The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 509

Chapter 509

Ellie’s POV

Before I could collect my bearings, a hand closed around my braid and yanked.

I went down backwards, my shoulder cracking against the table’s edge on the way, gasping and scrambling at nothing. Nothing! There was nothing there, and yet-cold fingers snagged my collar. My wrist. The hem of my sweater. They pulled in different directions at once, like children fighting over a doll.

“The mushrooms,” I gasped. “It’s just the-”

A fistful of my hair tore out at the root, and that was when I knew for certain that mushrooms had fucking nothing to do with this.

I screamed and swung just as a dark shape lurched at me. My knuckles passed through freezing air. Not flesh. I staggered, gasping, as my hand met nothing.

“Stephanie?”

The room was silent for a moment. But then, in the distance, like mist rolling off a cold ocean, the whispers

began.

“Firstborn…”

“Her blood-”

“OURS!”

Cold air rushed at me. I launched to my feet and ran in the direction I thought the exit was. I got it half right. My hip caught the edge of a table halfway across the room, spinning me, and then I was staggering out into the main area with claws raking down my back, catching cloth, tearing it. Cold pressed through my sweater everywhere they touched. The same cold from the bottom of that pool.

I hit a shelf. Books rained down around me, and I felt a stab of guilt even now, even like this.

Fingers found my throat, pinning me back against the shelf.

They were like ice. I’d felt this grip before, deep underwater, attached to my sister’s ruined face. These fingers were longer and wrapped all the way around my neck, cold, slithering like snakes.

I clawed at them. My nails went straight through them like trying to grab smoke. The grip on my windpipe never loosened. So those were the rules of this fight. They could touch me, but I couldn’t touch them.

White sparks crawled in from the edges of my vision. My lungs convulsed. My wolf was throwing herself against the inside of my ribs, frantic, useless.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I stopped clawing and dropped down instead. All of my weight slammed down at once, knees buckling, twisting sideways as I went. The fingers raked off my throat as I hit the floor and crawled, coughing, dragging air down a throat that felt crushed by nothing but air.

My hand struck a desk leg. I hauled myself up it, sweeping my arm across the surface, and my elbow knocked something over with a clang. Iron. A stand of fireplace tools beside a little brazier I hadn’t bothered lighting

1/3

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earlier. My fingers closed around a long, cold rod with a hooked tip.

A fire poker. It wasn’t a weapon, but it would do.

The first swing connected with something, but it wasn’t solid. I heard a hiss, a screech like a teapot whistling, and the rod slowed down for a moment as if bouncing off some invisible force. The thing in front of me burst apart with a shriek, smoke dissipating in the wind, only to rematerialize a few feet away and come at me again.

I swung until my shoulders burned. Every hit scattered one of them. Every single one of them came back. I wasn’t killing anything down here. I was buying myself seconds, seconds that weren’t enough, each one costing me the little strength I had left.

Think, Ellie. Think.

They hadn’t existed a few minutes ago. This library had sat silent and untouched for centuries, right up until-

The book.

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