Love Between Two Worlds - Chapter 3

  

Chapter 3 — The Shadow at the Window

The glass didn't just break. It detonated inward, a hundred small knives catching what was left of the moonlight.

Amelia screamed and threw her arms up as shards rained across the study floor. The candle had already died with the flame's last gasp, leaving nothing but moonlight and the faint silver pulse of the ring still clenched in her fist.

Adrian moved before her body had finished deciding to.

His arm caught her around the waist and drove her down, and something passed through the exact space where her head had been a half-second earlier — a black shape, fast and utterly without sound, that struck the far wall hard enough to spider the plaster before dropping into the shadows below.

For a moment neither of them breathed.

"What was that?"

"Stay behind me."

He was already on his feet, and for the first time since the corridor, since the door, since any of it, Amelia saw something in his face that had nothing to do with mystery or that careful, practiced calm.

Fear. Plain and real.

The thing on the floor began to move. Its limbs unfolded in stages, far too many joints for anything that should be called a body, and where a face should have been there was only smoothness — a depth of dark that the torn hood above it seemed almost apologetic for containing.

It rose to its full height, and it was taller than either of them.

Adrian stepped in front of her without being asked.

"You're not taking her."

The creature tilted its head, slow, curious, the way something might look at a bell before deciding whether to ring it. A sound rolled out of it that was neither growl nor voice but something unpleasantly between the two — a sound built for a throat that had never needed to speak before.

The ring flared hot against Amelia's palm.

She gasped and opened her fingers on reflex. Silver light poured out between them, and the creature flinched back from it like something scalded.

Adrian's eyes cut to her. "What did you do?"

"I don't know—"

"Show me."

She uncurled her hand fully. The crescent moon and its seven stars were burning brighter now than they had all night, bright enough to throw both their shadows hard against the far wall.

The creature hissed — and then, impossibly, it spoke.

"Blood of Hart."

The words landed in Amelia's chest like something physical. Beside her, Adrian's whole posture changed.

"You shouldn't be able to speak. Not here. Not yet."

The creature's non-face did something that might have been a smile, if smiles could exist without a mouth to make them — a thin seam of pale light opening where an expression should have been.

"The gate has awakened."

Adrian's hand disappeared beneath his cloak and came back holding a blade unlike anything Amelia had ever seen — metal so pale it looked closer to bone than steel, etched with fine silver lines that seemed, when she let her eyes rest on them too long, to be moving.

"Leave this house," he said, and there was no room in his voice for negotiation.

The creature laughed — if the sound it made deserved that word.

"You still believe you can protect her?"

"I don't need to believe it." His grip tightened on the hilt. "I only need to do it."

He attacked.

The creature moved faster than anything with that many limbs had any right to. Steel met darkness, and the study filled with a burst of silver sparks that lit the room in strobes — there, gone, there, gone.

Amelia backed toward the desk, unable to make her feet carry her any further, unable to look anywhere else.

Adrian swung again. The creature simply wasn't where the blade arrived. It had unmade itself from that spot and was already somewhere else — behind him, she realized, a half-second before her voice caught up to the thought.

"Behind you!"

He turned. Not fast enough.

The blow caught him across the back and threw him bodily into the bookshelf. Wood splintered. Books rained down around him like something trying to bury him where he fell.

"Adrian!"

She was already running toward him.

"Don't—" His warning arrived a half-breath too late.

The creature had already turned toward her, and for one long, terrible second Amelia's body simply refused to move, as though some older, animal part of her understood that stillness was the only thing left to try.

It reached for her.

The ring answered before she did. Light erupted from her hand in a wall, a physical thing, and the creature slammed into it with a shriek that seemed to come from inside her own skull as much as from the room.

Amelia hit the floor hard, the barrier still trembling in the air between her and the thing that wanted her.

She stared down at her palm. The ring wasn't cold anymore. It wasn't even warm.

It was burning — and then it wasn't the room she was looking at at all.

A forest. A woman standing in it, younger than Amelia had ever known her to be, in a long dark gown that belonged to no decade Amelia recognized. Eleanor. Holding this same ring, this exact ring, and beside her — Adrian, but not the Adrian who had just been thrown across a study. A younger one. And Eleanor's face, above all of it, was wet with tears.

The vision turned, and there was the door — the same door, the one at the end of the west corridor — except now Amelia was looking at it from the wrong side. From Elarion.

People running through the trees. Fire somewhere behind them, close enough to paint the mist orange. Someone screaming Eleanor's name into a night that didn't seem to be listening.

And then, quieter than all of it, a man's voice, close to her ear as though he were standing right beside her:

"You promised us your granddaughter."

The vision tore itself apart, and Amelia came back into her own body with a gasp loud enough to hurt her throat.

She was on the study floor. Adrian was staring at her, blade still raised, blood at his temple.

"What did you see?"

"My grandmother."

Something in his expression went very still. "What about her?"

"You knew her." Amelia pushed herself upright. "Not the way you said. Not just as her guardian."

"I told you—"

"No." She shook her head, and it wasn't a question anymore. "You knew her before she died. Before I even knew you existed. You were there — in Elarion."

He didn't deny it. That, more than anything, told her she was right.

The creature slammed into the barrier again. Hairline cracks spread across the light like frost taking a windowpane.

Adrian's eyes flicked toward it. "We don't have time for this."

"Then make time. Tell me the truth."

"Amelia—"

"Who were you to her?"

The barrier fractured further, groaning with the strain.

He held her gaze for a long moment — long enough that she thought he might not answer at all — and then lowered the blade an inch, as if the truth cost him something the fight hadn't.

"I was her guardian."

"You already said that."

"I was more than that."

The creature hit the barrier a third time.

It broke.

Adrian's hand closed around hers before the light had finished falling apart.

"Run."

"Where?"

"Somewhere they can't follow."

He hauled her through the study doorway and into the corridor, and they ran — Amelia's bare feet slapping cold stone, the sound of something dragging itself across the floorboards close behind them, closer than it should have been able to get so fast.

She threw a look over her shoulder. The creature was there, unfolding itself through the broken doorway.

It wasn't alone. Three more shapes were pouring in through the shattered window behind it, black against black, moving with the same wrong, joint-heavy grace.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. "Adrian!"

"I know."

He pulled her toward the west corridor, and she felt her feet plant themselves before her mind caught up to why.

"No."

The door stood at the far end, waiting the way it had been waiting for her entire month in this house — patient, silver-veined, exactly where it had always been.

The door to Elarion.

Adrian looked at it, then at her, and something in his face had gone very quiet.

"It's the only place they can't follow you without your permission."

Her stomach fell through the floor. "You told me not to let them take me there."

"I know what I told you."

"Then why are we running toward it?"

His silver eyes held hers, steady even with the sound of the creatures closing in behind them.

"Because I'm asking you to trust me. Now, when it matters."

The shadows kept coming. She could hear them now — that same not-quite-growl, multiplied, hungry.

Amelia looked at the door. Then at Adrian.

She didn't trust him. Not entirely, not yet — there was too much he hadn't told her, too many pieces of her grandmother's life that belonged to a version of the story she hadn't been shown.

But the vision was still warm behind her eyes. Her grandmother, young and frightened and trusting him anyway.

And beneath the fear, beneath every reasonable objection her mind was still trying to raise, Amelia found something else waiting.

She wanted to trust him too.

She pressed the ring flat against the door.

The silver constellations across its surface caught fire all at once, and the lock gave way with a sound like a held breath finally released.

Adrian took her hand, his fingers lacing through hers.

"Whatever you see on the other side," he said, low, urgent, "don't let go of me."

The door swung open.

And this time, Amelia stepped through it on her own two feet, into a world she hadn't been born to.