My hands trembled as I swiveled them palm upward.

Oh my gods, oh my gods...

Nothing... There was nothing...

And there was no time to think, why, how, when—

Danne lurched forward and pressed the dagger to Graysen's throat, readying to split apart the flesh. "You, you arrogant sly prick, thinking you can strangle me to death."

"Wait!" I cried.

Danne's flushed face cut to mine. Bloodlust was a cloudy haze in his eyes. But he'd halted from slicing through Graysen's jugular.

"Let him live and I'll come with you."

Blood burbled from Graysen's mouth as he gasped my name. He was so pale, a terrible grayish hue, and his breathing was a horrid rasping noise that squeezed my heart in terror.

"You're coming with me no matter what. And I'm not about to let him live," Danne scowled, his voice notably hoarse. "Gods, he's feral, like all his family." Glancing down at Graysen, his mouth twitched with cruel amusement. "Your sister, though, she tasted so sweet and innocent. I wanted more—until you interrupted my fun."

Rage burst within Graysen's gaze.

What did I have? What did I have left? Nothing. Not even a scrap of power.

My strength was bound with the creature. And with the dark magical dust poisoning my blood and trapping it, there was little I could do. What else...what else do I have?

Me. I had me.

I would not bow to anyone. But I could appear subservient. Lowering my head, I tipped my chin down, and said quietly, "This is how you want me, isn't it?"

Danne's eyes, eager for violence, returned my way and lazily roamed up and down my body. His breathing quickened. "Very much." His hand fisted in Graysen's hair, relaxed before he withdrew the dagger a fraction. "You'll finish what we started in the limousine?" It wasn't a question.

I nodded, squeezing my hands anxiously at my sides. If I could lure him away from Graysen, maybe I'd be able to save us both.

Danne rose and stepped toward me.

Graysen's thick lashes parted wide. Understanding and horror flooded his eyes.

No longer able to hold his gaze, I tore my own away.

"You'll have it all, Danne. Everything you ever wished. Both of us broken." I kept my line of sight on Danne, looking at him beneath my lowered lashes. "Just as you told me."

And from the flare of his nostrils, the eagerness blazing from his features, I knew he was remembering what he told me inside the limousine. His fantasy of watching Graysen while he shoved himself inside me. Seeing Graysen shatter and break with every thrust.

I took a wobbly step back on the uneven ground.

Graysen struck out for Danne, but his hand raked uselessly through the air. "Don't you fucking touch her! I'll tear you to pieces! Rip you to shreds!"

Danne approached me in leisurely strides. I kept backing up, my feet leaving earth to stumble on rocks and stones.

And Danne kept walking.

If I could get hold of the dagger clenched in his fingers.

Danne glanced over his shoulder. "How, Crowther? Right now you're the one bleeding at my feet. And this sweet Wychthorn princess," he said reaching out to gently cup my chin, "is right within reach."

I lunged for the dagger—

He yanked his hand out of reach—

And I missed it.

I missed!

Spinning sideways, Danne drew his hand back and then slashed forward. The meaty palm of his hand cracked against my face. He slapped me so hard my head whipped sideways, my body following as I staggered and fell to my knees. Pain erupted, scrambling my senses and muddying my thoughts.

"That's exactly how I want you. On your hands and knees," Danne sneered, grabbing hold of my hair.

My head was wrenched savagely as he tugged me back to my feet. I swayed, disorientated, slashing drunkenly at his fist with my fingernails.

He cursed and let go.

I tried to move, to evade him—

He punched the side of my head violently. Great bursts of stars exploded behind my eyes. My teeth chattered and ferocious pain crashed right through me. My ears rang and distantly I heard Danne's laughter as I crumpled to my knees, sagging forward, one hand braced in the sludgy earth to stop me from tipping over.

Danne loomed over me. I blinked sluggishly as if watching from afar. I saw his dirty, expensive shoes stepping apart to brace his stance, and through the wide gap of his legs, I watched Graysen, bloodied and broken, trying to drag himself toward me.

The creature writhed, twisting and flailing. Its roar of fury drowned out everything else. I could see Graysen's mouth moving but I couldn't hear him. All I could hear was the screaming inside my head. Such wrath. It wanted to burn the world down.

Graysen was yelling something at me, his mouth forming words, but I couldn't hear him. Yet, I knew it was just one word he kept repeating over and over again and I suddenly realized it was my name he roared—Nelle! NELLE!

Danne turned away to hasten back to Graysen.

Free yourself!—I screamed at the creature.

The creature pounded, striking back at the magic-infused dust that had poisoned my body. Fat beads of perspiration burst along my hairline and rolled down my clammy temple. Nausea churned, sweating my mouth. A cruel cramping sensation stabbed my gut.

Hurry, hurry!—I begged it.

Danne kneeled behind Graysen's head.

Move, move, MOVE!—I screamed at myself.

My limbs shook so badly, they felt like jelly. I couldn't move.

But I felt it—

A giving.

Cracks and fissures appeared in that wall pressing back on the creature. It slammed with all its might, and I felt each strike vibrate with every rapid heartbeat and shudder of my bones.

My stomach spasmed—

The thing that lived inside me broke through the prison walls—

Dust exploded from my lungs, my stomach. Hot and bitter motes of dust sprayed all over the river stones, coating their damp surface with a dull sheen of blue, and left me tipping sideways and rolling to my back.

Dazed, my head reeling, I drew in ragged pants, trying to swallow down air. My throat was raw and burning, and I thought for a moment that my lungs might actually be on fire.

The creature mewled, convulsing with the residuals of poison still in my system. The energy to break free from its prison had weakened it severely. I could feel how little of its might was left to me.

My bare feet scrambled through loose stones as I struggled to right myself. One stone flew through the air.

I watched the stone skip and bounce, arching—

Arching. Skipping.

I suddenly realized what I could do.

A hiss through clenched teeth had my gaze snapping to Danne.

Danne held his arm stretched high. High enough he'd crossed the shadowline and sunlight struck the blade clenched in his hand. Light glanced off the razor-sharp edge of the dagger and spun away. A fistful of black hair feathered through his fingers as he yanked at Graysen's head to arch his throat back to expose the jugular.

No, no, no, no, no—

A scrap. There was a scrap of power left to me.

Time slowed.

Danne thrust his hand downward.

The blade sliced through the air—

I pushed to my feet, surged forward—

Barrelled into Danne—

Grabbed hold as I knocked him off his feet—

And swifted.

We reappeared in the swifting void. In that shadowed space between places. And beyond the shadows, it deepened to an endless black.

I'd never been frightened of the void. Its pitch-black realm had never terrified me in the same way being locked up in the Tithe Prison and its black emptiness had.

Here, the darkness was welcoming.

Perhaps because I'd always known I wasn't alone.

Buffeted by icy tendrils, the strange power of the swifting void coiled around an ankle, a wrist, tasting, tugging, trying to ensnare us for eternity. One of my questions was answered. Danne was still alive. I hadn't been sure when I swifted with Graysen, so I'd woven a pocket of air around him to ensure he could breathe in the void. Now I knew that whoever I touched was safe. Merely holding onto them, allowed someone living to swift with me.

Danne's eyes were so wide they were mostly white. His mouth fell open. Those creepy phantom tendrils of power ruffled his auburn hair and slipped across his clothes like ghostly fingers.

I held onto him. My fingers bunched in his shirt pulled the fabric tight against his straining body.

"Nelle, please... I'm your friend."

"You touched me. You tried to..." Force yourself inside me. To take me against my will.

I could still feel the echo of his hands tearing at my dress, ripping my panties, and pawing at my body.

Cold fury poured through me.

His gaze went to my hand fisted into his shirt, how I held him aloft with just one hand. His eyes snapped back to mine. He rasped, "What are you?"

"Do you want to know the joke of it all?" I hissed.

His throat bobbed as he gave a single tentative nod.

"I don't know."

I didn't know what I was or what I shared my body with. Was I me or simply a vessel to carry something else? Something other.

The creature snarled—Let go, let go, let go, let go...Just...let...go...

Danne had stolen me away.

Taken me against my will.

Tried to force himself inside me.

But what burned my blood to a raging inferno—He dared harm what was mine!

And the snarl that erupted from my lips was from both the creature and myself that twined together to gather in a ferocious roar of untamed fury.

Danne lurched back, altogether forgetting about the void.

I unfurled my fingers—

Too late...too late did Danne realize what I'd done. He panicked, his hands scrabbling for me, but I'd twisted free and—

Let go.

I watched as he drifted away, his limbs flailing and scrabbling for purchase that was never going to come. His eyes bugged and his mouth gaped like a fish landed on the bottom of a boat. Filaments of raw power wrapped around him like thick spiderwebbing, tugging him further into the shadows.

A noise—BOOM—in the shadowy void.

The swifting void, the pocket of space I'd accidentally found myself in when I was fifteen years old, had frightened me when it first occurred. One moment I was running through the woodland on a crisp winter morning, my bare feet breaking frosty earth, crushing grass and mud. And as I leaped over a jutting root from a tree that had tipped over, I'd suddenly thought of Lise, of when we'd last spoken in her bedroom, and I found myself leaping into nothing.

Into the shadowy swifting void.

And out again.

I'd reappeared with a sensation of wind beating against my skin like feathers, right in the middle of Lise's bedroom.

These pockets weren't just voids, they were places where creatures lived in the space in between. And if you were something special, like the Birds of Prey the Crowthers kept, you could use the dark abyss to pass through. Like stepping into an elevator and out again. One door closing—another opening.

...BOOM...

Denied oxygen, Danne's chest spasmed. His milky freckled face turned a blotchy red, then purple and blue. His hands scrabbled frantically at his throat.

I floated in the endless shadows, watching and feeling nothing but a simmering sort of satisfaction.

...BOOM...

...BOOM...

His fingers were white and brittle. His flesh became dry like drought-stricken earth, fissures cracking his skin.

Danne unfurled a hand to stare at it. Disbelief washed away his strangled, panicked expression. He tried to raise his arm higher, only to find it snap at the shoulder joint, and flail uselessly in the darkness.

The sound of gigantic wingtips reverberated around me.

...BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...BOOM...

A score of color emerged against the black. Frost-white and silver with touches of charcoal and mauve. And out of the darkness came the creature to whom this void belonged.

It soared through the grim shadows, a burst of crackling luminosity out of nowhere, a streak of lightning hues as its inflamed feathers rippled with every beat of its wings. A gigantic bird—a Stormbird.

It swooped in a graceful arc to snatch up Danne with its talons. Upon impact, his calcifying body snapped in several places. Fingers and one leg were broken at the kneecap. The limb and fingers drifted past me.

The Stormbird's pitiless eyes found mine, and the void winds, shifted by its aerodynamics, stroked against my skin like a caress.

...BOOM...

...BOOM...

...BOOM...

I stayed to watch the creature disappear into the darkness beyond until even its silver and charcoal flamed feathers winked out and there was just me, alone, in the swifting void.

It hit me then, what I had done.

Suffocating in the void didn't kill Danne. Nor did the calcification of his body. Nor was it the Stormbird that lived in the space between places. It was me. I killed Danne.

It was my choice to let go.

I swifted from the void, appearing some distance from Graysen, and ran toward him. Stones kicked up beneath my feet in my rush to reach his side. Mud squelched between my toes as I fled up the mound of fallen earth.

Graysen sucked in a breath of relief when he realized I'd arrived alone. I sank to my knees beside him. Black eyes flecked with gold scanned my face and body, as he searched for wounds until he reassured himself I was unhurt. "Danne?"

"I left him in the swifting void."

Graysen was shattered, bloodied, and pale. Cold, too, I realized as I pressed my hands to his, my stomach giving a tremulous lurch at his clammy skin and that he was shivering violently too. The stab wounds in his chest weren't healing either.

He stared up at me with eyes completely bloodshot with burst vessels. I pushed back his dark hair, wet with blood. "You came for me."

"Always, little bird." His lashes lowered and he sighed. "You c-could have let him have me...b-be free of the Alverac."

My mouth tipped up on one side. "I've gotten used to your sullen face. I think—I might miss it."

He grunted in pain. "You'd m-miss me th-then?"

I pressed my lips to his. His mouth was so cold, too cold, and I tasted something other than the coppery tang of blood. Salty tears I realized as I drew back, my lips wet, my cheeks too.

A broken, pained chuckle. "You're crying."

I sniffed, rubbing at my damp eyes with the back of my wrist. My bottom lip quivered. "No, I'm not."

"Got s-something caught in your eye then, little bird?"

"A bit of dirt," I lied, even as fresh tears coursed down my cheeks.

Graysen winced, gritting his teeth to hold back a bark of pain—yet managed to lift a shaky bloodied hand to wipe away my tears, leaving a sticky smear of red in its wake. "I'm not worth crying over."

"Don't leave me, Graysen," I whispered, clutching his shoulder with a white-knuckled grip and pressing my forehead to his.

"I wouldn't d-dare..." he whispered, weaving his hand beneath my tangled hair to its place at the nape of my neck. "Your wrath...would only h-hound me into the next life... Have you p-pissed at me for eternity? Not worth it."

I tried to smile for him and failed miserably.

He'd thrown himself from a cliff to save me, shattered almost every bone in his body, and still, he'd fought for me.