Sadly, traveling to a fragmented crystal was a very bad idea. It meant your body would reappear in the same number of pieces as there were fragments of crystal, which was… not ideal.
A shadow swept over me again, and I glanced up at the moth-mounted elf. As he circled above me, swooping lower, my heart hammered against my ribs. I was running out of options fast. Any moment now and that elf’s wand would be recharged.
I had to find another way out of the Citadel, because I was deep in enemy territory.
But when I turned back in the other direction, my stomach fell.
The prisoner was racing for me, dark magic whirling around him. He moved like a phantom—no sound coming from him, shadows coiling off him.
A line of guards trailed behind him even as his gaze bored into me. I could almost smell the High Elves’ fear in the air. They were shooting bolts of magic at him, but none seemed to hurt him.
What could I do now? I had no choice but to fight, even if he seemed to scare the crap out of everyone. I gripped Skalei, my legs shaking a little as the prisoner raced along the walkway. I was nimble from my years of assassin training, but he was much, much bigger than me.
I widened my stance, ready as I’d ever be. And as he reached me, I sprang forward. My blade plunged into the center of his chest.
Unfortunately, it didn’t slow him down a bit. He wrapped his arms around me, then pushed me to ground under him.
The guards were pelting us with hexes now. The air was ablaze with magic, and I could hear the spells hissing and sizzling all around me. Yet, somehow, none hit me. I opened my eyes, daring to look up at this monster.
He crouched over me, shielding me with his massive body. My dagger still protruded from his chest, and the skin on his neck looked burned. So, the hexes had hit him, and yet somehow he was still alive.
The darkness in his eyes faded to ice blue. He pulled Skalei from his chest and tossed it away. Beneath all the dark magic, the man was as beautiful as a god. My breath caught as I looked up at him; I struggled to think of what I needed to do next.
Before I could say a word, he wrapped a powerful arm beneath me and pulled me to him—tight. I was crushed against his iron chest.
As I struggled to break free from him, he lifted me up. The wind whipped over me, and panic climbed up my throat as he leapt on top of the battlements.
Was he going to jump? I screamed into his chest, frantic to break free. But he was far too strong for me, his grip like steel.
I looked down at the earth as he leapt off the parapet. For a moment, time seemed to slow down. We hung suspended a thousand feet above Boston.
Then, like a meteor, we began to plummet.
Chapter 10
Marroc
We ripped through the sky, a falling star against the darkness of night. And yet even as we plummeted, I felt something I hadn’t experienced in a thousand years: ecstasy.
The wind whipped over us. My soul wasn’t at the bottom of the Well of Wyrd with the ring—it was inside Ali.
For the first time in a millennium, I could feel it, its power warm within her chest. And with that warmth, the memories of everything I’d forgotten while in prison: sunlight on my face, the gentle breeze through rowan trees. The scent of roses. Now, I could remember the calls of the ravens I’d once kept in my castle, each of them named for a god… That had been before Ragnarok, before the gods had died.
Trapped in a dark prison cell, I’d forgotten the beauty of the world entirely. I’d forgotten how it felt to kiss a woman, and the sweet taste of lingonberry wine—
“What the fuck! What the fuck was that!”
My mate’s screams interrupted the glorious peace of my thoughts. Her voice tore through the night sky like a killing hex.
Did she not understand that the guards were going to kill her? That I’d saved her life?
With the curse stealing my voice, I could do nothing to calm her nerves. Her shrieks were grating, like a sword scraping against the inside of my skull. In my cell, I’d grown used to silence. Why couldn’t I experience this reunion with my soul in peace?
For the love of the gods, was my mate really this loud?
I tuned her voice out, focusing again on the warmth of my soul as we fell. And yet I still wasn’t whole. My soul still wasn’t in my chest.
Sadly, it had ended up in the body of this shrieking Night Elf. Had fate, had Wyrd really tied me to a burglar like this one? Perhaps fate was punishing me.
And yet perhaps her screaming, given these circumstances, was normal. Trapped in isolation for a thousand years, I thought I’d completely lost my mind. I’d forgotten entirely what it was like to feel anything.
It was hard for me to remember normality or what it meant to feel fear. With my soul so close to me, I was catching glimpses of what it meant to be alive, but I couldn’t experience it completely. I remembered feeling something like fear…
It was only at this point that it flickered into my mind again—that idea of mortality. The distant memory that when you were alive, death was something to be avoided. The little Night Elf in my arms was terrified because she would not survive this fall, and what the Helheim had I been thinking? I had lost my mind.
Worst of all, with my soul now trapped in her body, her death would mean mine as well.
Now, for the first time in a thousand years, I felt it: fear, cold and sharp, like ice exploding in my chest.
My hand whipped out, and I grabbed on to the only thing available to me—a gargoyle’s head. Our momentum nearly ripped my arm out of its socket, but I managed to hold on. The problem was that the masonry holding up the gargoyle was cracking, its leering face tilting further down toward the ground. Bits of cement flaked into the air as the masonry crumbled, and the Night Elf’s screams rang in my ears.
I had no magic to speak of, only sheer physical strength.
And any moment now, we’d be falling again. She would die.
Chapter 11
Ali
I could hardly breathe. That had been the most terrifying few seconds of my life, but somehow, the prisoner hardly seemed fazed.
With one hand, the prisoner pressed me to his muscled chest. With the other, he gripped a gargoyle, which was about to rip from the wall. My heart slammed hard against my ribs as I tried to think clearly. We needed something that would grip the stones, something to stop us from splattering across Boston’s streets.
“Skalei.” In a moment, the dagger was in my hand again.
Reaching over the prisoner’s shoulder, I stabbed the side of the wall, plunging the blade into the cement between the blocks of marble.
But too late. The gargoyle’s neck ripped out, and I lost my grip on the hilt. For a split second, we were falling to our deaths again.
Then, like a viper from beneath a rock, the stranger’s arm snatched the dagger’s hilt, nearly dropping me in the process. I clamped my arms tight around his neck, and for the first time realized I’d tightened my legs around his waist as well.
We were sliding down the wall now, the dagger cutting through the stone. Marble debris cascaded everywhere, but at least our descent was much slower than falling freely through space.
Beneath my panic, though, part of me was already thinking about the amazing story this would make when I told Barthol about it later.