It felt odd to be giving orders, especially to a fey high priestess who had just crunched a sentient being into a painful, broken lump with some seriously powerful magic, but the rest fell in behind Catrin. The halls rushed past in a whir, one after the other.

She had no idea where she was.

Six squads had passed them, all heading back toward the small tower that had once held the orb, and they’d flattened to the wall each time. She held her breath at the scent of rot that went with them.

It seemed that most of Grobitzsnak’s troops were undead, their mottled brown-gray skin devoid of life.

She grimaced.

The undead were harder to kill.

Ten minutes later, their luck ran out when she walked out into an empty hallway and a crackle of magic exploded into her side.

Pain screamed through her—erupting, and all-consuming. Her entire arm was on fire, flames rooting deep into her flesh. Energy whipped into her face, splitting her skull in sheer agony. The mercari on her armor flared bright gold, trying and failing to shield her.

Boots pounded the floor. She heard shouts, yells. The whining discharge of Matteo’s gun from somewhere close. Swords clashed. Someone stepped over her, shielding her.

The fire stopped. Abruptly. Healing magic flooded into her. Slowly, she became aware of Doneil’s touch on her arm.

After several seconds, the pain began to lessen. Golden magic spun through her side, knitting muscle, smoothing skin. He pried her hand, finger by finger, from the hilt of her blade. She sucked in a breath as some of the flesh stuck, ripping free. He healed that, too.

Then, he was finished.

He helped her shaking body to sit up. She sucked in air, forced her eyes to look down the hall. Four dead demons lay on the ground, with Nales and the two fey standing around them. One of them must have hit her with a fire spell. The demonic equivalent of Nales’ Kimbic Two, it felt like. Doneil and Matteo stood by her. One of the demon’s heads had the distinct look of being chewed up by shots from his weapon.

Everything, from start to finish, had happened in less than a minute.

Nearly every part of her shook. Her mind still reeled from the fire. The runes on her arm prickled against the new skin, sensitive.

She struggled to get up.

“Easy, rnari,” Doneil murmured, his hand holding her down on the shoulder. “Let it flow through.”

Anger spiked, hot and sharp, mixing in with fear and confusion, but it was an automatic response. Some part of her recognized the shock threading through her mind like a fog, the way she’d begun to dissociate. She needed to sit down, let it run through as he suggested. Take the time to mentally address it and shove it far, far down into her psyche. Otherwise, it would ride with her for the next several hours, a direct line to fear and panic, influencing her every decision and ready to split her into dissociation. A single lapse could make her go from alert and functional to numb and frozen—deadly in a fight.

She shuddered again, just her spine and shoulders this time. Then, slowly, she grounded herself. Took a minute to sort out her thoughts, process her emotions, and address the shock and trauma deep within her.

When she stood, she was still shaking, but it wasn’t as bad. Acid crept into her throat as she realized the smell of her burning flesh hung in the air. Matteo caught her eyes, shock and concern stark on his face.

Ah. Apart from his own fracture, this would have been the first time he’d seen any sort of major healing. A minute ago, she’d been screaming on the floor, a quarter of her body lit up like a bonfire, her flesh making smoke in the air. Now, she was walking again.

It was a shocking thing to witness, even for those who were familiar with healing. Some primal part of their brains simply couldn’t process the swift transition. The first time she’d seen one, she’d almost thrown up. Others had been reduced to gibbering lumps, the shock too much for them.

She touched his wrist, then held out her arm so that he could see the bare, unblemished skin between her shoulder pauldron and bracer. It was still hot to touch, some of it red and flushed with the regeneration, but it was healed.

They exchanged a nod, and she dropped the arm, giving herself a shake and rolling her shoulders as she walked it off. After a few steps, another shot of healing magic hit the air—Doneil, likely helping to ease Matteo’s own shock. Her newly-healed flesh buzzed briefly with its proximity, like an echo.

She gave herself another shake, pushed it all behind her, and headed for the group.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Yena nodded. “Yes. We are unharmed.” She gestured to the mangled remains of one demon. “This one had a special seeing script.”

Ah. So that’s how they’d gotten through the glamour.

Not that she’d trusted it completely. By the way the demon earlier had simply heard its way through, the glamour spell had already proven vulnerable.

It was likely sheer luck that Grobitzsnak had not seen through it before. That, and he’d been distracted.

Caracel was wiping the blood off his sword with a piece of the demon’s clothing. Nales stood nearby, silent and stoic, ready to move. His sword was in his hand, sitting at an angle similar to how Treng had held it.

“How far is the gate?”

Yena tilted her head, focus going to the mid-distance, like Catrin’s did when she was consulting her woodcraft.

“Not far. Below us.”

So, they needed to find some stairs, and to beware of demons that could see through glamour. Catrin let out a breath, some of her earlier frustration sliding back in. This place was too big. The halls seemed endless, stacking one after the other. She had no idea of the castle’s layout. The magic, and then the run, had obliterated any mental map she’d been attempting, the pieces fragmented in her mind. She had a vague idea that they should be going left, but without the woodcraft, and with her normal meticulousness smashed down like a storm dam, she didn’t trust it.

“The library is to the left.” Nales gestured with his sword, its tip swinging up and pointing toward an intersection back up the hallway. His voice was without inflection, and he sounded tired. “We can orient ourselves and take the stairs we found earlier.”

Her instincts screamed, a distinct repulsion at stepping back into the paths they’d already walked, now more likely to be filled with enemies. It was also close to where they’d released the forest lord earlier.

Suns, that thing’s magic had already knocked them on their asses once, and stripped their glamour in the process.

But they didn’t have very many choices.

Her breath hitched. And then what? Theoretically, the fey would go through the gate. Then, the rest of them would be left, without glamour, attempting to sneak out of a fortress full of demons and the undead—all of them likely heading to the gate once they activated it.

It’d be like trying to fight their way through a never-ending stream.

Her teeth gritted together.

That was going to be an interesting run.

Caracel watched her. She wondered if he had guessed what she was thinking.

She gave herself a shake. Nothing for it but to do it. They didn’t have a choice—and they would be much worse off without the fey.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Okay,” she said, pivoting. “Nales, you lead.”

They picked up another jog and were off again.

The halls rushed past in a whir, one after the other, as if someone had duplicated them in a repeat. She wondered if it had been an architectural style in the demonic world—a way of showing wealth and power—or if it had the simple purpose of confusing enemies. Currently, it was doing a really good job of the latter.

Fortunately, Nales seemed to know where he was going.

Three more squads passed them, undead bodies running in a hushed rush of weapons, armor, and pounding boots, some so close, the stench of rot smothered her nose and caused acid to trip from her throat. The fourth squad sparked with magic.

She was ready for it this time. She ducked into a roll, and the spell whistled over her head, heat igniting the air. The mercari on her armor flared in defense, and the two fey leapt into action.

A demon screamed, and a fountain of blood exploded from the middle of the group. Two others followed in quick succession, and Catrin had a sudden keen understanding of just how powerful the orb of destruction was—Yena certainly hadn’t been remote-exploding bodies on the way up to the room.

The other five fell to a combination of sword slashes and hits from Matteo’s gun. Bright pain seared her hip as one of the demons managed to slash her thigh before she killed him. She grunted, reversed her grip, and stabbed her blade into his neck, leaning into the pain to shove all her weight into the flesh until the blade’s edge ran through the back of the throat and into his spinal cord.

The demon fell like a bag of bricks. She limped free for a few strides before Doneil caught up with her. Magic shoved into her skin, knitting the wound in a stinging pain—a quick patch job, without finesse.

With a hasty glance to check on the group—all present, unhurt, and accounted for—she tucked back into a jog, she and Nales leading.

When they closed in on the pathway to the library, the smell of death hit her like a wall.

The hallway was filled with corpses.

They were a mix of demons, mostly humanoid, but some of them not. Several hellhound bodies lay among them, differentiated by their fur and structure, along with a few other creatures she hadn’t seen before. Something stopped her from stepping out, some sense that triggered a warning and a second look. The corpses were all strewn out, their limbs and bodies askew, like they’d been thrown.

And, without fail, every one of them was missing a head.

Whatever had killed them had gone through and meticulously crushed or ripped them off.

A series of thick claw marks lay in the stone wall, some of them twenty feet high. One, lower on the wall, held a blood smear, as if something had smashed one of the bodies there and wiped it along. Giant, four-pronged footprints amid and on top of the bodies gave no subtlety as to the perpetrator’s identity.

She gestured to them with the edge of her blade. “Our favorite giant chicken was here.”

Behind her, Doneil gave a low whistle. “And she was pissed.”

“Either that, or she really likes biting heads.” She grimaced, a sudden image of the bird snapping at her own head. “Something to watch for.”

To that, Doneil said nothing.

She picked her way through the hall. The smell of blood drenched her nose. Some of it was old, having clearly been dead before it was spilled. Gray-skinned corpses, dead long before the bird had crushed their heads, lay in slumps, veins black against their gray-green skin. Some of their armor had great slash marks on it, as if the bird had attempted to pry them open but found its claws were too big. Others had simply been crushed, blood imprinted into them from a heavy foot.

Nales jogged closer, keeping pace a half dozen feet away. He didn’t say anything, just looked over the corpses with a grim, assessing eye that surprised her.

“That bird was angry,” she commented. “Very angry.”

“She has reason to be. Grobitzsnak tortured her, corrupted her power, and used her like a battery of pain—and all evidence points to him having kept her locked up. He’s had her for three centuries, Catrin.”

Three centuries of imprisonment. On top of what he had done to her.

Yeah, she’d be pissed, too.

She hesitated. “How sentient is she?”

In her experience, the forest tended to feel things in moods. Not actual, concentrated thought.

But she hadn’t met many forest lords, and none of them face to face.

Nales grunted. “About on par with your Kodanh.”

Ah. Fairly sentient, then. As an elemental being, Kodanh had a keen intelligence—but it was like that of a wolf or lion. Not so much simple as less bothered with small things like organized civilization and more concerned with power and territory.

Other summon spirits had complex, multi-faceted rituals tied to them—rites done over the summer moon, regular offerings left at temples, that sort of thing.

Kodanh took payment by use and in blood.

Simple, primal, but effective.

If someone had done to Kodanh what Grobitzsnak had done to Franas, his vengeance would be a long and violent affair.

So, that’s why they set it loose.

They passed the library. The door was open, the same crystal lights glowing from inside, but she saw neither of the two goat demons they had encountered before—only smears of blood on the floor where she’d killed the others.

Then, somewhere below them, magic pulsed.

Catrin halted. A scream followed it, shrill and piercing. The footfalls of something enormous thudded in the near distance, one level below them. She felt a different magic, booming and chaotic, burning like a caustic haze, fighting it.

Grobitzsnak, dealing with the monster they’d unleashed.

Yena swore viciously, a litany in High Fey. Her face twisted. “The gate is that way. They’re right next to it.”

A hardness settled in her gut. Of course they were. Nothing could ever be easy tonight.

Catrin’s grip turned to steel on her blades as her mind raced, weighing their options.

“We could go around,” Doneil suggested. “It might take longer, but it would be safer.”

“There’s only one hall that leads to the gate,” Yena said. “And they’re in it.”

“Maybe they’ll move,” she said.

Below, another crash of magic shuddered through the castle. For one long, heart-stopping second, the crystal lights on the walls flickered.

“Could we fight him?” Nales asked.

His head tilted, gaze focused on the vacant hallway in the direction of the magical battle as he, like the rest of them, tried to pay attention to his instincts to follow it.

Catrin gave him a blank, disbelieving look. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“You already offered to kill him once. I figured that we may have an advantage, given that he’s currently busy. I imagine Franas would be happy for the help.”

“I don’t think Franas is happy about much of anything right now.”

Another crash echoed through the castle, this one accompanied by another deep, drawn-out shriek. All of the hair on the back of her neck lifted.

They all waited for several long seconds, listening. Around them, the smell of death sat in the air, a coarse, humid reek. She wrinkled her nose.

“We must get to that gate.” Yena’s voice shook.

Catrin made a frustrated sound in her throat. “Why? What is so special about this particular gate that you need to get to it? Why not come with us, cool your heels at Pemberlin for a bit, maybe switch over to the Raidt if you feel the humans aren’t up to your speed—suns knows they’d be happy to have you. There are other gates. They can’t all be broken.”

There was a small silence.

“Not broken, no. Changed,” Yena said, her tone wavering, rich with emotion. A frown cut down her face, and her nose twisted into a snarl. She shook her head. “I want to kill him.”

Ah. So that was it.

Catrin let out a breath. “Yes, well, so do I—but we have other priorities. We all need to get out of here.”

There was another small silence. In it, the castle rocked again, the semi-distant roar vibrating up from its depths. Magic clashed together like two siege engines, the effect dulled into a violent, discordant hum by the layers of stone between them.

Then, between one second and the next, everything stopped.

Catrin froze. The pit dropped out of her stomach. Around her, there was a ripple of expression.

Was it over?

Yena frowned, her body tense. “I can’t sense him anymore.”

Shit. Without the fight happening, they were blind again.

Catrin exhaled and took a moment to rub the bridge of her nose, cringing at the blood and grit on her skin.

Why do I have a bad feeling about this?

She drew her blades. “Right. Glamour back up. Let’s see if we can get around him.”