But hey, Romira seemed to be living a pretty normal life. It didn’t look all that terrible from the outside. But you can say that about anything, really. Getting your head chopped off at the guillotine is pretty effortless, too. No one ever complains about it.
I got on my knees, the damp of dewy grass and earth seeping through my jeans, and held my head up to the sky, watching for my next step. It didn’t take very long. The full moon blinked at me, as if it was a single, enormous eye. And just as Scrimshaw described, as Nyx herself had explained to him, a beam of brilliant moonlight descended from the heavens, making its way slowly down to earth.
It was time, then. I glanced down at my chest, at the whitish, ragged tissue of the scar over my heart. With the cold tip of the dagger in my hand, I sliced myself open, a shallow gash that ran parallel to the scar. As long as it was close to my heart. That was Nyx’s demand. And as small as the incision was, the blood fell freely from the wound, running warm down my chest and my torso. It almost felt comforting.
I looked up into the sky again, my hand squeezing the hilt of my dagger with crushing force. Could have been nerves, excitement, or outright fear, but I should have known then that there was no stopping the ritual. I clenched my teeth and set my jaw, watching as the shaft of moonlight flew closer and closer to the forest –
Yet it never came for me. It struck the ground a fair distance away, a soundless collision that bathed the tree line in an ominous, radiant silver. I looked down at my hands, then up at the moon again. Was I in the wrong place? Had I performed the ritual incorrectly? Had the beam struck nothing after all?
But there was a scream, a man’s voice, emanating from the exact location where the shaft of moonlight was still focused. The light held there for some horrible seconds as the screams went on. Nocturnal birds fled from the trees, fluttering and squawking in their panic. Then the moonbeam vanished. The forest went silent.
Who the hell was that?
I got to my feet. “Something’s wrong,” I breathed.
Carver was already stalking past me. “That is very much an understatement, Dustin. Come.”
I was swept up in the crowd, my friends headed unerringly, determinedly for the source of the screaming. Sterling and Gil ran ahead of the pack, the hunter instincts thrumming in their bodies jolting them forward. I sprinted to keep up, the blood on my chest cooling as it met the night air. I shivered and gasped as I ran. I wasn’t cold before.
We burst into another clearing, a short distance away from where we’d started, this one smaller. The grass here was luminous somehow, as were the leaves on the trees, as if the touch of the moon had left smears of lunar essence across nature itself, the traces of Nyx’s power. Standing in the clearing was a lone figure.
His shirt was missing, just as mine was. He bled from a wound over his heart, the way I did, slick crimson trailing in a glistening, dark pattern down his chest, down the ridges of his stomach. In his hand he grasped a verdigris dagger – a blade made out of the Eldest’s star-metal.
As the man approached, I realized why I couldn’t see his face. He was wearing a strange mask, or a kind of headdress that twinkled and glimmered in the darkness. It covered his head and his face with a veil that moved slowly with the breeze, its cloth black as night.
No. It wasn’t possible.
The man was wearing the Crown of Stars.
Chapter 30
The bile rose in my throat. How could this have happened? Had Nyx crowned the wrong person? I searched the skies, looking for any sign of the goddess, but nothing. The moon stared coldly down on the forest, silent, uncaring.
“Halt,” Carver shouted. “Come no closer. Who are you?”
The man in the mask said nothing, but walked towards us. Something about his body, something about his gait was terribly familiar.
“No more warnings,” Carver said.
A harsh string of phrases ejected from his mouth, and pale fire lanced from his fingers, exploding into a wall of fire at the man’s feet. That should give us time to think, I figured, to strategize. But the man stepped through the flames, unburned and unfazed, his bare feet padding in the grass.
Sterling snarled and rushed forward, a streak of silver and leather, his new sword still sheathed at his waist. Without pausing, without missing a step, the man hurled a ball of flame directly at Sterling’s chest. Sterling twisted and dodged just in time.
Asher started fumbling with my backpack. “Who the hell – what the hell is going on?”
Gil went next, his wolf talons erupting from the tips of his fingers as he charged the man with a horrible, inhuman growl. From the opposite direction, swift and deathly silent, Sterling swooped in as well, this time with his katana upraised. They had the man flanked, and it should have been a sure bet –
But he melted into his own shadow, vanishing. Sterling and Gil stopped just short of slashing and stabbing each other, katana and claws held perfectly still.
The man reappeared just before me, his body reforming rapidly out of the shadows at my feet. I staggered backwards, fearing for the worst.
Bursts of orange and green light filled the clearing as Carver and Asher each launched a spell at the man, but his body only wavered, the bolts of magical energy passing harmlessly through his torso. The man waved his hand, and shapes of shadow made solid surged from the ground, slamming Carver and Asher with so much force that they were blown completely off their feet.
I held my hand upward, a globe of fire at the ready, my mind already reaching towards the Dark Room, ready to conjure the blades of night. “Who are you?” I demanded.
The man stepped even closer, so close that I could recognize the jagged pattern of white tissue under the blood that coated his chest, the scar over his heart that matched mine. He tilted his head.
“Don’t you recognize me, brother?” He reached for his mask, lifting the Crown of Stars off his head. The twinkling light and the midnight veil of the headdress vanished – and I saw my own face staring back at me with a horrible, grotesque leer.