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Hundreds upon hundreds of them, so fine they were all but invisible until the eye was pressed close enough to touch, each one curved and hooked like a fisherman’s barb. They bit as his hand passed over them, and dark blood welled in a dozen thin lines.

The hooks didn’t let a single drop of it fall, serving their purpose well enough. As I watched the wood drink him down. There was no other word for it. The blood didn’t run, didn’t drip, it was simply caught and gathered along those barbs before being drawn inward. Sinking into the grain as though the tree had thirsted years for it. Where the blood vanished, a faint, sickly green light glimmered for a moment deep within the wood before it went dark. Something vast and unseen seemed to shift and settle, and the fog in the archway stirred for the first time, parting at its center by a hand’s breadth, like an eye half-opening.

“Aster.” Theron stepped back, flexing his unmarked hand as though the wood had handed it back to him clean. “You’re next. The herd’s blood is old and royal enough.”

Aster grumbled something about being volunteered, but he laid his great palm to the thorns and dragged it down the way Theron had. The wood bit into him and drank him down, and again the fog widened. Lazaros followed, jaw tight, giving the gateway his blood without a word. Then he turned and crossed back to where I was still sitting upon my horse, still holding her in my arms.

“Pass her to me,” he said quietly. “I’ll hold her.”

For a moment, I couldn’t make my arms obey. Then I leaned down and gave my brother the sleeping weight of her, watched him gather Alexandra against his chest with a care that loosened something tight behind my ribs. Only then did I swing down from Acelin’s back. I tossed the reins to the captain, and the man caught them without a word. His face was carefully blank in the way of a soldier who would rather be anywhere else.

I walked to the gateway, and without a word, I laid my own palm to the thorns, drew it down, and let the wood take its payment. The hooks bit in, and my blood welled before it was gathered and drawn inward, and the fog parted another hand’s breadth. The dark behind it seemed to lean closer, as though it had been waiting for me in particular.

And there I stopped, because here was the fear I had been carrying since Theron had suggested coming here.

“She is no king,” I said quietly, turning back to where Lazaros held her. “No royal of any line. The realm will turn her away.” And turning her away, I had been given to understand, was the kindest thing it did.

“The realm will know exactly what she is,” Theron said, as he met my eyes, and there was no cruelty in them now, only a terrible certainty. “She carries its own shadow inside her, Atlas. Stolen or no, that darkness is of this place, and the realm will recognize its own blood in her veins long before it troubles itself over a crown. Of all of us, she is the one it will let through without a second thought. Give it her hand.”

I didn’t want to…. Even now, even to save her, the thought of laying her skin open turned my stomach. But I crossed to my brother regardless, and I took her small, cold hand from where it hung limp at her side. Then I opened her slack fingers and pressed her palm flat to the thorns. I drew it down myself, as gently as I could, and felt the tiny hooks catch and bite. A dozen fine red lines welled up dark against her gray skin, and the barbs took them, gathering her blood the way they had gathered ours.

The realm took her blood faster than it had taken any of ours.

It did not sip.

It gorged itself on it.

It pulled, eager and immediate, the light blooming bright and deep within the wood, and the fog tore wholly open with a sound like a long indrawn breath. A black throat of a passage now yawning where the held mist had been. A fog now sinking down and away into a dark that no beam of light would ever touch.

“There,” Theron said softly. “You see? She belongs here more than any of us. That ought to frighten you a great deal more than it seems to.” I gritted my teeth at that but said nothing of my fear.

Because the truth was that it didn’t just frighten me…

It terrified me more than words could ever say.

I turned once to my captain and gave the order for the men to hold the threshold and wait for us to return, however long it took. Then I reclaimed my queen and gathered Alexandra closer against my chest.

With the Gorgon King on one side and my brother and my oldest friend at my back, I carried the woman I loved through the breathing dark and into the realm…

Of the Shadow King.

Alex

Iwoke on cold stone, in the dark, in the last place I remembered. I knew at once how wrong it was.

That was the only way to describe it.

Wrong.

As if I had woken up in an entirely different world.

Yet at first, it was all there, the buried chamber beneath the castle, the pedestal, the low stone walls, the stone steps that led back to the iron-banded door I had been fool enough to open. I was lying where I must have fallen, my cheek against the floor, and for one stupid, hopeful moment, I thought all I had done was faint. That any second now, Atlas would come crashing down those steps and gather me up and call me his impossible, infuriating queen.

I lifted my head, and the moment died, evaporating right before my eyes as if the world was dying… as if it had been infected.

Because the chamber was wrong. The stone had gone soft and dark. Its walls were weeping, slick with a black, wet substance that ran down in slow threads and pooled around my fingers without ever quite touching them. The pedestal had cracked and slumped like something melting.

And the box was gone.