Gabriel swore again, this time more profanely, railing against the fact that he was unable to help me.

I hurdled a fallen stone pillar, quickly crawling underneath it to curl up in the inky recess it created, holding my breath as a shadow touched me briefly as it sped past.

“May? May!”

I waited until the dragon was well past me before emerging from my hiding spot, silently racing back the way I’d come. I assumed he could hear Gabriel and me talking, but the diffusing effect the shadow world had on sound made it likely he couldn’t pinpoint my location based on it.

“May, answer me!” Gabriel roared, anger, frustration, and an impotent fury audible in his voice.

“I’m here. I’ll find a way out,” I answered, taking a different path from the one that led to Chuan Ren’s prison. “Don’t worry about me, Gabriel. This is my world. I know my way around it.”

“Gabriel,” a male voice called out, uncomfortably close. I swung around and raced in the opposite direction. “Gabriel . . . Tauhou? Wyvern of the silver dragons.”

Gabriel spat out something in the language I recognized as Zilant, the tongue used by dragons centuries before English was adopted as a universal means of communication.

The voice chuckled, the sound seemingly coming from everywhere at once. “And this is your mate? How did you get around the curse, I wonder. It is of little matter. She is no longer yours.”

A wordless roar met that statement, one not of pain, but of absolute, unadulterated rage.

I paused for a second, startled by the depth of emotion in the sound.

“Find somewhere to hide,” Gabriel yelled suddenly. “I will find you, little bird. Hide yourself and wait for me.”

I wanted to point out the obvious, that even if he did find me, there was little he could do to help me since he had no physical presence in this world, but there seemed little use in that. I concentrated on controlling my breathing as I dashed around the shadow version of Bael’s palace, seeking a place well away from the mysterious dragon where I could hide, or a passage out to the real world.

Time seemed to blur as I searched. It had been hard enough to find an exit in Bael’s palace, but here in the shadow world, where the fabric of being had been warped by association with Abaddon, it was a nightmare of endless onyx archways leading to nowhere, pits that opened at my feet, broken columns and walls, and twisted black metal that clawed at me as I raced past.