Caught — Paperback

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Chapter 1 — Sera

The Shadowborne finds me first inside my head.

I don't know where I am, but I’m warm. As I fall through the vast nothingness, I feel someone’s arms around me and catch flashes of golden light in my peripheral vision. It’s cold and dark and so silent that my ears ring.

His voice threads between the thudding of my heart and the ringing. His voice is smooth and seductive.

“Come to me, my sweetling. I’ve been waiting for you.” His whisper caresses my skin.

His dark magic moves through the abyss like a current, and finds the place the Raptores left open in my chest. It slithers inside and my body tenses.

They strapped me in Umbral restraints for two weeks and let the dark magic soak down into my bones while they ripped a tear in my magical core. The ritual transformed it into a channel and he settled into me that same night.

And it’s been open since the rescue. Raw, bleeding into the dark, tuned to the frequency of Him. To the Shadowborne. He’s awake and he won’t stop whispering his poison into my ear.

“I can feel you, little necromancer. Come closer and I will show you everything you could ever desire.”

The Dark Lorde's awareness wraps around mine, and his rage comes with it. All hundreds years of it. Five seals have imprisoned him beneath the school, sustained by the heirs’ magic through the pillars.

Their magic each tastes different and I can’t tell whether this new awareness is mine or his. In the end, I’m not sure it matters.

The Sanguine Seal is smoke and blood and it’s holding. But the Lunar Seal strains at its edges about to break and the Celestial Seal, Julian's bloodline bound into it, has fractures running through it like cracks in ice over black water.

“Where have you taken me?” I whisper out into the darkness.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, invisible fingers turn my head to the right where a figure tumbles through a portal into the oozing black around me. The smell of her magic hits me first. Decaying earth, the acrid bite of dark magic, and the sharp tang of ozone. She spins as she falls, her silver-white light bending and warping around the gravity of the dark. I know exactly who that is.

Linney.

Her magic flares in her palms, bright and instinctive, and the Shadowborne's hunger sharpens and becomes overwhelming. His want and need is the most voracious I’ve ever felt from him yet.

He pours all of that into me through the channel and the craving becomes mine. I lick my lips. I want to taste her magic, to savor it, to take it apart on my tongue and swallow it down. I become him and he becomes me.

I fight him and his magic, and come back to my senses. I remember where I am. Who I am.

I rear back from him in disgust, separating my conciousness from his desires.

“Get out of my head,” I hiss back at him.

End of excerpt.