the peculiar and persistent chill. Simmon, Aganon, Moore, and Tudyk all lunged at us with their own blades, desperate to capture us.
Veliko managed to squirm out of Petra’s control. He grabbed the nearest fallen scythe from a dead Darkling and used it to cut her Achilles tendon. She cried out in pain, blood gushing from the wound to puddle across the floor.
The Visentis brothers were momentarily distracted, which was perfect. A moment was all we needed. Kalon grabbed my hand and whispered something into his Reaper blade, and we both vanished from the room. We slipped through the wall as matter around us bent and melted. Walls lost their shape. Everything warped as we moved through the world.
I held my breath as Kalon’s arm snuck around my waist, keeping me close. We walked from room to room, passing through every hard surface in our path.
“What the hell?” I managed, shortly before we dipped into the floor and wound up in the reception lobby surrounded by utterly confused and terrified Rimian servants. They must’ve heard the ruckus upstairs, but they didn’t look like they were interested in checking the upper level of the house—not while Petra was still screaming from her injured foot.
“Hold on,” Kalon told me.
He pulled me with him as we ran and jumped through the outer brick wall. We didn’t land outside the mansion, but instead rolled along a battered road, trees rising tall and dark around us. Above, the midnight sky unraveled, clear and beautiful and riddled with stars.
I exhaled sharply, blinking rapidly as I tried to make sense of what had just happened and where we were now.
“Are you okay?” Kalon asked. He scrambled off the ground to help me up.
To say I was dazed would be an understatement. White stars waltzed before my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether they were an illusion or part of the night sky above. The world was slowly, ever so slowly, coming into focus. My head felt light as a feather.
“Kalon, what… what just happened?” I murmured, finally able to look at him without the entire planet spinning beneath me.
“I learned a few tricks from my mother,” he admitted. “She tried to teach me some death magic to woo me to the Darklings’ side after I repeatedly refused. I also eavesdropped on her a few times when she was casting spells. All I needed was to get my hands on a scythe.”
“You knew about death magic, then. Long before I did.” I scoffed, crossing my arms and remembering that I was supposed to be angry with him. After all, I was still discovering the truth with him—the unpleasant truth about how extensive his knowledge really was.
He nodded once. “Yes. But not enough to do much. This whole sliding trick is one of the few things I’m actually able to do properly without getting us both disintegrated.”
“Kalon, seriously?!” I shouted. “This needs to stop! You need to tell me everything! What the hell happened back there?! Your entire family are Darklings?”
“Yes, and I had no idea. I swear to you.”
I started walking up the road toward a clearing ahead. It was pretty wide, and there were lights twinkling across it. I couldn’t see much from this distance, but I figured it had to be a settlement of some kind.
“And y’all had a ghoul in the house? The very first ghoul ever made on Visio? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds? How does one even make a ghoul? How did they trap him? How did they convince Atlas to forsake his own nature? Oh, God, I have so many questions, and I can’t really trust you to give me a straight answer…”
Kalon caught my arm and pulled me back into a kiss. I felt it rippling through me like warm honey and sunshine. For a moment, I abandoned myself in this temporary bliss, but my ego fought hard to get back to the surface, and I jumped away from him.
“No, no, no!” I said. “You don’t get to kiss your way out of this one, mister!”
He almost smiled but pressed his lips tight and bowed his head in a bid to appease me. “I just want you to understand that my feelings for you are real,” he replied. “I couldn’t think of a better way to get that point across.”
“It’s fine,” I mumbled, touching my lips. The skin was electrified, tickling my fingertips. “I need to get to my brother. I can’t reach out to him via Telluris