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A short, ragged sound of relief escaped one of them, and then their footsteps drew in toward us, slow and cautious, unsure what they would find me capable of. I laid my hand flat against the wound at the back of her head and poured my healing essence into it. I winced when I felt the torn skin knit and close beneath my palm, and I looked into her face, waiting for her eyes to flutter open.
They didn’t.
“Alexandra. Come back to me now, my queen… please.” I pressed my lips to her brow as I begged. As I moved to lay her gently down, Lazaros stepped into the light, already dragging his shirt off over his head and folding it into a rough pillow. He slid it beneath her head, and I shrugged out of my own jacket and laid it over her, then sank down beside her and took her hand.
When I looked up, neither of them was looking at her. Both were staring at the box.
Lazaros bent and lifted it, turning it over and over in his hands.
“It’s nothing,” he said slowly. “Just a box. Empty, and by the look of it, never anything but empty.” He raised it to his face and breathed in. “It smells musty. Old. As though it’s sat down here a hundred years and more. And yet…” He ran a finger along the dark velvet lining, frowning. “Not a mark on it. The cloth is perfect. It feels brand new.”
“Well, it’s here for a fucking reason,” Aster growled, taking the box from him and turning it in his huge hands, his gaze cutting between it and Alexandra until his face twisted with fury. “Something was in this. Something did this to her.” And he drew back his arm and hurled the thing against the wall with all the force of a man who needed to break something or lose his mind.
I curved my body over Alexandra, shielding her, bracing for the burst of splinters.
It never came.
Because it didn’t break. No, instead it simply flew back to the pedestal as if it had always meant to remain there.
“What the fuck?!” Aster cursed, but I ignored it, my attention fixed on the only thing in the room that mattered to me.
“How?” Lazaros muttered, and my eyes flicked to him as he crossed to it and lifted it again. Turning the undamaged box in his hands once more.
Again, I had no attention to spare for it, turning back to Alexandra and laying her down once more, but that was when I saw something that chilled me to the bone.
“Avert your eyes,” I growled to the others, and eased the robe back from her chest, just enough to discover what I feared. The steady, shallow rise and fall of her breathing gave me precious little comfort. Because I knew, deep in my soul, that this was no ordinary sickness. No mundane affliction a healer’s tincture could mend. This was of my world. Or worse, far worse… it was of the dark.
And looking at her, I could see it.
Beneath the pale skin above her heart, thin black lines had begun to spread. Veins, but wrong, darkened as though her very blood had turned to ink. Shadows that marred the skin, branching outward from her heart in slow, creeping tendrils. Like frost crawling across a windowpane. Like the roots of some black tree, sinking deeper with every beat. I could see it move. Slowly though, thank every god there was.
But still, it spread.
Her skin was cold beneath my palms, cold enough that I had to swallow against the sickness it raised in me.
She wasn’t meant to feel like this. She was meant to be warm, and soft, and alive. A beacon I could find in any dark. Her skin should have glowed beneath my touch. Those marks of ours lighting like dawn, her heart drumming out the promise of every bright tomorrow we were owed.
I sent my power into her again. Straight into her heart this time, a flood of golden warmth poured from my hands and into her chest.
And something inside her recoiled.
An inky, frozen force surged up to meet it, slamming against my healing with a violent, unnatural resistance. Then a darkness burst beneath my palms, so cold it scorched, and hurled my own power back into me with force enough to throw me clear. It struck me back before ricocheting from my chest and into the wall behind me, shattering the stone.
Lazaros and Aster swore as stone crashed down, but I had no eyes for any of it. Only for Alexandra. For the shadows I could see writhing now beneath her skin, throwing off every scrap of light I tried to give her, slamming every door against me. Whatever had taken root in her heart refused to let me in!
A choked sound left me as I watched those black veins above her heart darken further, and the longer I stared, the more of them I saw, the slow and patient spread of the thing.
“This is dark magic,” Lazaros said, sinking down beside us, and I drew my jacket back across her at once. “I’d stake my life on it. I have seen its like before.” His jaw worked. “When I had wits enough left to see anything at all. When Demetrios wore my body like a borrowed skin, and I watched the world from somewhere far behind my own eyes. The rare moments he would allow me to see my own hand become a weapon of his making.” His voice dropped, haunted. “This is the same. The same cold. The same hunger. It doesn’t want to harm her, Atlas. Not exactly. It wants to take her. To hollow her out and climb inside, the way he did with me.”
The words turned my blood to ice.
“No!” I commanded venomously.
I would not let it. Whatever it cost. Whatever I had to burn down. I would not let that thing have her!
“We are not staying down here,” I said, and my voice came out flat and certain, the King’s voice, the one that did not invite argument. “Not in the dark that did this to her.”
I slid one arm beneath her shoulders and the other beneath her knees and lifted her, and she weighed nothing at all. A terrible, fragile breath of air against my chest. I carried her back up out of that black artery beneath my castle. Carried her up the endless stairs, through the old prison tunnels and the cellars, and out into the light. My brother and Aster falling in around me like a guard. Servants pressed themselves to the walls as we passed, eyes wide at the sight of their king striding through his own halls with his unconscious queen cradled bloodless in his arms, and not one of them dared to speak.
