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Charging across the dungeon, I swiped my hand out at the creatures that were reaching for the hook to try and pull her down. Feyfire poured from my body. A wave of euphoric pleasure washed over me as the flames incinerated a dozen wights into dust. The dark victory filled me with an ecstasy I’d never known before.
The girl looked up from the hook where she clung, her clear violet gaze full of desperation and fear. I soared over the pit and onto the hook, swinging us like a pendulum.
I breathed a word and disintegrated the ropes binding her, then hauled her into my arms. She gasped but didn’t struggle as I walked on top of the groaning piles of wights trying to pull us down. My steel-heeled boots cracked craniums and arm bones as I used the wights as stepping-stones to lift us out of the pit.
All the while, I gripped her closely against my chest, careful not to scrape her silken skin with my claws. I bounded up and over the wights, back onto the gritty stone floor of the dungeon. Her slender arms clung tightly around my neck.
Before the two bone-keepers realized what was happening, I whispered, “Etheline,” and waved my hand.
Flame leaped from my fingers in a red stream, incinerating them into dust. Power poured through my body, like a forgotten river that found its way back through a dormant valley.
It was sublime.
Following the shadowy passages I hadn’t seen in decades, I hurried down the deserted hallways winding away from the castle. The girl shivered in my arms, her teeth chattering. Hoisting her higher and trying to avoid the wounds in her back, I held her close and slipped through the shadows quietly, knowing the best way out.
An odd sense of rightness swept over me. In defiance of my father, I was going to escape his pit of death. And I was bringing one of his poor tortured creatures with me.
The scrape of boots on stone from around the next bend of the darkened corridor made me freeze. The fae girl sucked in a breath then went quiet, sensing the danger. Quickly, I spun back the other way. There was a small alcove not far from the main cell block where I’d been kept. I’d seen bone-keepers walk in and out of it for decades.
I ducked inside the alcove, finding a small cell without bars, tables piled with all manner of sharp instruments. Some of them still stained with the dark red blood of light fae.
“Don’t look,” I whispered close to her ear. I didn’t need her screaming at the sight of blood and giving us away.
She tucked her face against my shoulder, while I pressed my back to the wall beside the entrance. The footsteps drew closer.
I set the girl down. She went quietly onto her bare feet then I nudged her into the far corner, away from the entrance. Snatching a particularly sharp and short blade from the table, I pressed close to the entrance, out of sight.
The boots pounded closer, a single set of them. As soon as a hulking frame passed the entrance to the alcove, I leaped from the shadows, gripped his horn and jerked his head to the side, then easily sliced through his throat. He was so surprised, he barely fought me. By the time he did, it was too late. I sliced a second time, so deep that I partly decapitated him. He fell with a weightythunk.
He wore a heavy fur cloak, apparently one of the guards who either roamed the woods to seek out more victims for the dungeon or who watched the closest exit of the keep. He might’ve even been the one to capture the moon fae girl inside the alcove.
Growling, I straddled the glassy-eyed guard, his blue blood leaking onto the cobblestone. Then I cut the lacing clasps of the cloak near his throat and pulled, shoving his giant body with myboot so he rolled off of it. I tucked the blade into the waist of my loose-fitting trousers.
When I stepped back into the alcove, I heard nothing at all. For a moment, I thought the girl had run away in fear.
“Fae girl?” I asked dumbly, not knowing what to call her.
I sensed movement from the other corner farther away, then she stepped out of the shadows, still shivering, her eyes on the bleeding guard behind me.
I held out the cloak. “I know it smells foul, but you’ll freeze to death once we get outside.”
From the scent of snow on the cloak, I knew it was winter. She stepped quickly toward me and allowed me to wrap it around her, the hem falling to her ankles.
“I’ll carry you.” I pointed at her bare feet. “You have no shoes and will slow us down.”
She merely nodded, pulling the dirty fur cloak tighter to her body. I scooped her up, stepped over the dead guard and stalked swiftly back toward the exit of the keep.
She said nothing, still shivering in my arms. The long corridor leading toward the exit was empty. Likely because I’d killed the guard meant to patrol this area.
As we came into the final passageway, I heard the slowly marching steps of a guard near the back of the keep. I knew there was an exit nearby, because I’d been morbidly fascinated with the dungeon when I was a little wraithling, exploring where I shouldn’t.
I followed my instincts now, peering down the long passageway where it ended. Between two flickering torches on the wall a stone staircase spiraled upward.
That was it, the exit.
I kept to the shadows. I was about to set her on her feet so I could grab the knife in my waistband to kill the approaching guard, but the guard walked right past the stairwell and keptgoing, never even glancing our way. When the footsteps receded altogether, I hurried across the corridor and up the spiral stairs.
The fae girl was light in my arms as I continued upward. Halfway there, I stopped to listen. I heard no one above or below, so I rushed up the final spiral and onto a landing where there was an iron door.
