War of the Princes 03: Monarch Read Free Page A

Determined not to be caught, I sent out a violent pulse of electricity.
    My back hit the ground, punching the air from my lungs. I curled up reflexively, cradled my head, and groaned. How far had I fallen?
    When I breathed, the air was close, like I'd stepped into a closet that had been closed for fifty years. It was stagnant, but clean. Scrambling to stand, I exploded with another burst of electricity, freeing it from every inch of my skin. The white flash blinded me and illuminated nothing of my surroundings... at first.
    It was after the bolts died away that I saw the shadow chasers. They were all around my feet, swarming to me. A thousand pairs of tiny white eyes blinked up at me. Their salamander-like bodies were flickered with wings and horns and spines of electricity. After hoarding my power for themselves, they burst into flight, soaring away in all directions.
    I shielded my face and shuffled back a few steps. Two zipped past my ear, and I could feel the static pouring off of them. I marveled at them and then lost my breath entirely.
    Eyes finally adjusting to the darkness, I found myself submerged in another world. The sky was all wrong. It was slashed and moving, like layers of sheer fabric floating in a slow current. The horizon blushed with soft cyan light, and blended with midnight azure. Only the crown of the sky was true black.
    The shadow chasers grew distant overhead, darting and twinkling like swimming stars.
    I was in a glen of shadowy tall grass. Black outlines of great leafy trees undulated in a nonexistent breeze. Stoic silhouettes of boulders, ridges and mountaintops thrust up from behind the woods. Fog curled through the place in varying shades of gray, lending depth to the pitch-dark world. The shape of a mighty palace stood proud in the distance, the focal point of the entire scene. It must have been enormous, because though it seemed quite far off, its many spires still managed to brush the upper quarter of the sky.
    Everything was blue and black, white and gr ay, almost like Breakwater had been that night. But this place couldn't be real. It was beautiful and heavy and twisted. It was like the stage of a play with a thousand shifting parts had tumbled into the real world, as if it was cut from the cloth of dreams… or nightmares.
    A silky white stream flowed beside me. I leaned down to touch the strange water, and my hand drifted right through it, disrupting the flow pattern like I'd brushed a ghost.
    I pulled my hand back at once, afraid of what it might do to me.
    Wind began to whistle again . There was a tearing sound, and four horses leapt into existence before me. Sixteen hooves clattered on the stones of the ghost stream as they landed, diaphanous water splashing up around their ankles. The way a cat's eyes will shine in the dark at night, the way an opal will seem to be a certain color and then another, these horses appeared solid and then semi-transparent. As their positions shifted, their muscular black masses would gray out like they were made of smoky quartz crystal, showing me glimpses of their ivory skeletons within.
    Four sets of white eyes found me. Ears flicking flat, heads pulling back, they spooked as though they didn't expect to see me there. Neighing, the group bolted off down the meadow, only looking back at me when they were a safe distance away.
    Like they were the only ones who'd been startled. I found my hand clamped down like a claw over my heart. I was still gasping for the thick, still air, when I saw the three-headed warhorse, picking its way through the field toward me.
    “ Oh no,” I said, backing up. “No. No. No !” My last word came as a shout. I screwed up my face, squeezing my eyes shut, and emitted a third blast of electric energy. When I opened my eyes again, I could still feel the sharp buzzing of the Spark just beneath my skin. I was certain I'd used my Ability, but nothing had changed. In Cape Hill, when I'd been locked into the gaze of the Voice of the