A Sky Beyond the Storm (An Ember in the Ashes #4) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,85

be here.” I pull my hand from Keenan’s, because if he does love me it is a twisted sort of love.

“No,” he says. “You should not.” Though his voice is soft, something behind it makes me draw away. Deep in his brown eyes, I see the flash of a feral creature, riven by a hunger that never ends. I feel surrounded by that hunger, suddenly, as if it’s a pack of wolves, closing in.

“Get away from me,” I say. “I will tell you nothing—”

His body changes, the way it did when I gave him the armlet. Except he is no shadow creature now, but something explosive and wild, an unchecked fire, malevolence emanating from every flicker of his body.

“You will tell me what lives within you and where it came from—”

“I’ll die first!”

I open my eyes then to a nightmare world. A turbid river of rock and branches and debris tosses me to and fro like a rag doll, and though I try to stay afloat, I am yanked under again and again, until water fills my nose and I cannot breathe.

No, I think. Not like this. Not like this. I scream as I break through the surface of the water.

“Let me inside, girl!” Rehmat appears, reaching for me. “I can save you, but you have to let me in.”

I barely hear it before the water pulls me down once more. I claw and kick and thrash, pain exploding along my hands and legs as the flood’s undertow drags at me. When I surface again, Rehmat is somewhere between furious and frenzied.

“Stop fighting the flood!” it shouts. “Keep your feet up!”

I try to do as it asks, but the river is a starving giant clutching at my ankles, as hungry as the maelstrom I see in my nightmares.

“Let me in, Laia!”

As I break the surface, I imagine a door in my mind and fling it wide. Almost immediately, I go under again. My whole body is on fire. I swallow a lungful of water and this must be death.

Then, like that day weeks ago in Adisa, I am pushed to the back corner of my mind—this time with a shove instead of a nudge. My body shoots through the water, clothes ripping, my pack falling away. The wind bends beneath me, Rehmat manipulating it as easily as clay.

I wonder if this is real or if the flood has killed me.

It’s real. When Rehmat speaks, it is from inside my own mind now. The creature’s magic saturates my limbs and we are one, riding the wind as easily as I tread the ground. It carries me to the top of the canyon, and I collapse on my side, staring down at the flash flood in wonder and horror. Rise, Laia. The Nightbringer is near—

A soft thud beside me, and then there is a hand at my throat, lifting me, squeezing. The Nightbringer, cloaked and shadowed once more, fixes me with his hateful, sun-eyed stare.

“You—cannot kill me—Nightbringer—”

“But I am so much more than the Nightbringer now, Laia.” His voice is that flood below, all-consuming and treacherous.

Once again, I am shoved to one side of my own mind. I stare down the Nightbringer in all of his wrath. But I feel no fear, because Rehmat feels no fear.

“You,” the Nightbringer whispers, “have been hiding for a very long time. What are you? Speak!”

“I am your chains, Meherya. I am your end.” But Rehmat does not sound triumphant. It sounds anguished. It sounds broken.

The Nightbringer releases me. He takes a step back, a slow shock rolling over him. I expect Rehmat to use the moment to spirit us away. But it does not. Nor does it attack the Nightbringer. Instead, we stare together at the king of the jinn, and an unexpected emotion unfurls within Rehmat. One that makes me recoil in disgust.

Longing.

The Nightbringer appears as paralyzed as I am. “I know you,” he says. “I know you, but—”

Rehmat lifts my—our—hand, but we do not touch him. Not yet.

“I am your end,” Rehmat says. “But I was there at the beginning too, my love. When you were king alone, solitary and ever apart from our people. You went wandering near the sea one day, and you found a queen.”

I try to wrap my mind around what I am hearing, but it is too deep a betrayal for me to comprehend. This . . . thing living inside of me was a jinn? And not just any jinn, but their queen?

“Rehmat,” the Nightbringer says, the