The Midnight Star (21 page)

I reach the valley first. Here, the trees are so close together they seem to form a maze leading to the center of the origin point. As we run, I look through the trunks and see my reflection flash by in small pockets of ice amongst the snow, fleeting and distorted. My face is pale, my hair a stream of silver. I look panic-stricken.

“Watch out!” I shout at Raffaele as a creature barrels through the maze of trees toward us. Raffaele jumps back in time for the creature to lodge its face in between a split trunk. It snarls and claws for us through the narrow gap, fangs snapping. Raffaele stumbles backward and falls in the snow. A sword streaks out of nowhere to cut the creature nearly in half. It's Teren, both hands gripping the hilt of his
sword tightly, standing over Raffaele like a strange guardian. More creatures leap for him. He swings at them, forcing them back. Another creature dies by his blade.

“
Move,
” Teren snaps over his shoulder at Raffaele. “Don't make me save you again.”

Raffaele needs no second warning. He leaps to his feet and continues running for the beam of light. I do the same. Behind us, Teren pulls out a long knife and stabs one more creature.

Then another leaps out in front of us, landing deep in the powder snow. It turns its sightless sockets on us and smiles with its fanged mouth. Beside me, Lucent rises from her painful crouch and grits her teeth, then brandishes her own sword and swings at the creature. The whispers burst to life in my head, and I can almost understand what it wants. It focuses on me.

Kill them,
it says.

A shudder ripples through my body. The creature takes a step forward.
No,
I think in return.

You are one of us. You don't need them to visit the Underworld. You belong there yourself. It is your home.

The poison of the whispers seeps deep into my mind. I turn to look at Raffaele, and my thoughts fill with a sudden influx of hatred. Raffaele must see the change in my expression, because he suddenly pulls away from me. Lucent's eyes widen. “No, Adelina!” she shouts. I clench my fists.

No,
I think, hanging on to Lucent's cry.
No.

The creature snarls. It lunges for me—only to skewer
itself on Lucent's blade. She had moved in front of me so quickly that I didn't even see it. The creature screams, even as a spasm of pain shoots through me at its dying throes. Lucent yanks her blade out of its chest with a labored growl, and together with Raffaele, we run around its flailing body.

We are so close to the origin now. But more creatures crowd around from all sides, their hulking shapes gathering near the beam of light and behind us. We continue to run. Ahead of us, a cluster of creatures surrounds the light, and they turn their hideous faces in our direction. Maeve appears, bares her teeth, and flings herself at them—I reach within to weave a cloud of illusions around her and the others, trying to make them as invisible as I can. There are too many of us in motion. I can't hold the illusion, but it is enough to give them some cover.

Then, from somewhere, comes Teren. He is breathing heavily, his eyes wild with fury, his mouth twisted into a wide smile. His blades are covered in black blood, while his own clothes are stained red. He meets my stare, then turns to face the creatures. With a roar, he charges at them.

The creatures swarm him—but even then, they can't seem to take him down. He still fights like a beast while the rest of us gather by the origin. The light is bright enough here that I need to shield my eye from it. I look back at Teren again. One of the creatures sinks its jaws deep into his shoulder—he lets out a roar of agony. In the same moment, he twists around and stabs the creature deep in the neck. I wince. The creature tears its fangs out of his shoulder with a shriek. I throw my
energy out in Teren's direction, trying to prevent him from feeling the pain.

Magiano darts past me, along with Maeve. “Give us some cover!” he shouts back at me. He glances at the others. “Keep going!”

Before I can tell him to stop, he's gone, dashing to where Teren is trying to fend off the monsters. He draws his daggers and flings one at a creature clawing at Teren's back. At the same time, Maeve pulls an arrow from her sheath and aims it at a second creature preparing to lunge at Teren. She fires. Both attacks hit their marks. The creatures scream and fall back—but more continue to come. Through it all, Teren fights like a demon himself. It takes me a moment to realize that he is laughing. He closes his eyes.

“The gods speak!” he shouts as the creatures rip at him. And an instant later, one of the monsters plunges its razor-sharp claws straight through Teren's back, the black nails protruding from his chest.

I shudder, stunned. Maeve lets out a gasp, while Magiano freezes. Then they are on the move again, rushing toward him—but Teren's eyes are wide, his mouth open. Blood trickles from the corners of his lips. His body tries to heal around the creature's claws, but they remain buried in his heart. He trembles. A flash of Enzo's dying moments returns to me, followed by the memory of Giulietta's final breaths.

Magiano flings himself onto the creature still skewering Teren. He's strong enough to knock the creature backward—he is channeling Teren's power. I pull harder, trying
to inflict an illusion of pain on the creatures. They shriek at me, but my illusion cannot bring them down. Maeve swings her sword at the still-advancing creature that Magiano had just attacked—her blade cuts the demon's arm clean off. As the creature writhes, Teren collapses. I know before his body even hits the snow that he will not make it. A ringing blocks out the sound in my ears. I can barely believe it, but Teren is still smiling. His eyes are turned in my direction.

There is a moment of silence. We stand, stunned, at the sight.

Maeve and Magiano carefully roll Teren onto his back, while I hurry forward a few steps to see him. He is limp, his breathing slow and shallow. His eyes are hooded. The wound in his chest is healing, but it is not healing fast enough. “Teren,” I say, leaning over him.

His eyes flutter open for a moment. He has trouble focusing on any of us, and instead his gaze ends up resting somewhere on the night sky above. “Now I am forgiven,” he murmurs, so quietly that I think I misunderstand him.

I wait for his chest to rise again, but it doesn't.

I find myself looking down at the snow, willing myself to remember my first encounters with him—how he'd tied me to the stake and wished me to burn, how he'd threatened my sister and taken Enzo's life, how even after that, he continued to torment
malfettos
and Elites alike, how I drove him mad enough to take his own lover's life. I know, without a doubt, that he deserved to die.

So why am I sad? I reach up and feel tears on my face.
Why do I care what happens to him? I'd kept him a prisoner of my own, hated him and tortured him. I should be thrilled in this moment to see his blood running through the snow, the vacant, lifeless white of his eyes.

Teren is dead, and I do not know why I cry for him.

I have killed and destroyed too. I have hurt.
Perhaps we have always been one and the same, just as he used to tell me. And now that he's gone, I feel a sudden rush of exhaustion, a freeing grief. His death marks the end of a long chapter in my life.

He will be in the Underworld. Waiting for us.

The monsters in the woods are still drawing near. Maeve and Magiano run toward the light. I follow them in a daze, the world still quiet around me, the snow blurring. With the creatures at our backs, gaining on us fast, and the blinding blue-white light before us, I tear my gaze away from him, take a deep breath . . . and step in at the same time as the others.

MEDINA
. Have I arrived? Is this, truly, the ocean of the Underworld?

FORMIDITE
. Speak, child, for you stand at the gates of death.

MEDINA
. O goddess! O angel of Fear! I cannot bear to look upon you.

—Eight Princes
, by Tristan Chirsley

E
nergy floods me. It fills every crevice in my mind and body, threads of power from every god—Fear, Fury, Prosperity and Death, Empathy and Beauty, Love and Wisdom and Time, Joy and War and Greed. I feel everything at once. It burns my insides with its sheer intensity, and for an instant I think I won't be able to stand it. I want to scream.
Where are the others?
I can no longer hear Magiano's voice or Raffaele's shouts. I can no longer sense anything but the light and the energy.

I try to open my eye, and in that instant, I think I see a glimpse of the heavens beyond the sky, and the waters deep below the mortal oceans.

Gradually, the light starts to fade. The air turns cold again, but it is different from the winds in the Dark of Night. It is
a cold that burrows deep into my bones, a numbness that nestles there near my heart and wraps it in a cocoon of ice. Tentatively, I open my eye. The world around me is hazy and gray. I recognize this gray. It is that of the Underworld.

Under my feet is the feeling of cold water. On one side of me is Magiano. On my other is Raffaele, then Maeve and Lucent.

We have crossed into the world of the gods.

Although the Underworld's ocean looms at our feet, we do not sink into the water. Instead, we stand on top of it, as if we were weightless. When I look down at the water, I notice that not a single ripple disturbs its surface. A mirror of the eternal gray sky around it, the realm between the heavens and the earth, the space where you are neither here nor there; the water is dark, almost black, but completely transparent. Far below glide the silhouettes of enormous creatures, the same that I've seen countless times in my nightmares of the Underworld. Except now we are here.

Adelina.

The whisper echoes all around us, reverberating deep in my heart. It is a voice I know well. I look up at the same time everyone else does. There, some distance away, a pale figure with long black hair walks on the surface of the ocean toward us. As she draws near, I am unable to move. The others remain frozen in place. A chill lodges in my chest.

Adelina.
Then she whispers the others' names too.
You do not belong here. You are from the world of the living.

Formidite. The angel of Fear. She has come to claim us.

Her hair trails all across the ocean, stretching on beyond the horizon, so that the sea behind her is nothing but a field of dark strands. She has the body of a child, but skeletal. Her face is featureless, as if skin were stretched tightly across it, and she is whiter than marble. Suddenly I am reminded of the first time I ever saw her in my nightmares, on the evening right after Raffaele had tested me for the Dagger Society.

I bow as she approaches us and the others do the same. Raffaele is the first to address her, his eyes cast down toward the water.

“Holy Formidite,” he says. “Gatekeeper to the Underworld.” We murmur our own greetings to her.

Beneath her layers of skin, she seems to smile at him.
Return to the mortal world.

“We are here to save those like ourselves,” Raffaele answers. He must be afraid of her, as are we all, but his voice stays steady and gentle, unrelenting. “We are here to
save
the mortal world.”

Formidite's smile vanishes. She leans down toward us. The fear building in me grows, and my power grows with it, threatening to undo me. She looks first at Raffaele, and then turns to Maeve. Something about Maeve catches her interest. She steps closer to the Beldish queen, then tilts her head in what can only be described as curiosity.
You have a power, little one. You have pulled souls out of my mother's realm before, and taken them back to the living.

Maeve bows her head lower. I can see her hand visibly trembling against her sword's hilt. “Forgive me, Holy Formidite,” she says. “I was given a power I can only say was from the gods.”

I was the one who let you in,
Formidite answers.
You have learned since then, I know, that there are consequences for channeling the gods' powers.

“Please let us enter,” Maeve says. “We must fix what we have done.”

Still, Formidite waits. She looks at Lucent, then at Raffaele.
Children of the gods,
she says as she goes. And then she looks at me.

The fear in my chest spikes. Formidite takes another step forward, until her figure looms over me and casts a soft shadow across the ocean. She reaches down, one bony hand outstretched, and she touches me gently on my cheek.

I cannot stop my power—an illusion of darkness bursts from all around, silhouettes of ghostly arms and red eyes, visions of rainy nights and a horse's wild eyes, of a burning battleship and long palace corridors. I stumble backward, tearing myself away from her touch.

My child,
Formidite says. Her strange, featureless smile returns.
You are my child.

I am hypnotized by her face. The fear swarming inside me makes me delirious.

Formidite is silent for a moment. The ghostly calls of creatures from the deep echo up to us, as if they had been stirred
to life by our presence. Finally, she nods once at us. When I look down again, the creatures' shapes are closer to the surface, and they crowd one another. My heart pounds faster. I know what this means, and who is waiting for us beneath the surface. Formidite's twin angel.

The water beneath us gives way. I drop into the depths, and my head submerges. The world fills with the sound of being underwater. For an instant, I'm blind in the darkness, and I reach out instinctively for Magiano. For Raffaele. For Maeve and Lucent. I find nothing. The silhouettes of enormous creatures glide around me in a circle. As I continue to sink, I get a glimpse of one of the creatures' faces.

Eyeless, finned, monstrous, fanged. I open my mouth to scream, but only bubbles emerge.
I can't breathe.
The energy of the Underworld pulls me down, tugging hard on my chest, and I have no choice but to follow it.

One of the creatures glides close to my face. It is Caldora herself, the angel of Fury. She opens her jaws at me, and a low, haunting echo reverberates through the water. Even though I can't see the others, I can feel their presence. I am not alone here.

Follow me,
Caldora's thoughts say, penetrating my mind. She turns away, and her long, scaly tail makes a loop in the water. I swim deeper and deeper with her.

Follow me, follow me.
Caldora's hiss becomes a rhythm in the water. Her voice blends with my own whispers, forming an eerie harmony. The water turns blacker and blacker, until
the pressure builds and I can no longer see anything, not even Caldora swimming ahead of me, not even the silhouettes of other creatures haunting the waters. It is just deep, black, endless space, in all directions, until eternity.

I sink into the realm of Death.