The Songbird and the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia #3)

Chapter 16

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“ D on’t look at her,” Asar commanded. But it was too late. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. How could I? She was repulsively stunning.

She melted into the shadows, her body comprised of countless tattered shreds of darkness wavering in and out of solid form. She was clearest out of the corner of my eye, and difficult to pin down in a direct stare. Her face was striking—high cheekbones, full lips, deep hair the color of vampire blood, which fanned out around her as if underwater. Her limbs were long and delicate, and at certain angles, I glimpsed the bone within. She wore a scarf around her neck, eye-searing red, floating in an invisible breeze.

But of all of it, I couldn’t look away from those eyes. Empty as the mouth of the souleater had been, belonging to neither life nor death.

She was not a wraith.

I knew that immediately. Her want, so keen-sharp I could feel it beneath my fingernails, was so much more painful than the mindless hunger of the dead.

With every blink, she melted to a new location. First she was at the corner of the room, then behind Asar, then coiling around him—ribbons of dark sliding over his shoulders, around his throat, caressing his face. An embrace. A noose. Luce circled her, barking, hissing.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she breathed. “It has been a long time.”

Asar was not looking at her. He was still, his jaw tight, body rigid, like it took every shred of focus to keep his composure intact. But his gaze met mine over her shoulder, and that one look drove a stake through my heart. Because despite his stoicism, there was no denying what I saw in his eyes:

Terror.

“Run,” he whispered.

The word made the world stop.

Blink, and the woman spun around, her death-stare spearing me.

RUN.

I started to move—not away from Asar, but toward him, a gut instinct that even I didn’t understand in the moment. But Elias grabbed my arm and hauled me back through one of the arches. Asar’s stare held mine until Elias dragged me around a corner.

“We can’t leave him there.” My legs tangled under me. Elias was now at a full-on sprint. Chandra was long gone ahead. Ivory carvings smeared past me. The halls twisted and forked, and Elias chose his route seemingly at random.

“Sure as shit we can,” Elias said. “He wants us to follow orders? We’ll follow orders.”

“She’ll—she’ll kill him.” I barely got the words out. But even as I said them, I knew kill wasn’t the word for what she would do. I’d felt her starvation. I somehow knew it would be worse than that.

Elias scoffed. “If only.”

The silence of the temple had shattered, those steady breaths now warping to grotesque gasps. A throbbing beat thumped under the walls, the floors, like the temple itself couldn’t quell its quickening heart. Dread nipped at our heels. At some point, Elias stumbled, and my hand slipped from his grasp. When I reached out for him again, he was gone. Chandra was, too, and I was alone in the winding halls.

Fear screamed in my ears. Far in the distance, I thought I heard Luce’s frantic barks—but was I imagining them?

I slipped in a slick puddle and collided with a turn in the hall, forehead smacking against ivory. I spat a curse, but as I pushed myself up again, the shock of pain actually cleared my head. My palm pressed to the wall as I tried to make sense of my surroundings. How far had I run? I wasn’t sure—I’d been lost in such a blind panic.

Think, Mische. Don’t just bolt. Think.

I forced in a breath, slower than the ones that shook the temple walls.

It was easy to run. It was what this place wanted us to do. It was manipulating our fear until it made us panicked animals.

I squinted down the two paths that split before me. Both fell into shadow, identical.

This was a maze, I realized. That was the test. Like the second Trial of the Kejari. But I’d already gotten myself hopelessly lost. I didn’t remember how I’d come, or even when I got separated from Elias. It felt as if someone had reached into my mind and scrambled those memories—hell, maybe that’s exactly what this magic had done to me.

There had to be a way out. A key Atroxus had left.

I flattened my hands against the wall. They were covered in carvings, glyphs that reminded me of the ancient ones on the gates Asar and I repaired. I tried testing my magic against them, but it was like trying to speak a language I only understood in fractured syllables—one that had been dead for thousands of years now.

Then my fingertips passed over something familiar.

I stopped. Dragged my hand back, then repeated the movement.

The wall looked like smooth ivory here, unmarked. But when I touched it, I felt the indentations beneath my fingertips. And these were so familiar that I didn’t even need to see them to recognize them.

Glyphs of Atroxus.

They were small, running in a straight line that extended, as far as I could feel, all the way down the hall.

The sun felt so, so far away now. It took me too long to find a scrap of it inside myself, and even then, the spark of magic was so tiny that I struggled to make it catch. The burn would earn a disapproving stare later from Asar—or I hoped it would, if we made it out of this alive. But with a hiss of pain and a spark of light, fire at last leapt to my fingertips. It flowed into the glyphs immediately, burning a streak of ancient prayers along the wall of ivory.

Lighting a path.

One path.

A smile broke over my face, but then I hesitated. I looked over my shoulder to see that the trail of light extended behind me, too—potentially, I guessed, all the way back to the doors. It wasn’t exactly subtle. Asar would see it, surely. And I had a feeling that it would draw her attention.

Maybe that was a good thing. If this brought us to the center of the temple, where the relic was, it could distract her. It would, at least, get Asar to the same location as the rest of us.

The breathing of the walls quickened, as if to say, Hurry, hurry.

I didn’t have time to doubt it.

I ran .

I followed that streak of light around countless turns. I whispered constant thank-yous under my breath because with each one, it became increasingly clear that I would have died in those hallways without Atroxus’s help. I prayed Elias and Chandra had spotted it, too.

Eventually, the path ended in a great circular room. It was dark and windowless, plain compared to the entrance’s unsettling ornamentation. The thread of fire continued its path all the way around its perimeter, tracing the outline of a single closed door on the opposite side. My eyes snapped to that door immediately. Surely, the relic was behind it—I could practically feel it inside me, tugging and scratching.

But then, as I began to start toward it, something nudged my foot. I looked down.

“Oh, gods,” I gasped.

Asar had been right that there had been lots of wraiths here.

Had been.

They covered the floor like withered leaves in winter. Their bodies, or what remained of them, bled into the air like the smoldering remains of a fire. Most were motionless. A few still twitched, as if trying to drag themselves back to whatever scraps of life they’d once had. The fire etched into the walls seemed to awaken a renewed desperation. They twitched as the light rolled over them, half-formed pleas at their lips. One wraith, an elderly man, weakly grabbed at my ankle.

“Warm,” he whispered.

His emotions were a raw, open wound. Fear and grief and pain.

I knelt beside him. “What happened to you?”

But even as I asked, I knew.

They’d been eaten. Something had been preying on them.

Something that was not the souleaters.

Sudden cold fell over me. Smoke gathered in the corners of the room, drawing inward. The wraiths on the floor, or what remained of them, pushed themselves away, as if trying to retreat into the ground.

Her.

Run , Asar’s command echoed in my head.

But the terror paralyzed me.

The shadows wove around my throat in a searching embrace. It reminded me of the way Atroxus’s hands had slid under my dress on my offering night. Like peeling back the skin of a rare fruit.

“It has been so long since I have been warm, too,” she whispered in my ear.

On shaky legs, I forced myself to stand. Her want wrapped around me. She was so hungry—for warmth, for food, for love, for light, for the moon, for the stars.

She pulled back just enough so I could see her face. More solid than those of the wraiths. But more dead, too. Gods, those eyes?—

“I used to be as pretty as you,” she said wistfully. But I could still see that she had been much more so than I ever was. She still wore the ghost of captivating vampire perfection.

A shiver racked my body as she drew me closer.

“Wh-what is your name?” I asked.

My voice shook, but I tried to sound gentle. Pleasant. She craved life just as the wraiths did. Maybe the key to survival was granting her some of its dignity.

She paused, like this surprised her. But she didn’t answer. Instead, her touch lingered over the fresh burns at my wrist.

“You pay a great cost for your light,” she crooned. “ Don’t you, pretty bird?”

And then she smiled, revealing sharp teeth and a rotten pleasure in a rotten truth.

“Leave her.”

Asar’s voice echoed through the room.

The woman drew back, tightening around me as she shifted behind me. She caressed the underside of my jaw. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Asar’s eyes met mine. Only for a moment, before he dragged them away again. But that split-second glance was enough. The woman’s wounded chuckle rippled through me.

“Ah.” Her lips brushed the crest of my ear. “ He likes you. Even if he doesn’t know it yet. But don’t be fooled. He will ruin you one day, too.”

Then, to Asar, “ She is very interesting. I see why you enjoy her. Another attractive curiosity. But she only knows how to love things she can fix, and there is no fixing you, is there?”

The laugh that rippled through the air was ugly, rasping, closer to a sob. “ Or perhaps that’s why you would be so perfect for each other. A girl who can only love broken things, and a boy so broken he can only love what he cannot have. A perfect match.”

Asar said, “You’re not here for her.”

“And who am I here for? You?” A hitch in her voice. “ Are you here for me, Asar? Did you come back for me?”

Asar’s left eye glowed bright, trails of light streaking from it like tears underwater. His hand fell to his chest, and I felt a corresponding tug on the anchor on my own. He was calling all of us, I realized. Dragging the others back, while feigning a gesture of overwhelmed emotionality.

She can’t pass through the door, he said into my mind. As soon as I tell you to, run.

But how would I get it open? I didn’t know how to answer him, how to ask the question. But I wouldn’t have time to form the words anyway. I could already hear footsteps rushing down the hall.

“I’ve come back for you so many times,” he murmured. “You know that. Let me try one more time.”

She wrapped tighter around me, balancing on the edge of fury and despair. There was such a fine line between them, and anger was so much easier to bear. “You never say my name anymore,” she whispered.

But Asar just said softly, “Please.”

Gods, the way he said it. Like he put his entire soul into it.

Asar kept masterful control of his walls, but that didn’t mean he was a good actor. I knew, beyond a single doubt, that his desperation was real—deliberately unleashed, yes, but real . It was uncomfortable to witness. It reminded me of when I’d seen him in that soaked shirt. Like I was leering at something I was never meant to witness.

He held out his hand.

She wanted to resist him, I could tell. Wanted to toy with him a little longer, make him suffer, to make him beg. Somehow, I got the impression that all those things had happened before.

But above all, I felt her loneliness. And as it so often did, that won in the end.

She slithered away, leaving me swaying in her wake. Asar opened his arms to her. The light that poured from his left eye intertwined with her shadows like a stream reunited with the sea.

His gaze locked to mine. He didn’t have time to speak into my mind—but he didn’t need to. He’d timed it all perfectly. I was already halfway to the door. Chandra and Elias broached the last turn of the hall, mouths opening in horror at what they saw.

Now.

I wasn’t sure if Asar said it, or if I did.

I threw myself against the door, fingers digging into the ridge around it. Firmly closed. Atroxus’s glyphs burned into my hands. The door bore a carving of the eye of Alarus, but the sun had been carved over it, magic nested over magic.

I called flame.

Again .

Too slow?—

Chandra threw herself against the door beside me, pressing her hands to the door. The light surged from her immediately, searing my eyes as it illuminated the symbol of the sun.

And in the same moment, shadow snaked around me. At first, I thought it was her—but no, this was refined and gentle. Asar. Handing me the last key.

I pressed my palms to the stone, and I breathed Asar’s magic deep into my lungs and exhaled.

Dark light flooded from my splayed fingers, radiating out, pouring through the carvings of the door. It illuminated whorls around my hands, then countless words in some lost, ancient language, and then, at the apex of the arch, two eyes of Alarus—lids, iris, pupil.

The door disappeared, revealing spiral stairs.

A roar shook the stone, the frantic gasps of the temple coming to a brutal crescendo. Something wet hit my head, and I looked up to see blood pouring down from the ceiling.

Chandra bolted through, Elias not far behind, and then Luce. But I turned back at the threshold. Asar was surrounded by a collision of darkness and light, his left eye so brilliant that it reduced the rest of his face to silhouette. He cradled the woman close, and for a moment, I thought maybe he was about to kiss her.

But then she screamed. It shook the walls. It shook the earth. It shook the veil between worlds of the mortal and the dead.

He was holding her back to buy us precious seconds for our escape.

And she just kept screaming, a promise of vengeance, as he at last released her and dove for me.

I pulled him through just as she threw herself after him. He collided with me, the two of us falling down the stairs together. Stone clapped against stone as the door slammed shut.

Silence consumed me as the darkness did.