Page 105 of Radiant Shadows

I squeezed my eyes shut as the accusation sliced through me. This particular bandaid was really going to hurt. “Yes, I’m sorry! But it’s not what you think, I prom—”

“You know what, save it!” she snapped. “You’re all a bunch of fucking liars! You, Tobias, Caesar! At least the general is honest about his depravity. Well, I’m done. I’m done with every last fucking one of you. Have fun with Professor Douche!”

The line went dead, and my lip trembled as the horrible truth of what just happened settled on me.

Caesar knelt beside me, putting his hand on my knee. “Hey, who was that?”

I pursed my lips as the weight of my regret crushed down on me. “It was Arya. She knows everything, and she hates me.”

Fresh tears spilled down my face, and he pulled me into his arms while I cried.

The world was falling apart around me, and all I seemed capable of doing was making things worse. How was I going to fix any of this?

Chapter 38

Arya

It was the screams that woke me.

At first, they sounded so far away, I thought they were a dream. I was so bone-deep tired and emotionally exhausted from the events of the past few days that I wanted to continue sleeping, even through the threat of a nightmare.

Something inside me triggered, and my eyes snapped open.

The distant screams still sounded beyond the walls, punctuated by an echoing boom every now and then. Just outside my bedroom door, students were throwing their words at each other in haste, their feet scampering up and down the halls.

My eyes found the clock flashing in bright red numbers that it was just after midnight.

What the hell is going on?

I slid out of bed and hurried into my uniform—smart clothing and all—before venturing out the door. The guards that had been assigned to watch me were strangely absent. I was briefly thrilled by the freedom it gave me, until a flock of harpy girls ran past me crying, looking utterly terrified before they disappeared into a room.

In the common room, more students were openly weeping as they clung to each other, while others rushed out of their rooms still in their pajamas.

“Arya!” Ashlyn’s voice startled me as she suddenly appeared at my side.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Ashlyn said, looking over the mayhem that surrounded us. “You’d think the sky was falling or something.”

“It’s okay, they can’t get through,” I overheard one of the dragon guys saying to the harpy girl he was attempting to soothe on one of the couches. It was Shawn, the guy Tobias had sparred with that night he got injured, the night I healed him, the first night I...

I blinked the memory away and went up to them. “What’s going on out there? Who can’t get through?”

Shawn looked up at her, a serious set to his eyes. “Vampires. They’re attacking the Dome.”

“What?” I gasped. An icy chill shot through my chest and rippled through my entire body.

Ashlyn and I exchanged panicked glances before sprinting out of the avian common room. The Great Hall was a zoo. Students stampeded through each other in a frenzy, some trying to escape the horrors beyond the doors and others trying to get outside to witness the attack for themselves.

We pushed through the hoard, hugging the walls as a sort of shortcut. Finally, after being battered and bruised by countless shoulders and elbows, we made it through the main doors.

What I saw left me frozen in place.

Above our heads, white-faced wraiths rammed down on the Dome from the water that surrounded it, illuminated in flashes by the ultraviolet beams that blasted whenever they got too close. The beams burned the vampires even in water, but that didn’t keep them from slamming into the thick glass in attemptsto break it. Every few minutes, some sort of projectile weapon fired at the glass from those hiding in the shadows.

A little voice inside my head tried to assure me that the glass couldn’t be broken, not from the vampires diving at it. We were going to be fine. In a few hours, the morning sun would shine through the water and scare them away.

But every time the ultraviolet beams flashed, telltale spider veins in the glass caught the light—they were spreading.

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