A Court of Night and Shadows

Chapter 18

I awoke to a sunlit room. It took three short blinks before I could tear my eyes open to the wave of warm light. I could feel each sinew of muscle, each vertebrae in my spine ache under my efforts to turn my head. The largest wall of the room was mostly a window, looking out at winter-kissed garden with an empty stone fountain at its center. I could hear the crackling of a small hearth fire on my other side, but couldn't muster the strength to tear my neck the other direction.

My neck.

It came back to me then. My broken neck. My death.

I was dead, yet somehow, here I was.

Alive.

Alive because of my self-named Amulet of Storms.

I lifted a fragile hand to the blanket pulled up to my chest, unsure if its wild shaking was from the pain or the fear at what I might see beneath. The cream quilt was heavy in my fingers, but I managed to pull it away to reveal my naked torso, covered only by a bandage wrapped around my chest like a second skin.

"I couldn't heal you."

If I hadn't already felt near-death, then the panic of hearing the voice of a stranger so close to me without my knowing had definitely done its best to get me there. But it wasn't a stranger's voice, not exactly. I'd heard the voice before.

In a dream.

Amren? I tried to say, but when I parted my lips to speak only breathless air escaped.

"You're extremely weak and your healing is slow," she said, stepping around the bed to come into my line of sight. I would never have told her, but I couldn't have been more grateful for her recognizing my weakness. "None of us could heal you. We even called in a professional healer... There was nothing we could do."

I let that sink in. Was I actually dying? She had said my recovery was slow. Did that mean I was recovering, just slowly, or did that mean I was recovering too slow. That I wasn't going to recover at all.

"I'm... I'm sorry," she whispered, and her eyes of wild silver lightning met mine. I got the feeling she hadn't said those words in centuries. Her eyes were settled, brows a tiny bit down on her face. She was sad. Sad for me.

I tried to speak again. "Wha-" was all I got out before weak breathy coughs overtook me. I was dying. I had to be dying.

"The heirloom - the amulet - its imbedded itself in your heart."

My coughing stopped. The air in the room suddenly felt far, far away.

"It's keeping you alive. Pumping your blood. But even more than that," she cleared her throat quickly, coming closer to the head of the bed. "It's changed your blood, changed your essence. You've become something else."

I felt my lip trembling, my ribs shaking with a sudden anxious cold.

"We can't remove it or you'll die."

My eyes travelled back down to the exposed bandages across my breasts, nearly up to my collarbone. I looked back to Amren, hoping she understood my silent plea.

She did.

With small, nimble fingers she reached for a piece of fabric tucked into the folds of the dressing and pulled it back to reveal the place where smooth skin should be covering my beating heart. The place where ribs and breastbone should be. The place that now homed a gem buried deep into the cavern of my chest. It was still for the first time that I'd ever seen, its color now the darkest black. Darker than the strange shadows that followed Azriel. Darker still than the consuming night that Rhysand left in his wake with every step.