as if she could just will Hana to shift allegiances from around the corner. But Daemon was right. Sora had already attempted that, and it had backfired.
Daemon was already halfway up the wall with a gecko spell when he looked back down at her. “Sora! Come on!” He shot a sharp arrow of alarm through their bond, and it pierced through the fog of her regret, jolting her to action.
She followed him up the wall and swung herself in through the window frame, landing on the floor without a sound. Just in time, too, because the ryuu turned the corner where she had just been. Sora let out a long exhale.
Daemon looked around the room, perplexed. “It’s completely empty in here.”
“The castle is only a few days old,” Sora said. It was probably too much to ask that it already be furnished.
With Hana left behind, Sora forced herself to get back to her job. She tiptoed to the door and pressed her ear against it. It was quiet on the other side, so she pushed it open a crack and slipped through.
Here, there were torches. The tower was narrow, and the center was mostly a spiral staircase with only a room or two on each level. The walls were made of black stone streaked with crimson, and the flickering of the torch flames made the red look like pulsing veins full of blood.
She and Daemon poked into the room opposite. Again, no one there.
“If you were the Dragon Prince, where would you stash a usurped empress?” Sora asked.
“Nowhere as obvious as a tower,” Daemon said.
“My thinking as well.”
They trod carefully down the stairs. The ground floor connected the tower with the rest of the castle. Sora and Daemon hurried along the corridor.
They examined every room they passed for Empress Aki, listening for hollow spaces in the walls and floors where she could be imprisoned. They went up and down the other towers, too. But other than a locked room—which was totally silent—and a few ryuu here and there, the bloodstone castle seemed abandoned.
It was too quiet. The little hairs on Sora’s arms stood on end.
And too much time had passed already. “We need to get out of here soon,” Daemon said.
“One more passageway,” Sora said. There was a corridor up ahead that branched off from the others.
As they turned the corner, she took in a sharp breath.
If the rest of the castle was already eerie with its red-streaked, black stone walls, this dark hallway was the crown jewel. There were no windows, torches, or lanterns; the only light came from the sinister glow of what looked like giant dragon’s teeth, each taller than Sora and composed entirely of crimson crystals seemingly lit from within. It was like walking straight into a dragon’s jaws.
The corridor led to a heavy set of wooden doors. The handles were carved with dragons, their eyes inset with red rubies, their claws outstretched as if ready to tear into prey.
“I have a feeling one of the two people we’re looking for is behind those doors,” Daemon whispered. “And it’s not Empress Aki.”
Their gemina bond tightened, the taiga equivalent to holding hands to give each other strength. Sora nodded at Daemon. There was no time like the present for regicide.
Knives and throwing stars at the ready, they snuck up to the twin keyholes and peered inside.
Gods almighty.
The throne room was a massive receiving hall, with walls made of the same red-streaked black stone as the castle. There was a huge mural painted on the ceiling—although Sora couldn’t quite make out its subject from the angle of the keyhole—and also a throne, a menacing opus of crimson stone and black velvet, with fiery flames made of orange sapphires to frame Prince Gin’s head.
He wasn’t sitting on the throne, though. The Dragon Prince knelt before the fireplace in front of real flames, chanting over and over in what sounded like Kichonan but older. Like an ancient version of their modern language.
“What is he doing?” Sora whispered.
Daemon didn’t get to answer, though, because the fire in the throne room suddenly extinguished itself, and a giant appeared in the air in its place, his long dark beard fluttering like a flag, his ten-fingered hands stained red with a millennium’s worth of blood.
Zomuri.
Chapter Nine
Sora staggered back a step. Gods rarely deigned to interact with humans. Sola, goddess of the sun, would visit the emperor or empress only if summoned with imperial blood and a sacrifice of a year of his or her