Novels by ANURIKA ANGELA

~ ELIJAH ~ “He’s cold, Elijah,” Dell whispered, his voice breaking. “He’s so cold.” I couldn’t answer yet. My arm had only just come back to me, pins and needles racing down it as the woman’s invisible grip let go, and the blade I’d dropped lay on the floorboards three feet away, too far to reach. The front door still hung open on the dark. Of the woman herself there was no trace, only a faint ripple in the air above the threshold that smoothed itself out while I watched. “She’s gone,” Gideon rasped from the table, half collapsed over the edge of it, his fingers still locked around a blade he had never managed to lift. “Elijah, she’s gone, go to the boy.” I was already moving, though I glanced once at the packing along his side, soaked dark through the cloth, and understood I was choosing between two men with only one pair of hands. Corin lay where the woman had left him, curled on his side beside the overturned table with one hand flung out toward the door. The wound across his

~ LYRA ~ “Breathe, you arrogant idiot,” I sobbed, my voice cracking on every word. “Breathe.” Darius’s palm lay heavy over my hand, and beneath it, through the gold-lit glass, his heartbeat had stopped. I felt the silence the way you feel a missing stair in the dark, a sudden drop where something solid should have been. Kael’s pulse limped along beside it, thin but stubborn, the only sound left in the tether. “Eleven seconds,” the woman said, her pen scratching across the notebook in her hand. She sounded delighted. “Twelve. Do keep going, dear, this is remarkable.” “Stop counting,” Aelindra snarled from the wall, rage and grief fighting in her throat as she hauled herself upright. “Lyra, listen to me. Let the stone have him. You cannot hold three.” “He’s dying,” I said, tears running into my mouth. “He’s dying because of me.” “He’s dying because he chose to,” Tobiah answered hoarsely, still kneeling in the dust. “Davin’s healer never came back, child. Neither will he.” Kael’s

~ DARIUS ~ “Don’t let go, dear,” the woman murmured, kneeling beside Lyra with the patience of a nurse at a bedside. “You’ll want to keep him warm.” I was still on my feet, and she hadn’t spared me a single glance. People always looked at me first, because assessing the threat was the courtesy everyone paid, so being ignored felt worse than being aimed at. “What did you do to it,” Lyra choked out, her voice splintering as her hands shook beneath Kael’s, still locked around the stone. “I reversed it.” The woman patted her wrist as if soothing a child. “Before, you poured warmth into him faster than the stone could drain it. Now it drinks from him first and takes whatever is left from you.” The gold in the chamber had turned slow and heavy, pulsing in time with Kael’s labored breathing. Every push of heat Lyra sent down the tether came back doubled as a loss, and his knuckles had gone grey against hers. “Let go, Lyra,” Kael wheezed, each word dragging out of him like it weighed so

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN ~ LYRA ~ "Let go," Kael rasped from somewhere near my knees. "Lyra. Drop it." "I can't," I sobbed, panic scraping my throat raw. My fingers had closed around the stone and stopped taking orders. The glass was cold, then warm, then hot enough that I should have screamed, but the heat didn't burn. It poured up my arm and settled behind my ribs, where my own core lived, and my core opened for it like a door. The chamber had gone dark. I could still see. Gold lines ran through the black behind my eyelids, and at the end of each one stood Kael. Not his body. The deep, quiet place at the other end of the tether, the one I had learned to reach for a thread at a time. The stone wasn't taking a thread. It was taking the whole river. I felt him thin. I felt the vast, patient depth of him tilt and begin to drain, a tide going out, and every beat of my heart pushed it further. "Stop," I begged the stone, my voice cracking apart. "Stop, stop, please." "It doesn't li

~ KAEL ~ "Don't touch it," I rasped, one hand clamped around Lyra's wrist. My knee had hit stone and I couldn't remember going down. The bond roared in my chest, so loud it drowned the lamp's hiss and Tobiah's breathing. Every beat of Lyra's heart landed twice inside me, once in her pulse and once in mine. The stone pulsed gold in time with both. "It doesn't hurt," Lyra whispered, wonder trembling through her voice. She stared at the thing in Tobiah's palm as if it had called her by name. "Kael, it's warm. It feels like..." "Like what?" "Like someone's holding the door open for me." Fear closed around my throat. I dragged myself upright on her arm, and the room swung once before it settled. The tether pulled against my sternum like a rope with a weight at the other end, and the weight was growing. "Put it away," I snarled at Tobiah, fury cracking the words down the middle. "Wrap it up. Now." "I can't." He looked ashamed of that. "It's awake. It won't sleep again for me." "Th

~ AELINDRA ~ "Leave it dark," the voice said from the passage. "You'll want to be sitting down before you see me." I wasn't sitting. My knees had stopped taking instructions. "Light," Kael snarled, his blade scraping free in the black beside me. "Now. Or I start swinging at the sound." "There's no need for that, Alpha Draven." The voice sounded gentle and dreadfully tired. "I'm an old man carrying a lamp." A match scraped. Flame caught on a wick, and warm yellow light climbed the carved walls of the chamber, softer than anything I could have conjured. He stood in the mouth of the passage with the lamp held low. Thin. Grey-bearded. A coat gone shiny at the elbows. He looked sixty, maybe, and he was not. I knew the eyes. "Tobiah," I whispered. "Hello, love." Something broke open in my chest. I had buried this man. I had stood in cold mud fifteen decades ago and put a coat stained with his blood into the ground, because there had been nothing else to put there. "You died," I s