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He walks away, his back a fortress I have no siege weapons to breach. He puts distance between us with every long angry stride, leaving me gasping in the gray.

I stand rooted in the ash. The silence of this dead realm rushes back in to fill the space where his words were, heavier than before. It presses down on my shoulders, shrinking me. I feel physically diminished, as if his words have shaved away my status, my very substance, until I am nothing more than another speck of debris.

Tell it to the man who spent years screaming.

The echo of his voice is louder than the thrum of the tower.

I didn’t even know Eryon was in the dungeons. I did not even care. I was so absorbed in trying to get my father out that I did not even check.

I look down at my hands—hands that have held swords, cast spells, hands that I thought were strong. They are shaking. An uncontrollable tremor running through my fingers.

I am not the brave rebel daughter who left the Seelie Court to find honest agony. I am just a selfish tourist who played with fire and let someone else burn. I broke the only real thing I had, and then I ran away while he bled.

My chin wobbles—a pathetic mortal reaction. I bite my lower lip—trying to force the tremor to stop, trying to summon the mask of the princess of Hell. But it won’t come. The mask is shattered, lying in the dust along with my pride.

I wrap my arms around my waist, holding myself together because no one else will. Remiel is far ahead now, lost in his own mind. Jareth is a silhouette of rage.

And I am entirely, devastatingly alone.

35. Cassia

I did not leave the chapel as a woman. I left as a fugitive echo, a ghost haunting her own bones. My boots beat against the frozen earth as I fled the sanctuary of that broken church.

Malakar’s words had taken root in my chest, a poisonous seed that bloomed into a forest of thorns. He left you. He chose Heaven. He regrets you.

I returned to the flat one last time. The air inside was stale, holding the phantom warmth of the morning we had shared, the scent of tea. I ignored the ghost of him standing by the window and went straight to the corner, where I had hurled Valden’s gift in a fit of terror. The silver ring lay in the dust, glinting with a malevolent light. I picked it up, and it hummed against my skin, a promise of power I never wanted, but it was valuable.

I took it to the Forbidden Quarter. The warlock with the veiled face and the cursed mirror was still there, presiding over his table of horrors. He recognized the ring and knew the signature of the vampire sire. He weighed the silver in his pale hand and offered a stack of bills, currency that felt substantial enough to buy a few items of clothing.

And I used that money to strip myself of the past. Along with a thick coat lined with rough fur, I also bought heavy wool trousers and sturdy leather boots that were not yet muddy. I shed my clothes that smelled of the chapel, leaving them in a pile in the alleyway. I then turned my back on Prague.

I walked. The journey was a blur of misery and endurance. I walked down the spine of the Carpathians toward the Balkans. It was the 1960s, a time when the mortal world was divided by iron curtains and cold wars, but I moved through the borders like smoke.

Weeks bled into months. The money from the warlock ran dry somewhere in Hungary. My purchased boots began to tear, and when the soles started to flap against the frozen mud, I replaced them with a stolen pair from some farmhouse porch in the dead of night.

I became a creature of the wild, sleeping in abandoned barns that smelled of mildew and rust or in caves where the earth remembered the slumber of bears.

Desperation made me reckless. Somewhere in Velika Kapela, amid the wind howling through a pass of jagged limestone, I stopped. The cold was no longer just a temperature but a weight, a physical manifestation of the silence I was so desperate to escape. Standing on the cliff of a ravine, where the snow stretched out like a shroud, I closed my eyes and reached inward, seeking the hollow space in my chest where the light used to be.

I summoned the memory of the chapel, the intoxicating power of the crack in the stone that had swallowed a vampire lord, and I poured every remaining ounce of my grief and rage into a single point in the air. I did not ask the world to open; I wanted to command it. Driving my heel into the frozen rock, I pushed my will into the earth, demanding it to yield, to tear the veil with my bare hands.

The air shrieked, a sound of tearing metal that vibrated my teeth, and the ground beneath my boots buckled. The mountain groaned, and a fissure cracked open in the ground at my feet, shooting outward like a stone serpent. Rocks tumbled into the darkness of the ravine.

But the sky remained whole.

The void recoiled, and the energy I had summoned slammed back into my chest, a physical blow of rejected magic that lifted me from the frozen earth and hurled me backward. I struck the rough bark of an ancient pine, the impact snapping my head back with a violence that tasted of iron. I slid to the base of the trunk, gasping for air that was too thin to fill my burning lungs, while warm blood dripped from my nose to stain the white snow.

I had nearly brought the mountain down on my head, cracked the very plate of the earth, yet the rage that had fueled the fissure at Houska Castle had burned out, leaving me just a broken woman with no fight left to give against a tree.

The wolves never left me. As I lay shivering in haylofts of random barns, they were always there with me, keeping me warm. I named them Fate and Fury.

They had returned sometime before I began my journey. Malakar’s light had banished them only for a moment, but they had reformed, drawn back to me by a command that transcended celestial authority. They were Remiel’s parting gift. Or perhaps his parting curse.

I couldn’t just glamour them constantly on train rides, nor did I have enough money to get to where I was going. So, we walked.

They kept circling me with the silent, lethal grace of guardians who knew their charge was broken. The larger one—the one named Fate for the scar across his muzzle because it seemed my destiny was always to be marked—would always lower his massive head and nudge my hand with a wet, cold nose, pushing me forward. Fury, the smaller and more volatile of the two, would always settle at my back, keeping me warm in the depths of winter.

It took us nearly two months to reach Velebit. The mountain air there was different—thinner, sharper, and charged with magic that tasted of old copper and dried herbs. This was the domain of the Old Ones, the witches who did not bow to the tribunal or the infernal courts.