We could explore this desolate place later. Together.

  I closed my eyes and timed my breathing with his, which sounded kind of ridiculous in my head. But something was happening here.

  Instinctively, I knew which direction to go to find him.

  Unfortunately, however, it was not the direction I’d been hoping to go in.

  To my left down the beach, the sand was relatively smooth and clear of any large ships. I could see quite a ways down, which also meant I could tell that no one was hiding there or waiting to ambush me..

  To my right, however, was a ship graveyard.

  A million hiding places out there in the semi-darkness. Plus, I’d have more debris to search through in order to find him, which meant I needed to deal with this pain.

  The constant wind and light rain of the storm swirling overhead and all around was nowhere near as violent as it had been right at the edge before we’d passed through it, but it was enough to make all of this incredibly annoying. I had to at least try to stabilize my arm before I tried to walk in this weather.

  If I could just grit my teeth and bear the pain long enough to maneuver into a sitting position, I might be able to take my shirt off and tie it into a makeshift sling. It wouldn’t be easy, but what choice did I have?

  I certainly couldn’t shift into my shadow form and try to move down the beach that way. Aerden and I had both tried that as our ship approached the storm, but something here had definitely blocked our magic.

  Or had it?

  I shook my head against the pain that kept rolling over me like dark waves.

  What exactly had happened out there?

  When the storm took us, there was darkness.

  Not the way it was dark on the beach now, where the light was muted and grey. Inside the wall of the storm, it had been utter obscurity. A pitch blackness like I’d never known in my life.

  As a demon who could see in the dark, even the thought of it now sent shivers down my spine.

  Another clue that my magic had been blocked or stolen from me.

  Even in Peachville, when the witches had bound my magic, I still had the ability to see in the dark. In a way, they had only dampened my powers.

  But the wall of that storm had seemed to erase them entirely.

  Still, the last thing I remembered as Aerden and I stood together on the deck of the ship, the boards beneath our feet being ripped apart, was a warm amber light, almost like the flicker of firelight, except stronger.

  It had come from Aerden’s fingertips, surrounding us completely as the storm obliterated our ship. If it hadn’t been for his timing, passing through that wall of shadows might have torn us apart the same way.

  When the darkness and the light collided, the ship flew into the air, as if caught in a tornado that shredded it to pieces.

  I didn’t even remember hitting the water.

  I must have lost consciousness at that point, but how long ago was that?

  I thought of trying to shift again now that I was on the shore, but with my arm in such bad shape, I wasn’t sure it was possible anyway. I needed to try to heal it first, if I could.

  I called Aerden’s name several times, hoping he was close enough to hear me and at least cry out to let me know he was okay.

  But there was no answer.

  Besides, it probably wasn’t the smartest idea to start broadcasting my location.

  There was no way to know who—or what—might be out there.

  So, I needed to test and see if I still had access to any of my healing powers out here. It would likely take an enormous amount of focus, and I was usually better at healing other people than I was at healing myself, but I had to try.

  I took several deep breaths and closed my eyes, shutting out the sound of the crashing waves and the constant roar of the wind in my ears, the rumble of thunder in the distance. Instead, I thought of Harper’s face.

  The way her brown eyes seemed to sparkle with light when she smiled. I focused on her eyes, as if I were looking into them now, and I poured all that emotion into the core of my being, relieved and shocked when an ice-cold energy roared to the surface.

  I’d expected my power to be completely inaccessible, the way it had been in the water.

  But this? This was incredible.

  What usually came to me like a slow trickle of energy, less than half as powerful as Angela’s ability to heal, now poured from me like a rushing river.

  In fact, it came so fast and with such force, I struggled to control and channel it.

  Carefully, I lifted my glowing palm to my opposite arm, moving the power up and down to find the broken and shattered parts.

  With my limited powers of healing, the most I would normally have been able to do was numb the pain and reduce the swelling.

  As I channeled the light through my arm now, though, I could literally feel the shattered bones in my arm fuse back together.

  At first, it hurt so badly I had to bite my tongue just to stay steady and to keep from losing my connection to the power flowing through my hands.

  But after a moment of intense pain that made my head swim, an equally intense relief spread through my arm and down my entire body, repairing bruises and scrapes I had barely even been able to feel beneath the pain of my arm.

  I pulled my hand away and stared at the pulsing blue light.

  What was happening here?

  But before I could even get my mind wrapped around the question, shadows moved in my peripheral vision.

  So much for not broadcasting my presence. I’d just lit up this entire beach like a freaking Christmas tree.

  I dropped the light and quickly scrambled back toward a cluster of grey stones behind me.

  “Aerden?” I said again, hoping to hell that was him.

  All it took was a single screeching cry from the shadows for me to recognize that not only was it not Aerden, it was my worst nightmare.

  Hunters.

  And they had me surrounded.

  Elegant Magic

  Harper

  I stood staring at the spot where Blackwood was supposed to be, wondering if I had the strength to face this.

  Was Jackson trapped inside a storm like this one? Its greedy shadows sucking the power from his body the way it had tried to do to mine?

  Ryken, a massive vampire who towered over me at well over six-feet-five inches tall with muscles that scared me just to look at, emerged from the edge of the woods about five yards away. He had a machine gun hanging from a strap on his shoulder which, under different circumstances, might have made me laugh.

  Why did a vampire need a gun?

  But I faintly remembered Rend making some kind of joke about it himself, saying Ryken was ex-military and kind of obsessive about his weapons.

  Seven vampires followed him as he walked toward us.

  “What happened in there?” he asked, his eyes lingering on Magda’s exposed neck for a long moment before he dragged them away.

  How was I supposed to answer that question? I still didn’t even understand it myself.

  “Keep your eyes to yourself, if you don’t mind,” Magda said, attempting to pull the collar of her blouse higher.

  Ryken smiled at her, not-so-subtly running his tongue along one of his long canines before they retracted back slightly.

  I had no idea exactly how Franki had managed to keep these guys satisfied without the blood of witches to feast on, but whatever she and Rend were doing to keep them all in line, none of the vampires had lost control around me or Magda, and if there was going to be anyone who was tempting for these guys, it would have been Magda.

  They seemed totally in control, though. I had a feeling he was just messing with Magda because he knew he could get away with it.

  “You didn’t lose anyone inside, did you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I wanted like hell to come in there and grab the two of you and pull you out, but Franki told me to stay put, just in case something happened out here,” he said. “She said you warned her it could be dangerous for us, but I thought it was supposed to be our job to look out for you.”

  If we were just looking at size, I could see why he would think it was ridiculous for me to be giving him orders or telling him to stay put while I was in danger, but there was really nothing he could have done in there to stop that storm.

  “I didn’t want any of you coming through that front door and being sucked into that storm, or whatever it is,” I said. “We were trying to get out through the amethyst portal when it first appeared, so we ran up to the Hall of Doorways, instead.”

  “It was in the Hall, too?” A white-haired vampire they called Frost stepped forward.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But we met with other challenges up there.”

  Ryken’s eyes dipped to the scars on my forearms. “Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I said, suddenly remembering that I was bleeding. Awesome. “Is this going to be a problem?”

  Ryken cleared his throat and the veins in his neck pulsed, but he shook his head.

  “We’re good,” he said.

  “Well, consider the Hall of Doorways totally off-limits from now on. It’s filled with creatures Magda says were created by her sister Alexandra, the priestess of the citrine demon gates.”

  “She calls them her pets, but we all call them chimera,” Magda said. “They’re all strange experiments she’s performed over the years. Mixtures of different species of creatures and types of magic. Often, they began as humans, like hunters.”

  I shivered at the thought of what those poor people had been through at the hands of the citrine priestess. Was there no end to the horror?

  “Either way, don’t go in there. Trust me,” I mumbled.

  “What do we do about this place, then?” Ryken asked, nodding toward Blackwood.

  I needed to figure out what was really going on here, and if this storm had really stopped expanding. I also wanted to see if it was possibly the same type of magic Jackson and Aerden would be facing in the Shadow World, not that there was anything I could do from here. I just wanted to know how all of this connected.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. To Magda, I added, “Stay here and don’t move a muscle.”

  “You can’t seriously be leaving me here with a group of vampires,” she said.

  But I was already gone, shifting to white smoke and flying as high into the air as I could.

  I circled the property, flying around toward the mountains at the back of the mansion and trying to get a good look at just how far out this storm extended.

  From the looks of it, the storm had stopped growing, which meant whatever magic had been placed on it was incredibly specific. In fact, the shape and practical purpose of it reminded me a lot of our own domed city the way it arched over the top of the entire mansion.

  In fact, it was almost exactly like our dome, only this version was malevolent.

  The dome over the southern kingdom’s city was designed to keep the demons and witches inside it safe.

  This storm appeared to want to destroy or harm anyone unlucky enough to get trapped inside. My heart ached for the guards I’d had to leave behind. There was no way for me to know if they were alive or not.

  They would have each had small ruby communication stones to use so they could check in with Cormac at the command center, but since my ruby bar had been drained by the storm’s energy, I couldn’t check in with him to see if he’d heard anything.

  Which meant we needed to try to get back to Brighton Lake as quickly as possible.

  Normally, we would have gone back through the amethyst portal and flown home from there, or we would have gone through to one of our safe houses in the Hall of Doorways and flown from there to Brighton Lake.

  Now, however, without a fully-established portal system of our own just yet, we were stuck here in Wyoming, more than fifteen hundred miles away from Brighton Lake. Getting home was going to take some time, and by using my demon magic, I’d inevitably leave a trail that could be followed by the Order of Shadows.

  Still, it wasn’t like Brighton Lake was some big secret. The Order not only knew it existed, they were certainly well aware of the fact that we had built out our defenses there, as well.

  As I circled Blackwood again, I went through a dozen possibilities in my head.

  I kept coming back to the fact that I needed to get home. The Council would have to meet immediately to figure out how to protect ourselves from further attack. We needed to triple the security on the rose portal, and we needed to get Willow working around the clock on creating a protective dome around the entire command center.

  We couldn’t afford to lose what was basically our only remaining usable portals between the human world and Shadow World.

  I guess deep down, I knew this was coming, but every time a new attack started in this war, it made me feel helpless. Everything was going to shit, and it wasn’t a coincidence, either.

  We needed to figure out if this was the citrine priestess’s work, or if Gladys Black had rigged the entire mansion with her traps a long time ago. Maybe we just missed something on our sweep, and our activity inside today set it all off.

  But if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t really believe that, either.

  The High Priestess was finally making her move, and if we were going to protect ourselves, we needed to figure out who the hell she was.

  I hoped Magda would be able to shed some light on that.

  I flew back down to where Magda had surprisingly not moved at all. Usually, she was more rebellious when I gave her an order, but she must have been pretty shaken up by the whole storm-trying-to-kill-us thing.

  Or maybe it was the whole surrounded-by-half-a-dozen-bloodthirsty-vampires thing.

  “What did you see?” she asked.

  “It’s a dome like the one over my city,” I said. “Only this one is obscuring everything inside, so I can’t exactly tell if what was in there has been disintegrated and destroyed? Or if it’s all intact and just hidden. Either way, it’s off-limits to us for the foreseeable future. Magda, earlier you said you’d never seen anyone cast a storm barrier like this before, right? What makes you think it’s the High Priestess?”

  Magda wrapped her arms around her midsection, as if she were freezing cold.

  “Because I’ve been working with Willow—who is a very talented young demon, by the way—to create a magical dome here in the human world, and so far, it’s been an impossible task,” Magda said. “And that dome is basically just a shield. The type of magic we cast all the time. We simply don’t have enough consistent power to maintain it. This, though?”

  She shook her head, her eyes fixed on the storm clouds, all perfectly encased inside the dome, as if a glass had been placed over the top of a violent, smoky fire.

  “Magic like this would take an incredible amount of power to create,” she said. “But to keep it going? This is like the problem of the dome but add a powerful, magic-negating tornado inside of it that is also intelligent enough to know exactly what to consume and where to stop. It’s elegant magic. This is not something a normal witch or demon could pull off. Not with a thousand human sacrifices. And there has to be enough power to keep it going.”

  So, who could possibly have that kind of power? Would an ancient fae be able to cast magic like this?

  A face immediately came to mind as Magda spoke, and I wondered if, yet again, we’d trusted the wrong person.

  Sabine.

  She was certainly the single most powerful supernatural being I’d ever come in contact with.

  And she was the one who had sent Jackson and Aerden into the storm over in the Shadow World. She’d given them that note, knowing we were desperate to put an end to this war. Knowing Jackson would trust her, because it was his abilities she was playing around with.

  She made us believe they needed to go toward the storm to find the answers we’d been seeking all this time.

  But what if she’d sent them there to trap them? Or kill them?

  What if she’d planned all this time to steal their power?

  The rumors we’d tracked down about the storm said any ship that sailed toward it was never seen or heard from again.

  We knew it was a dangerous mission, but because of Sabine and the things Aerden had learned from his friend Trention, we had all agreed that it was worth the risk, so long as we had a chance to find out the truth about the western continent.

  They were meant to investigate. Get as close as possible without getting into any trouble.

  But what if something had gone wrong? What if the only thing to be found anywhere near that storm was malevolence and death?

  I closed my eyes, attempting to calm my mind and steer my thoughts back to something a little less hopeless.

  We’d found a way out of impossible situations before, and I wasn’t about to give up now.

  “We need to get back to Brighton Lake and find out if anyone knows where this storm originated,” I said.

  “What do you want us to do?” Ryken asked.

  “Do you have any ruby stones that work?” I asked.

  He nodded and pulled a stone from his pocket, freely handing it over to me. “This will contact Franki,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  I activated the stone and gave her an update on the situation here.

  “Contact Angela and Cormac. Tell them to go on complete lockdown,” I said. “I want every soldier we have on high alert. Put guards on the main entrance, double the guards at the lake on the human side, and be on the lookout for anything or anyone who seems out of place. We’re being attacked on multiple levels, and I don’t think it’s over.”

  “Of course,” Franki said. “Anything else?”

  “Get in touch with Lea to make sure she got home okay. I want someone to check the other side of this amethyst portal to see if the storm is also there in the Shadow World, or if it stops here,” I said. Then, my mouth dry, I added, “And see if you can reach Jackson or Aerden. If you can, tell them what happened and that I said to turn around immediately.”