My panic deflates when I see he looks whole, but his eyes are fixed—staring straight forward at something.

Fione catches up to us, her voice low. “V-Varia.”

I look to where the princess is, to the Bone Tree. It sits on the very edge of the circle of earth, clinging with its wavering roots. It hasn’t changed at all—no marks from the explosion visible. The bones are whole, untouched.

And there, standing beneath its branches with a calm ease, is Varia. Her curtain of dark hair shines, her smile discernible from even our distance. She looks whole, too, normal, as if nothing has happened at all—save for the fangs sticking out of her neck. Like a macabre piece of jewelry, like a choker gone wrong, a line of sharp, svelte fangs spreads down her neck in a perfect ring, fused to her flesh. Not big enough to be valkerax fangs, but identical in shape and serration.

She tilts her fingers up to the sky, and, horrifically, something rises. A low hissing swells like a wave as some hundred things rise from the mountain. No—thousands. Thousands of sinewy, wyrm-like white bodies rise slowly into the aether, feathered manes flared and tails lashing, whiskers undulating in the cloudless sky.

The valkerax.

A pillar of valkerax, writhing around one another.

“Well now.” Varia smiles at us all. “I believe this is where your work ends. And mine begins.”

END OF BOOK TWO

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

After seven years of writing, you’d think it would get easier. But the struggle is half the fun—what would my little monkey brain do if it couldn’t feel that rush of accomplishment that accompanies solving a complex problem after three weeks of not seeing the simple solution on a nigh-constant basis? What I mean to say, of course, is that writing is a dream, but one of those dreams where you don’t have any pants on and you’re in high school and everyone can definitely probably extremely see your crotch right now. As a career author, I can assure you, it’s okay to not have pants on all the time. Sometimes people will even read what you wrote without pants on!

This little space feels silly sometimes to write in, but it feels less silly when I thank people. A very big thank-you to my agent, Jessica Faust, for being a steadfast presence in my life. A bigger thank-you to my father, Michael, and my mother, Deb, for believing in me with such candid fervor it astonishes me constantly. A wonderful shout-out to everyone at Entangled for bringing this little dream to life, and to Stacy Abrams and Lydia Sharp for being keen-eyed editors to the last word.