Page 102 of Fractured
The seer raised her chin. “Your time here is done, I’m afraid. Don’t forget the mirror. Raja…”
A shape leaned in front of me to pick something up from the floor—the mirror I hadn’t even noticed was there, that had most likely slipped from my hands when I fell. I only saw a flash of the diamonds that decorated it.
A hand on my forearm. Vair nudged my leg. “Let’s go, Nilah.”
And just like that, I was being dragged back toward the shadows—no,notthe shadows, but the doors. The doorsthat had appeared on the wall again, like they’d never disappeared in the first place.
Raja opened one and stepped outside, and Vair waited for me to follow—but it was just wrong. This whole fucking thing was wrong.
That little boy, Rune when he was only six, with that face and with his hand covered in blood—wrong, wrong, wrong!
“The prophecy,” I choked, refusing to follow Raja even when she continued to pull my arm. I jerked it away and turned to the seer again, whom I’d been sure hadn’t moved an inch, yet she was standing in the middle of the platform again, just like when we first arrived.
“Tell me the prophecy—can you do that? The one that foresaw the queen’s death,” I said. “Please,just…just tell me.”
To my surprise, the ice-cold look in the seer’s eyes changed. Suddenly she looked confused.
“Nilah,” Raja warned—calling me by my actual name for the first time since we met.
“Please,” I said to the seer because I needed to know. Something about this whole thing just sat wrong with me—and, yes, I might have been delusional because I simply did not want to believe that Rune was capable of committing cold-blooded murder in that way, but it was a gut feeling, and I’d ignored those my whole life. Never again.
Even though part of me hoped that the seer would actually tell me what I wanted to hear, I was still shocked when she closed her eyes, raised her hands, and began to whisper:
“The Queen of the Frozen shall fall by Midnight’s son,
With mercy cloaked in deep despair.
Not by hate nor vengeful hand,
But by the fate the stars have planned.”
These words, just like those of the Chronicler, etched themselves into my very bones so that I may never again forget them, even if I tried to.
Hands on my shoulders, and I was pulled back hard, and the door closed right in front of my face before I could make a single sound.
The prophecy was real. Ifeltit all over me, underneath my skin. It was real and it was powerful, and it was always going to come true.
Rune was always going to kill the Ice Queen, simply because the stars had planned it.
And now I had no fucking clue what to do with myself.
twenty-nine
“Rune is here.”
I blinked and actually saw Raja’s face.
“Where?” I asked absentmindedly, surprised that I was still conscious. I could have sworn that I’d passed out, but maybe I’d just been locked up inside my own head. There’d been only darkness—that much I remembered—but we were outside now. We were no longer under the ground, or in the strange room of the Seer of Shadows, or the stranger still library we’d had to go through to get to her. I didn’t remember our way out, to be honest—my mind was so full I feared it was going to explode any second now.
The sky was dark over our heads. There were buildings around me—Midnight fae of all ages coming and going right beside us.
And I genuinely had no clue how we’d gotten here.
Then Raja closed her eyes.
I could barely see her face from her hood. Shadows danced on her fingertips, and she was holding her breath, too.
Wounded.She was still wounded by the curse she’dbroken from Rune. Vair had smelled it. The seer said so, yet here she was.
