Page 76 of The Reckoning of Starlight

“Ayla…” Serenna rasped. Her sister hadn’t moved, pinned with Fenn’s shadows, her breath still coming fast and shallow. “We have to take her with us. What she knows could help us. I—”

The words shattered as sudden light flooded the bond, Vesryn’s presence crashing into her mind—so close she felt like she could touch him. Relief struck fierce enough to knock the breath from her lungs.

“Serenna.” Vesryn’s voice came clipped and urgent, his words wound tight around the fear underneath it. “You’re hurt. Hold on. I’m—”

“Wait!” Serenna said before he risked opening a rift blind to retrieve them. “Fenn can portal us out.”

Fenn shouldered into the bond with the subtlety of kicking open a door. “Knew you’d come for us, princeling.”

Vesryn’s irritation spiked through first—familiar and sharp, meant entirely for Fenn. “What the fuck are you waiting for? Portal out in front of the caverns. Now. The city isn’t going to hold.”

Serenna glanced back at Ayla, who stared through the darkness, the imperious angle of her chin gone slack.

“We’re bringing someone with us,” Serenna said.

Fenn followed her look and nodded. He tore a rift open across the sand, the portal lying flat like a dark mouth.

“Can you carry her?” Serenna asked, even though she had the Starshard. She could make Ayla crawl through the rift on her hands and knees. Puppet her sister’s body the way Ayla had puppeted hers.

Something vicious had stirred in her when she’d clamped Ayla’s jaw shut, but Serenna would rather drag herself across glass than feel that satisfaction again.

Ayla flinched when Fenn released his shadows and gathered her against his chest, but she didn’t fight. A whimper left her as tears cut pale lines through the blood and dust on her face.

Fenn motioned Serenna through first, and she hauled herself into the void.

CHAPTER 19

SERENNA

Serenna dragged herself through the portal and onto the cliff outside the collapsed cavern, the stone still radiating the day’s warmth under her knees. Smoke billowed from Asharyn below, fire lighting it from within.

She drew only one breath before Vesryn seized her.

He dropped beside her, palms sweeping her face, her throat, the trembling wreck of her hands. His fingers pressed everywhere, hunting for injury.

Then the agony in her ankle tore out in a rush, flooding straight into Vesryn. Relief hit like a wound of its own, leaving her gasping. His jaw locked, scales flickering along his neck as he absorbed every last shred of pain through the bond without a sound.

She could’ve told him not to, but it wouldn’t have mattered.

His mouth crashed into hers, teeth catching her lower lip. One hand tangled in her hair while the other cradled her jaw like she might dissolve.

Beneath the kiss, through the bond torn wide open, her name moved through him again and again with terrible tenderness, carrying the emotion he couldn’t put into words. He held the feeling at the edge of language and kissed her harder instead.

When he pulled back, his pupils had narrowed to draconic slits, jade irises burning through the night. His focus dropped to her boot—leather crushed inward and dark with blood—and as crimson light raced to his fingertips, Fenn emerged from the portal.

He hauled himself through on one forearm, the other hooked around Ayla.

He looked worse in the firelight flickering up from the city—dirt streaking his face, blood dried dark at his scalp. Still, he staggered to his feet and dragged Ayla with him, his shoulders squaring from an exhaustion that echoed Serenna’s own.

Vesryn’s hands halted above her ankle, the mending lattice half-woven. His attention flicked over Ayla, then snagged on Fenn—on skin that should’ve matched the midnight sky, on golden hair and blue eyes, a face rewritten in an arch elf’s image.

“What happened to you?”

“What?” Fenn bared teeth that should’ve been fangs, his grin too sharp for the face wearing it. “First time seeing an elf prettier than yourself, princeling?”

Serenna sensed the wrongness beneath Fenn’s bravado—the body he hadn’t chosen, every proud piercing peeled away and replaced with someone else’s standard of perfection.

“At least your tongue survived the transformation,” Vesryn muttered, returning his attention to her ankle.