Novels by ANURIKA ANGELA

KAELThe gap narrowed to nothing three inches from my hand.I hit the stone with my shoulder anyway, full weight, and it didn't move. No seam. No give. Just smooth rock where an opening had been a half second earlier, sealed so completely that if I hadn't watched it happen I'd have thought there had never been a door there at all."Kael!"Gideon's shout came from behind me, sharp with something that wasn't panic yet but was close to it.I turned.The line had held for maybe ten seconds after Lyra went through. Then it hadn't. Three of the dark-clothed attackers had broken past Rafael's flank, moving fast and low, and one of them was already inside our perimeter, close enough that I saw his face for the first time.Wrong.His expression hadn't changed since I first saw him on the slope.Gideon's shot had dropped his companion clean through the chest thirty seconds ago and this one hadn't so much as glanced at the body.I put him down with a strike to the throat that should have stagger

LYRA POV "How many," I said."Twenty. Maybe more." Gideon didn't lower his voice, but he didn't raise it either — flat, professional, the tone of a man doing math instead of panicking. "Coming up the slope in three groups. Spread wide."Kael was already moving, pulling Elijah and Rafael back from the ridge with two hard gestures, no words needed. The Enforcers fanned out along the rock line without being told, taking cover behind the same shelf of stone that had hidden us from the basin below.I looked at the narrow gap in the rock face. Then at the slope behind us, where shapes had started breaking free of the treeline, moving with the kind of coordination that didn't belong to animals or accident."We're boxed," I said."We're boxed," Aelindra agreed. She hadn't moved from the stone entrance, palm still hovering an inch from it like she expected it to change its mind."Can you open it," Kael said, dropping into a crouch beside her."I don't know what it's locked with.""The

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREEKAEL"Stop."Aelindra's arm shot out, catching Gideon across the chest before he cleared the ridgeline.He stopped. Everyone did, the whole line freezing mid-step the way trained people freeze when someone with more information than them says one word with that much certainty behind it."What," I said.She didn't answer right away. She'd gone still in the specific way she went still before she touched something — a door, a wall, a piece of ground that told her more than it told the rest of us."Down," she said. "Everyone down. Now."We dropped. I pulled Lyra with me behind a shelf of grey rock, close enough that I felt her pulse jump against my forearm where it pressed to her back."What did you see," Lyra whispered."Nothing," Aelindra said, crouched beside us. "That's the problem."I looked over the rock ledge.Below us, the ground opened into a wide basin ringed by the same broken stone that had carried us the last ten miles — and at the center of it, half-swa

LYRA POV"You're limping.""I'm not limping.""You are. Left side. Since we crossed the ridge." Kael didn't slow down to make the point, just said it while he walked, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd stopped."It's nothing.""Show me at the next break."I didn't answer that, which he correctly read as agreement rather than refusal.We'd been walking since before dawn, the lodge already an hour behind us, Aelindra setting a pace at the front of the group that none of the trained Enforcers seemed to find easy either. Sixty miles, she'd said. She hadn't said how many of them were uphill.The terrain had changed twice already — forest, then open scrubland, now something rockier, older, ground that felt like it hadn't been walked in a long time except by whatever animals still lived out here undisturbed.No roads. No trails, even, not really. Aelindra moved like she was following something the rest of us couldn't see, occasionally stopping to press her palm flat against a bou

DARIUS POV"You should be asleep."I turned. Lyra stood in the doorway of the room they'd given me — the smallest one in the lodge, furthest from everyone else, which nobody had bothered pretending wasn't deliberate."So should you," I said."I don't sleep well anymore." She stayed in the doorway, arms crossed, not committing to entering. "Being dead for a day does something to your schedule."I didn't have a response to that. There wasn't one that wouldn't sound like an apology, and I'd learned a long time ago that apologies I didn't fully mean were worse than saying nothing at all.She came in anyway and sat on the edge of the second bed, the one nobody was using, putting the width of the room between us."I keep waiting for you to explain yourself," she said. "You haven't. Not once since the tree line.""What would explaining accomplish?""I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just want to hear you try." She looked at me directly, the way she hadn't been able to in the hospital corr

KAEL POV"You're not doing this alone."Lyra didn't look up from the map spread across the lodge table. "I didn't say I was.""You were thinking it.""I think a lot of things you're not entitled to hear."Gideon, across the room, made a sound that might have been a laugh and turned it into a cough when I looked at him.I pulled out the chair beside her and sat. The map was Aelindra's — hand-drawn, old paper, marks in a hand that wasn't mine or Marcus's or anyone I recognized. Three points circled in faded ink, none of them near the Council complex we'd just left."Where did she get this," I asked."She's been updating it for fifteen years." Lyra traced a line between two of the circled points without touching the paper. "Every time the signature moved, she marked it. This is the whole history of where they've kept her family.""And now yours."She looked up at that. Didn't argue it.The fire had burned down to coals behind us. Most of the others had gone to whatever rooms the lodge ha