Shadows (Book Two of the Accalia Series)

Hatred

Ava's POV

Another few days of scrying for Brandon's body. Nothing. Samael and Jasmine had come up equally empty. Every time I used my powers, they felt stronger — where the surge was coming from, I had no idea, but I wasn't asking questions. I still had a mission.

Then the dream came — or rather, the vision. I wasn't walking anyone's dream. A dreamwalker always knows the difference, and this was something else: events that had already happened, playing out as if I were standing inside them.

I was in a realm I had never seen before. Red sky. Yellow clouds. A lake in the distance that pulsed with an unknown power. A woman was near the lake's edge, planting flowers. Long black hair trailing almost to the ground. I moved closer and she looked up — but not at me. Past me. I turned around.

My mother. Younger than I had ever known her, but unmistakably her. She walked toward the silver-eyed woman and stopped halfway — her eyes found mine, and her mouth fell open.

Then her jaw kept widening, past anything natural, blood beginning to pour from her eyes, the sky going black. I backed toward the silver-eyed woman, but she was gone. When I turned back, my mother was gone too. Carved into the ground in front of me, burned into the earth:

She is coming.

Every inch of my skin tingled, sharp enough to pull me out of the vision and back into my room. The door was swinging closed, as if someone had just left.

The walls were covered in the same words, written over and over in black marker.

She is coming. She is coming. She is coming.

My own hands were covered in black ink.

I sat with that for a long moment. Someone was sending me a warning. My mother had been in it. And so had the silver-eyed woman — whose face I didn't recognize, whose identity I couldn't place.

As if something were listening, a portal opened in front of my bed — to the same realm from the vision. The red sky. The lake.

I thought of my father's warning. I thought of everything that had happened the last time I went somewhere alone.

"I can't. I'm sorry," I said to whatever force had opened it.

The portal closed. The presence that had been watching me was gone.

I sat in the quiet of my room and turned it over. My mother. The silver-eyed woman. The warnings written on the walls in my own hand. All of it felt connected, though I couldn't yet see the shape of the connection.

My father had once told us about contacting a spirit through a medium — Jessica's spirit, when he thought she was gone. Was it possible I could do the same for my own mother? I couldn't leave the grounds. But maybe I didn't have to.

I needed answers, and I was going to find a way to get them from inside these walls.

Atlas's POV

A sound at the entrance to the cave pulled me awake and I was on my feet before I was fully conscious, ready for whatever was coming through.

Nothing. Instead, a portal — blue and silver light — had opened in front of me. On the other side was Draconis. My home.

I started toward it immediately, and Kai pulled me back.

Could be a trap. Adam knows you escaped.

It was a chance I was willing to take. I had been building my strength for weeks — I didn't know where the energy was coming from, but it had been healing me faster than made sense, and Kai was stronger now than he had been on the day I walked free. I was as ready as I was going to be.

I stepped through.

I landed exactly where I had been taken from five years ago. The same patch of ground near the lake. My father's house was visible from here, and the sight of it sent a pain through my chest that I had buried so deeply I had almost forgotten it was there. Almost.

I pulled my robe's hood forward and walked to an elderly woman sitting in a rocking chair outside her home near the lake's edge.

"Excuse me, ma'am," I said.

She looked up. Her eyes were cloudy blue. Blind.

"Yes, young man?"

I removed my hood.

"I haven't been here in five years. Has anything significant changed?" I asked.

"A great deal, lad. Our young King Atlas was declared dead after a conflict with the witches over yonder. The witches took his father too — tore his heart from his chest, they did," she said.

I let her continue.

"King Adam killed that head witch, but it was too late to save poor Atlas. Adam reigns now. But this kingdom isn't what it was. Not since the queen died," she said.

Sorena was dead.

"What happened to the queen?" I asked.

"Stabbed to death," she said simply.

Did Adam kill her? If he had lost his mate that way, the madness should have taken him already. I said as much.

"From what my children tell me, he looks like himself. No scales, nothing. His temper is right on the edge, and he doesn't care much who he hurts, but he's still standing. People fear him, but they know better than to live without a Drakos on the throne," she said, and closed her eyes and began to rock again.

I stood there processing it. Sorena's death would explain why Adam's dragon hadn't taken over — if the bond was severed, the pressure was released. But Adam murdering his own chosen mate to stabilize himself? Even that felt too calculated for grief.

Something about all of it felt wrong. I needed to see it for myself.

I shifted into Kai and rose.

I came in low over the castle, and I could see people stopping to look up as they recognized the shape of me against the sky. I could hear the gasps as I landed at the palace doors. The guards recognized me immediately and moved aside without being asked — the weight of Kai's presence and five years of compressed rage did the work before I could say a word.

I pushed the doors open.

Dinner time. They would be in the kitchen. I could hear the laughter from two floors away. I followed it to the kitchen and pushed the doors open.

Silence fell.

Older faces — five years older — stared at me as if they were seeing something impossible. I had time for all of them later. I was looking for one face, and I found it sitting in my seat at the head of the table.

Adam.

Five years of everything moved through me at once. Five years of captivity, abuse, darkness, and fury that had been building since the moment I saw his face through the closing portal. It focused down to a single point.

I crossed the kitchen in less time than it took him to register what was happening and drove my fist into his face.