Page 48 of Taken By Shadows

Without even an ounce of fae magic in my blood, I couldn’t heal. They might not have been fatal wounds to someone like Kaed, but the warmth was slipping from me into the aether.

The world faded into soft focus.

“Stay with me.” The darkness seemed to whisper.

What if that’s where I belonged? The dark. The waiting sleep for everyone. What if all that awaited us was darkness?

“Imogen! Stay with me!”

It was cold.

My fingers gripped onto the soft fabric around me, and I pressed into it, breathing in citrus air as everything else fell away. His touch was gentle.

In an instant, everything went pitch. Not black. Entirely void of anything.

There was nothing.

No sound. No sense of time.

No air. I thought my lungs might implode from the pressure. Or the absence of pressure.

Had the end come for me? Was this what it felt like? Crushing nothing and painful darkness?

There was nothing.

Only nothing.

Chapter fifteen

Light shattered my vision, and my eyes burned with the sunfire of red and gold.

We were standing.

Inside.

In a foyer?

My mind scrambled to make sense of the new surroundings.

I could barely hold my head up, but the shock of what had just happened had snatched me from the edge of an abyss.

We’d instantly arrived at a house. A grand house with carpets and oil paintings.

“Where are—”

“Celeste?” Kaed’s voice cut over mine as he moved through the house, shouting.

I tried to tell him to be quiet. My head hurt. And it was ringing with the hounding of his voice through it.

A female appeared with copper hair with bright strands of silvery white throughout and pinned neatly in a bun at her nape.

With a flurry of words I didn’t hear, Kaed carried me through the halls until I felt a hard table under my back. I couldn’t smother the cry that ripped from me at the required readjustment to lie flat after being held. Kaed had been binding me together with his arms, and I felt I might unravel as he let go.

“Why isn’t she healing?” I heard the female’s voice. Strained. Worried.

I wanted to tell her I couldn’t. I didn’t have magic. I wasn’t really fae; not like them. Not in the way that mattered now. I had nothing inside me.

I had never felt more human than in that moment. Something in me strained to feel a seed, a tiny grain of magic in me. But I reached and felt a cold wall of nothing.