Page 121 of Fractured
Butthisplace? It was completely different.
It wasdarkness.
The stone floor underneath my feet was polished, so dark it caught faint reflections of us as we moved. I only caught glimpses as I had to keep my head down, but I still saw. Along the walls, silver-framed mirrors hung at uneven angles, but none were low enough to actually show anybody’s reflection, instead simply throwing the light back and forth from each other. The blueish white light of the fae magic that hovered over them—like some sort of a unique lighting system underneath a ceiling that was…nothing.
I risked a glance up twice and the ceiling just wasn’t there. There were no corners—only darkness. Walls covered in shadows, and these didn’t move like the walls in the seer’s chamber. These walls were calm.
Banners draped from above, black with a half moon in the middle sewn with silver threads. I’d seen that same thing on the guard’s armors, too. The crest was everywhere—sometimes even engraved on the black doors.
We passed caged candles hanging on the walls, vases full of thorns—no flowers—and silver harps in the corners, at least one on each floor we passed. The air smelledsharpsomehow. As sharp as Rune’s shadows.
They were everywhere—like they were guarding this whole place, every turn and every corner, every door and every window.
Someone spoke to Raja, I thought, and she answered, but my mind was lost to the view outside a large window at the end of a hallway on the third floor. The wall of the palace slithered around like a snake in the distance, and beyond it I could just see the Midnight Court, darkerthan the sky, wide streets dotted with white lights. Because of the darkness, I couldn’t see the end of it nor the outer wall of the kingdom at all. It felt like thisside went on forever, too, just like the sea at its back.
Then the sound of metal against metal pulled me out of my thoughts.
I stepped back instinctively before my brain even registered the view in front of me. Raja had her sword in her hand, and she cut the throat of a fae guard wearing black armor with such ease, he hadn’t yet made to draw his own sword out of its sheath.
Fuck.
To say I was shocked would be an understatement. Everything happened so fast.
“Stand back!” Raja shouted, and I knew she was talking to me. I watched in horror as all five of the guards who’d been standing by the walls of this large set of black polished doors charged at her with their weapons raised.
Raja moved—quick, brutal, merciless. She killed in a way that made me feel like it was a show, a rehearsed dance, definitely notreal.Her sword stopped another, and her elbow shattered the jaw of a soldier behind her, and the two who’d been coming toward her left ended up on the floor when she ducked low and spun around, too fast for my eyes to catch the movements properly.
Then came the shadows slipping out of the last two guards—and shouts coming from others who were running toward us from the other end of the hallway.
“Nilah!” Vair cried while my mind was still chaotic—the thoughtwhat the fuck?!echoing in my head—because I hadn’t seen anything, and Raja hadn’t warned me, and now there was a fight. Now, there were over ten soldiers withswords in their hands running at us from the other side, the sound of their armor plates drilling into my brain.
I knew there would most likely be a fight when I decided to come to this place, but actually seeing those soldiers, and the other fae who were stepping to the sides to make way for them as they looked atmein horror, shocked me all the same.
I only had a second to get my shit together, and I did simply because I wasn’t here forme.I was here for Rune.
My body moved. Ice underneath my skin, and the palms of my hands were lit up from within, and I raised them. Rune said I could even take out Lyall all by myself if it came to it, and right now I was choosing to believe that. I could take these guards out, and that was exactly what I planned to do.
Except a second before I unleashed every ounce of energy that was willing to come out of me—completely without thought, purely instinctively, I might add—Raja screamed.
I turned only halfway to find she’d grabbed the last standing soldier by the armor, and shethrewhim right into those polished doors. She simply flung the body forward as she screamed, and the soldier crashed into the wood with a loud crack.
Both doors swung open at once, and every person standing in that hallway stopped.
Cold air swept out of whatever room was beyond, and raw shadows had created a threshold on the stone floor.
Ahead, barely ten feet away, a man with a dark beard stood alone in the middle of a large room, slowly lowering his arm to his side as those shadows on the floor faded.
The soldiers behind us no longer ran. Nobody made a single sound for one of the longest moments of my life.
Then Vair growled and Raja stood up straight, her bloody sword in her hand still. She was looking at the bearded man—but he was looking at me.
And when my eyes met his, I realized I was standing before the Midnight King.
thirty-five
I moved.
Maybe because Raja did. Maybe because she stepped over the bodies of the soldiers she’d killed without even looking. Her head remained up, and her eyes ahead—on that man.
