The magical projection of Seraphina’s sneering face dissolved into a wisp of foul-smelling gray smoke, leaving the shadow realm in suffocating silence.

I stared at the empty space where my father’s tortured image had just been, my chest heaving as if the air had been sucked from the room. My nails

Darius shrieked, a high-pitched, entirely un-lordly sound that echoed off the vaulted glass ceilings. He stumbled backward, clutching his right hand against his chest. The smell of searing flesh and melted metal filled the ballroom.

Where the binding rune had touched my bare arm, not a single mark

The transition back to the Shadow Realm was a violent rip through space, a breathless plunge into the dark that left my knees buckling the moment my boots hit the obsidian floor.

I stumbled, the solid shadow sword I had summoned in the High Court shattering into a thousand wisps of black smoke. Th