Page 66 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

“You know it?”

“Everyone knows the Castle. It appears like a ghost in the night. Its white spires reflect the moon and make the whole forest shine. It brings us all great terror and great pleasure to see it coming. It’s funny how these things go so well together, isn’t it?”

“Do you know the way?” I pressed, breathless with impatience. “Or perhaps do you have another compass I can use?”

She frowned at me, perplexed. “Don’t you have magic?”

“I can see the future sometimes,” I blurted out, too anxious for instructions to talk about magic right now.

“It’s very odd for a seer to rely on a compass to cross a path her future self already has,” the sprite mused unhelpfully.

“That’s not how fortune-telling works,” I groaned.

“Follow your instincts then,” she advised. “Run. Run until you see the lightning-stricken tree. Then go straight through the thicket. Trust your magic to do the rest.”

It was easier said than done. The forest was a sloping mass webbed in shadow. It was impossible to see anything further than two steps ahead of me, listen to anything beyond the beat of my own blood.

Still, I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my lungs drained, and the tears in my eyes meant nothing more than fear leaving my body.

In the end, it was a lot like the sprite said. Everywhere I went, I found I’d been there already. The woods were dense, threaded as a labyrinth. The air was musty with far-off woodsmoke and sharp with dawn chill. But my heart knew the way, and it refused to give up. Even as it knocked itself against my ribcage, bruised and bleeding, it kept on guiding me forward.

Please,I beseeched my throbbing body.Please hold on for a little longer. He has to know. He has to know I love him.

26

Thea

The Castle appeared black and enormous against the approaching sunrise, the meadow undulating with cotton-thick fog.

The white tendrils hung so densely in the air that at first I didn’t notice him: Dain kneeling in the center of the haze, his face marbled with blood. His throat was stretched back. He was looking up at someone. Hector.

Hector.

I almost collapsed when I saw him, the ground slipping off my feet. He was not only alive but also standing over Dain like a column of light, solid and shining bright with power.

Sobs racked my chest as I screamed his name with whatever air was left in my lungs. He veered, and the searching hope in his gaze was the most familiar thing in the entire world to me.

I’d like to say that our collision was a cosmic one, all force and spark and fate. But it was the opposite. It was easy and peaceful, like closing the door between you and an ocean of noise. I caught him around the waist and buried my face in his blood-soaked shirt. He kept still with his arms hanging open, too astonished to even release the breath I heard climb up his throat. It could have been a single moment or the sum of an eternity by the time he spoke, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

“You’re here,” he rasped into my hair.

Furiously, I drew back and smacked his sternum with my fists. “Of course I’m here! How could you do this to me? Do you have any idea how scared I was?”

The guilt in his face was as raw as the skin of his hands that shone dark with dirt and blood. The sight of him cut me open, even as a part of me floundered in the maelstrom of my anger. I wanted to scream at him, hit him, do all the terrible things Dain had failed to do. But I also wanted to close him in my arms and forget all the rest, forget all the misery and despair that was unraveling around us.

Roan was focused on holding up Tieran, who seemed to be on the verge of collapse, so there were only Espen and Collette to restrain Dahlia as she writhed and thrashed, wailing inconsolably. Sybella was standing high up by the entrance of the Castle, staring at her husband with what could only be described as flaming rage. But Kaladin was paying no attention to her. His dark eyes were pinned down on Dain, the first beams of mourning dawning in them already.

“Hector,” Dain choked out, an efflux of dark blood pouring out of his mouth. “Finish it.”

“No!” Dahlia howled, and in her mania managed to escape and flung her body over Dain’s.

Espen started toward us, his face sickened with dread for his daughter’s fate. “Dahlia, get away from him now!”

Dahlia ignored him. She stared up at Hector, her expression relentless despite her tear-stained cheeks. “You’ll have to kill me too.”

Hector let out a soft sigh, pushing the drenched tips of his hair away from his eyes. There was a sticky gash along his forehead as if Dain had struck it with a rock. It took more strength than I knew I had in me not to moan at the sight of it. Even the skin around his knuckles had yet to knit, his healing process slowedby the severity of his wounds. That was how close he’d come to death. That was how close I’d come to losing him.

Finally he turned, towering over Dain and Dahlia’s knotted forms like Death himself, impervious and immortal. He bent to grab Dain’s arm with one hand and Dahlia’s with the other, forcing them both up to their feet. “No more,” he said in a steady, solemn voice. “No more death.”

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