Trissa chuckled. “It was beautiful, once. Freshly fallen snow, two-hundred-foot-tall trees with wintercones that smelled like Solstice. Quite amazing.”
Was being the operative word.
“Winter was the first land to fall.” Trissa lowered her head in shame. “I had a dear friend from winter. She never made it out…”
Damn. I would be beside myself if Elle was across Faerie when darkness started to kill off everything. A silence descended over our group, and for the first time, I thought Liam’s friends were getting to actually see what taking the crystals from this land had done.
We walked an hour through the winter landscape with chattering teeth and purple lips. I was pretty sure that if I’d had to fly out of there, I couldn’t. My wings felt frozen to my back. We’d brought sweaters, but those were for the chill nights of Spring, not a cold, hard winter.
“I can’t feel my fucking toes,” Elle growled.
“Just a bit…farther,” Trissa mumbled.
By then, I would have killed for a toasty fire or a sunny afternoon day. As if that thought brought attention to it, my palms started to warm, bringing a tingling pain as my fingers thawed.
Sunlight power.
Sun.
Warmth.
Duh—why hadn’t I tried this an hour ago? The cold had sucked out my brain cells.
“Gather round!” I told the others. Cam, who had his hands in his armpits, sulked over to huddle, as did the other Halflings I’d gotten to know—Jensen, Brick, and Donny. Brick, as one might imagine, was a gigantic man with horns and an outgoing personality. Jensen and Donny were silent and broody.
As soon as we’d closed ranks, I aimed my hands at the ground and pushed sunlight out of them. A warm glow lit up the space, and everyone sighed in relief as heat escaped my palms and melted the ice beneath our feet.
“Ahhh, you were holding out on us,” Cam said, rubbing his hands together.
I chuckled. “These powers are still new to me.”
We stayed in our warm little huddle for a good twenty minutes before I realized Liam was gone. Looking over my shoulder, I saw him standing at the edge of an ice cliff.
“Let’s get moving,” I told everyone, and ceased the warmth, turning away to go after Liam.
When I approached, he was looking down at something with a frown.
“What is it?” I asked, coming up behind him and peering into the ice-covered valley below.
Holy crystals.
Winter Castle. It was nothing like the paintings. Where it once had four large turrets, now only one stood. The others had been brought to the ground in heaps of stone and snow. But that wasn’t was held Liam’s gaze. Crawling over half the castle walls was a thick, black, oily substance. It moved and shimmered like it was alive, and just looking at it gave me a creepy feeling in my gut.
“What the winter hell is that?” I breathed.
If we had to go down in that stuff and seek the Sword of Night, then this wasn’t going to go as well as I hoped.
A somber mood came over our group as we hiked down into the ruins of Winter Castle.
“I once attended a wedding here,” Trissa breathed, stepping carefully so that she didn’t touch the inky stuff. “They had snow sculptures and ice skating.”
I’d never seen Faerie before the Dark War, so this wasn’t as traumatic for me as it must have been for her.
“Don’t touch the goo,” Liam said.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Trissa nodded. “Remnants of the dark magic unleashed when Faerie fell.”
I shivered at that thought and was careful not to get near it. “Can you Seek the sword?” I asked Liam. Our Seeker power had limits. You had to have seen the object at one time or have a photo of it, at the very least.
Liam nodded. “I’m trying. I saw a drawing of it once. I was little.”
A skittering sound, like claws running across stone, drew my attention to the left. Trissa nocked an arrow, and everyone became super-intense and alert.
“Let’s be quick!” I called out.
Liam took for the skies. “I’m going to check over here. You check that end.” He pointed to one of the demolished turrets.
I kicked off the ground, flapping my thawed wings, with Elle right beside me. Liam’s wingless men waited for us with Trissa, as far as they could go without touching the black stuff below.
Now that I was airborne, I could see sheets of ice and dead trees for miles in each direction, before my gaze hit a dark and densely packed forest at the back of the castle.
We fluttered over to the pile of stone with the black magic crawling all over it and landed on the other side, which was free of the scary stuff.
“This place is creepy,” Elle whispered. The large tower was half-collapsed, but I could still slip inside the door and enter the basement floor of the castle.
“Totally creepy.” I eyed a chunk of black goop squirming near the edge of the room.
As we walked into the space, I had to cover my mouth to mask the damp smell.
“Light, please,” Elle said.
I’d forgotten that I was a fae lightbulb. Calling up my power, I let a faint glow emanate from my palms.
“Daughter of Light,” a faint voice hissed.
Elle and I both jumped and pulled our swords, spinning around to search for that voice.
“Did you hear that?” I cried, heart pounding in my chest.
“I heard it.” Elle’s gaze darted about the room, taking in the black goop and every corner and crevice. “This place is fucking haunted. Let’s bail.”
I shook my head. “We can’t bail. Liam needs the sword.”
“Princess,” the voice hissed again, and the black goop started to slither towards me.
Oh, hell fucking no. The black stuff was talking?
“Kill it!” Elle screeched.
I aimed a palm at the snaky mass and shot a beam of sunlight. A hissing sound rose through the space, and then the goop shrank away, slithering like a snake back into the corner.
Elle shook herself. “Gross.”
I felt like it was crawling on
