“I called to you.” Skul Drek pointed to the place over my heart where the golden rope burned bright and heavy between us.

“Release me! I am not yours to summon or chain or—”

I cried out when the phantom reared over me as he’d done before, his flashing, cruel eyes a hairsbreadth from mine. “Soul to soul, I called you. If you desire to die, then do so.”

Soul to soul?

By the gods. My lips parted. “You are not a man?”

A cruel, thick, heavy laugh danced a shudder up my arms. “I am he, we are we.” Skul Drek placed an open palm over my heart. I shuddered beneath the frost of his touch. “But you brighten the dark.”

I swallowed, dropping my gaze to the hazy skeins of darkness billowing off his long fingers against my breast. “My soul…calls to you?”

“Yes.”

All gods. “That’s what happens? I speak to you, see you, in my soul?”

A low, haggard sort of hum was his only response. After a drawn-out pause, the assassin stepped back, dropping his hand. “I brought the warning. Stay away.”

For the first time, through the fissures breaking away bits of my own terror, I saw a flash of something in his eyes, something like his own worry. One breath, two, three, then I nodded briskly.

His palm slid away painfully slow. Skul Drek braced on his elbow, merely studying me from beneath his cowl.

I swallowed. “Why are you here?” How was he here?

Skul Drek’s head canted to one side, then back. He was studying me, absorbing me, as though trying to puzzle through a riddle. “You brighten the dark, and I do not want it to stop. No matter what you hear, do not chase it. Stay quiet. Stay back.”

The assassin touched my jaw. My skin hummed with a strange heat. He had me vulnerable, could apparently draw me into the mirror without my control, and still his touch stirred something like unbidden desire in my blood.

Gods, what was the matter with me? He was a trickster, a killer who’d nearly sent Prince Thane to Salur, and had caught me in his snare.

This close I could see the rage buried in the crimson of his eyes, the haunting flecks of black and copper. Otherwordly eyes.

I did not know what he was—a demon, a man, a dream.

Whatever he was, there was a disconcerting draw tethering me to a killer, and I did not know how to break it.

“You’ve come to attack,” I said, voice steady even when the realization struck. The only reason Skul Drek would be here was to draw blood, and he did not want me to be in the middle of it. “You don’t need to do this. We…we were working together, I thought. We were going to find the scattered bones of the Wanderer.”