Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,156

utter blackness. Looking over her shoulder, she moaned as she saw her daughter behind her, the shadows whipping about her like living things. A daemon beside her. Inside her.

“Mother, stop!”

“Away from me!”

The boy appeared from the darkness ahead; some half-starved waif with a sliver of jagged steel in his hand. More afraid than Alinne, most like. But still, he lashed out in that fear, that panic, the blade gleaming red. The Dona stumbled. Clutched her breast. And behind her, her daughter screamed.

“NO!”

The shadows reached out as if of their own accord, seizing the boy and his bloody knife and mashing him into the wall, again and again. Mia skidded to a halt at her mother’s side, the woman slumped against the stone, her chest wet and red.

“Mother, no, no, no!”

The girl pressed her hand to the wound, trying to stifle the flow. Scarlet pulsing through her fingertips, almost as dark as the shadows around them. The Dona Corvere looked up into her daughter’s eyes. Light dying in her own.

“Not my … daughter…”

She squeezed Mia’s hand in a sticky, red grip.

Pushed it aside.

“Just … her shadow…”

Alinne’s chest rattled, the light in her eyes slowly dying. The girl knelt there on the stone, the shadows around her twisting and warping. The very structure about her trembling. Masonry cracking. Ceiling rumbling. Blood on her hands. The murder going on about her echoing in her mind, their blood leaking into the darkness nestled between each and every flagstone.

DON’T LOOK.

The girl stood, raven hair flowing about her as if in some invisible wind. Hands in fists. A hundred shadows snaking in the air about her. The walls split and cracked. The ceiling began to sag, to crumble. And just as the brickwork split asunder, as hundreds of tons of masonry collapsed, obliterating the stairwell and all within, the girl stepped inside one of those writhing tendrils of darkness and stepped out from a shadow

five

floors

above.

On the upper levels now. The Descent in full swing. Murderers and murdered. Chaos and blood. Men smeared in the leavings of their butchery, crude weapons or severed limbs clutched in their hands. One saw her, stepping toward her with a death’s head grin. She looked toward him, and the darkness simply tore him apart. Flinging the pieces of him about like an angry child with a broken toy. The walls about her split and buckled. Bricks shattering to dust. More folk came, men and women drenched in murder, only to be ripped apart like rotten rags. The girl stalked the Stone’s battlements, brickwork falling away behind her, tumbling in showers of pulverized mortar and shattered stonework, down, down into the sea.

The Philosopher’s Stone began to list, entire sections of the keep crumbling to dust as the shadows between each brick and stone tore themselves loose, adding to the storm of darkness whirling around the weeping girl. Tears spilling down her cheeks. Face twisted in grief. Her eyes jet black. Too much to hold inside. Too much to bear.

“… mia…!”

A cat made of shadows materialized beside her, shouting over the din of the tortured stone, the dying men, the wailing darkness. The keep split along its outer wall, ramparts collapsing into the ocean below. The thieves and thugs ceased their bloody struggles and cowered in corners or fled back to the cells they’d escaped from. The stones beneath her feet fell away, left her suspended in a web of writhing darkness.

“… mia, stop this…!”

The girl’s whole body was shrouded in shadow now. Ink-black tendrils sprouting from her back like wings, ribbons of razor-sharp darkness springing from every fingertip. Black eyes were affixed across the bay, to the Ribs rising above the City of Bridges and Bones. Home to the Senate of Itreya and all its marrowborn nobility, lorded over by the gloating consul who’d torn her familia apart. Killed her father. Her baby brother. And now her mother, too.

The girl shook her head. Snarled.

“This stops when he does.”

And curling her fingers into trembling fists, she disappeared.

Step.

She was at the bottom of the Stone, among the shadows of the jagged rocks.

Step.

She was across the bay, in the shifting black of the shoreline.

Step.

She stood on the boulevard, looking at the Carnivalé crowd in their smiling masks. Mister Kindly was no longer with her, but rage walked beside her instead, boiled away the place fear tried to take root. She stepped from one shadow to the next, like a child hopping stones across a flooded drain. Folk shivered as she passed. The city around her