight.”
“Nothing. What’s going on is that we have about twenty minutes to get into that palace and try to kill Baleros. Because if we don’t, every terrible thing you just described will happen to everyone we know. Melusine, Ciara, Aengus. Every human and everyone at the Institute will have their fingers rot off or whatever. And I’m not letting you give yourself over without a fight. That’s it. That’s final. We’re in this together.”
Ruadan stared at me for a long minute, and the breeze rushed over the Thames. “We probably won’t come out of there.”
“I know.”
But a creature like me shouldn’t be here in the first place, right?
Ruadan’s jaw twitched. “Go back to the Institute. I’ll do this alone. I’m the one he wants.”
“No. We can work together. You can use your magic to make it dark in there, while I try to find Baleros. Maybe we don’t get to capture him and take him through a portal, but at least I can hack him to pieces with an iron sword. I can slow this down, give us a few more days. And if Adonis—” My voice broke. “If Adonis is there, we can slow him down. Everyone can die, even the Horseman of Death. You have those magic stones or whatever, right? The ones that can kill him?”
“I’m ordering you to return.” Steel laced his voice.
I’m done taking orders tonight. I turned, heading for the palace. “If you won’t bring the darkness, I’ll go in the light.”
I marched over the grass toward the beaming palace. The faint scent of myrrh curled around me.
Dad?
“Arianna,” Ruadan barked. He was moving after me.
I turned to face him. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me from running into that palace. I get to choose when I die, not you. I don’t care if you’re the Grand Master. There’s not an army on Earth that could drag me back through that portal right now. We’re finding Baleros together. Now, we have less than twenty minutes. I need you to make it dark.”
Ruadan’s eyes were black as pitch. He turned to the palace. “At the first sign that your life is in danger, I’m giving myself up.”
“That’s sweet.” Ruadan would have no idea why I sounded so bitter. The fact is, my love, you’re gonna be the first one to draw a sword on me when you find out the truth.
Another hot tear spilled down my cheek, and I hated myself for it.
What I was not expecting was for Ruadan to pull me into his arms at that moment, to envelop me with his warmth in a gentle embrace.
For just a moment, I let myself rest my head against his chest. And for just a moment, I imagined that this was our reality—that we were just a normal couple who loved each other. That we weren’t possibly rushing to our deaths, that we weren’t keeping secrets from each other. For just that perfect moment, I pretended this wasn’t the end. I listened to his heartbeat, and I breathed in the scent of pines and apples.
Then, I pulled away from him again. “I don’t know anything about this palace, or any palaces, really. Where would we find Baleros in there?”
Ruadan sniffed the air. “We’ll have to scent him out.”
“Roses. Sickly sweet roses.”
“I remember.”
I closed my eyes, breathing deeply to pick through all the smells. After a moment, the faint scent of roses floated on the wind from one of the palace walls—inside one of the courtyards.
“I’ve got it,” I whispered.
“Wait,” said Ruadan. He pulled a silver ring off his finger, and his violet magic pulsed and sparked around it until the whole ring glowed with his magic. “This will help you move undetected. My Wraith magic, distilled.”
He handed it to me, and I slipped it onto my thumb. His magic skimmed over my skin. There was something strangely intimate about using another person’s magic. It was like sleeping in their bed or wearing one of their shirts over your bare skin—a strange closeness to another person’s essence, a little spark of their soul.
We walked over the grasses, along the perimeter of Hampton Court Palace, moving closer to the scent of roses coming from the courtyard. We kept at enough of a distance that we weren’t bathed in too much light, our forms indistinct with Ruadan’s magic.
The silence that bloomed around us had thorns.
I couldn’t admit the truth to Ruadan, but I couldn’t hide it from myself anymore. The other truth. The part about how I’d fallen in love with him.
For such a complicated thing, it was as simple as that. I didn’t have a choice in it, any more than the ocean had a choice about crashing against the shore. It just was.
Chapter 96
His fingers brushed against mine as we walked, and an electrical charge passed between us.
“Why did you punch me?” he asked quietly.
“Why does anything happen?” I asked. “Why does the ocean crash against the shore?” There was that image in my mind again.
“Because of the wind and the moon’s gravitational—”
“Okay, that was a bad example.”
“Sometimes earthquakes, or—”
“I get it.” I swallowed hard. In this day and age, it was hard to think of anything without a viable explanation.
“Whatever it was,” he said, “it was an amazingly inadequate answer.”
“Says the man who answered literally no questions for years.”
At the entrance to the courtyard, the scent of roses grew stronger, and I peered around the corner. There was so much light blazing out of the palace windows that I couldn’t see anything within them.
Ruadan’s wraith magic flickered around us, disguising us. Golden light blazed over the court—so bright it looked like daylight. Through the archway, I could see a fountain. Dark red liquid flowed from its ornate spigots—either blood or wine, I couldn’t tell.
“We have to go in there,” I whispered. “Can you make it a little darker?”
The temperature dropped, and darkness swelled around Ruadan, his pale hair whipping in the wind. A frigid power rippled over the landscape, and the bright golden light dulled to a dusky purple.
Now, there were just enough shadows for me to leap into the courtyard, into the darkness beside the fountain. Ruadan followed behind me, touching down on the cobbles in the shadows.
The palace walls towered high above us. From here, I could smell the distinct scent of claret. But over that, Baleros’s rosy smell bloomed on the wind. It was coming from an archway on the other side—just to the left, I thought. Now, I had a pretty good idea of where to leap next.
Ruadan was doing that indistinct thing, and I couldn’t quite see him, but I could feel his power close to me. “Almost there,” I whispered.
Just for a moment, I caught his gaze. Not the shadowy eyes of an incubus, but Ruadan’s violet eyes—the real Ruadan.
I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but something stopped me. I think it was that pragmatic survivor in me. The survivor knew it would kill me if my confession was met with silence. I might have had only a few more minutes to live, here, and it might be best if I didn’t spend them falling apart emotionally.
Golden light lit up some of the windows, and if I wanted to move around rapidly inside the palace, I’d need even more darkness.
A flicker of myrrh on the breeze, and my pulse quickened. I did not want to find my father here. “I don’t feel Adonis’s presence.” My voice broke as I lied. I hated lying, but I wanted it to be the truth.
An ice-cold wind whipped over me.
“How
would you know what his presence feels like?” Ruadan asked.
Shit. I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel anything like angel magic.”
A lie. It was all around me, pulsing over my skin. The scent of myrrh tinged the wind under the roses.
I had to stop my father. Stop Adonis. Get the mist army.
I had twenty minutes to do it. No, less now.
Ruadan kept staring at me until I gave his arm a little smack. “We don’t have time for this. You need to bring the darkness, now. Cover this place completely in shadows. I’ve got my iron sword. Let’s go.”
“You’ve got three minutes before I announce my presence.” He closed his eyes. His body seemed to grow, and a wave of pure, dark power washed over me—thrilling and dizzying at the same time, like standing at the edge of a chasm. The effort of creating night seemed to have consumed him completely, and when I stared at him, it was like looking into the void itself. His body was still as marble. Never had he looked more remote.
When I closed my eyes, stars whirled in my mind over a blanket of vibrant purples and midnight blues.
When I opened my eyes again, shadows had blanketed the entire palace. I couldn’t even see Ruadan anymore.
“I need you to stay out here,” I whispered. “Promise me you’ll stay here. Keep it dark.”
His only response was a silky stroke of his magic over my skin, and my spine straightened at the touch.
I turned, then shadow-leapt to the archway. I felt around in front of me, then pushed through a wooden door. An unlocked wooden door. For just a moment, I hesitated. Was that a little too convenient? My heart thundered, and I drew my sword as I stepped inside.
I had to act fast. It was dark as the shadow hell in here. I reached out to feel the room around me—the cold stone of a wall, the swoop of a stone banister up a stairwell. I sniffed the air again, tuning into Baleros’s scent.
Tracing my fingertips along the cold stone banister, I swooped up the stairs, toward the rose smell. I landed at the top of a stairwell.
Fifteen minutes left.
Institute of the Shadow Fae Box Set Page 55
