Then the shadow deepened, darkened, and I could tel it was being cast by a tree. Actual y, more than one tree. I could see them. It worked?
A chattering sounded in the dark around me. Then the darkness surged forward. Somewhere behind me Hol y screamed, but the nightmares weren’t after us. They were aiming for the door and there was no stopping them. The nightmares poured through the door I’d opened—dozens, hundreds. Maybe thousands.
I swal owed, watching the monsters I’d released escape into the unsuspecting mortal realm. Let this have been the right choice. Then the nightmares were gone, the darkness strangely empty without them.
“What were those?” Hol y asked, stil breathless from screaming.
No one answered. Falin scowled at the opening, and I wondered if he stil thought the reaper and accomplice’s threat was more dangerous than what I’d released. But it was done now.
Kyran lifted the hourglass, using the pole it stood on as a walking stick. He damn near skipped as he headed for the door. “Coming?” he asked, glancing first at me and then at the hourglass. Only a sliver of sand remained. “Looks like the end, one way or the other, wil be soon.”
Chapter 37
I stepped through the shadow into total darkness.
Oh, the nightmare realm had been dark and ful of shadows that were more physical than any shadow had a right to be, but during my hours in Faerie I’d become accustomed to seeing the world il uminated with no obvious source of light. When I stepped through the doorway I’d created, reality crashed down on me with a darkness that crawled across my vision and left me blind. The weight of the grave, which I’d been blessedly free from for several hours, also returned to bash its chil ed fists against my shields.
“Fuck,” I whispered, my head swinging back and forth as I tried to make out something, anything.
A hand closed over my mouth as an arm snaked around my waist and I froze, a scream brewing in my chest. But the arm dragging me backward was a familiar warm without being hot.
Falin.
I let him move me as I continued to blink, trying to focus.
Cloth brushed against bark as he pressed us both into the cover of a tree, but stil I couldn’t see. I blinked at the impenetrable darkness fil ing my vision. It didn’t help. I was blind. I probably had been since the fight with the hydra.
Faerie just liked my eyes better.
Damn. I cracked my shields, trembling as the first traces of grave essence dug deeper into my psyche, but as I released my shields, the shadows parted.
“Cut the light show,” Falin hissed, his voice a harsh
“Cut the light show,” Falin hissed, his voice a harsh whisper.
“I need to see.” Because I definitely wasn’t hot on the idea of walking around blind, especial y if Kyran was correct and this was near the accomplice’s ritual. I looked around, trying to get my bearings.
When I’d first realized the shadows were cast by trees, I’d thought we were in a forest, but now I saw we were in a smal wooded patch in one of Nekros’s parks. In the distance I could hear the rush of the river, and a few feet in front of the tree Falin had pressed me behind was a large, emerald green wal .
A wal that was breathing.
“Is that a dragon?” Hol y asked from where she knelt behind an unkempt bush huddled against my tree. Her fingers trembled as she clutched the amulet that she once again wore around her neck with one hand and PC with the other. Or maybe it was PC trembling. He was remarkably quiet, so he obviously realized something was wrong.
“A construct,” I said.
“Yeah, and there are two more,” Falin whispered as he eased his daggers out of their sheaths.
His blade glimmered in the moonlight drifting through the tree limbs as he pointed. On the other side of the clearing a blue dragon stretched wings that must have been twenty yards across, which caused a silver dragon to pause as it paced the outskirts of the clearing. No, the dragons weren’t pacing. More like patrol ing.
The three constructs were guarding a circle that had been erected in the center of the clearing. The barrier buzzed a faint red in my senses, preventing me from feeling the magic inside the circle, but I could see the energy and it swirled in a chaotic storm. The shadows we’d seen in the nightmare realm truly were dancers. They spun and leapt through the air as the magic whipped around them like they were cogs in a giant magical conductor. And in the very center of the circle stood a hooded figure playing a pair of center of the circle stood a hooded figure playing a pair of panpipes that looked a little too real in my second sight.
The relic the collectors are searching for.
“Come on, be here,” Hol y whispered as she patted her pockets. A smile broke across her face and she pul ed out her cel phone. She cued the phone to display our GPS