42
KYLO
C hecking the blood bond for the steady beat of Evie’s heart had become a comforting, obsessive compulsion. I’d been away from her before, but never this great a distance.
And not since I’d felt my essence slide down her pretty little throat, binding her to me forever.
I hadn’t realized how much it would affect me, leaving her behind like that.
No matter how much protection she now had around her at all times, I couldn’t help but imagine her in danger. And I’d seen the fear in her face, the heightened levels of terror in her blood, when she’d heard where I was going.
My angel was cute to worry about me the way she did. Though I suspected a lot of her worry was also about the state of Ravenia as a whole, and the ripple effects it would have on Etherdale.
I’d been shielding her from the truth, of course. It wouldn’t help her to understand what was coming. Not yet.
On the backs of firebirds, we flew across Etherdale’s mountains. And when I felt Evie’s heart speed up and pound much too violently for my liking, it was my own personal hell.
I knew it was likely Princeton, predictably disobeying my orders to examine Evie’s magick. But he didn’t understand my Evie like I did, and it infuriated me to know he might hurt her with his callousness.
My firebird, Vera, always tuned in to my moods, made a low rumble. Her bright, feathered wings of red and orange spread wide. Her crimson eyes crackled with Helia’s fiery rays. Even after all these decades, the size, grace, and might of these gorgeous creatures stole my breath away.
“Did you see what Zander included in the flight plan in his request for aid?” Blade called to me over the roaring wind.
I glanced over at him, his massive form fitting snugly on the saddle. “Which part?”
“He said to avoid this little patch of land between Florimell and Calliope at all costs. To not even fly over it, and certainly not to land there.”
“That just makes me want to head there immediately,” I answered.
“No,” Blade said, shaking his head. “He said it was cursed. Haunted by vengeful poltergeists.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, Zander is definitely hiding something valuable, then.”
“Now you’re a skeptic? He who is nauseatingly in love with a witch of esoteric mysteries?”
In love . My heart skipped a beat like I was human again, and not this monster plagued with bloodlust and an unquenchable hunger for retribution and power.
Evie had said she wanted me to feed from her. It was the most unexpected surprise that I was trying my hardest not to think about, lest I allow her to ruin my focus when I needed it most.
Gods, she really was ruining me. She had no idea how tightly wrapped around her finger she had me, no matter how many times I forced her to submit to the magnitude of my power.
“I’m not skeptical of esoteric mysteries,” I answered over the rushing wind. “I’m skeptical of scary ghost stories written by men in power.”
“No, I’ve heard it too!” Harmony called at our backs. “Princeton mentioned it once. It was the site of some unspeakable atrocity. Some fucked-up Servants of Lillian shit.”
“Well, that makes sense,” I relented. “If a cult who gives their children to the born as tithings was involved, then I wouldn’t put angry ghosts out of the realm of possibility.”
A vision of Evie giggling quickly transformed into that feral, wounded version of her that begged me to stop talking about her past—her childhood, if she’d even had one.
I ground my teeth together. Vera huffed.
“I know, I know,” I whispered so only she could hear. “I promise, when you meet her, you’ll understand.”
When we arrived, the battle quickly became a slaughter. Masked and hungry for our first decent fight, my clan unleashed shadowed magick on the unsuspecting horde of born.
My clan was highly trained in combat, in the control of our bloodlust and base instincts, and the meticulous balancing act of being vengeful monsters without losing our humanity. Our skill had only ever been utilized in small-scale, scattered violence. Assassinations, intelligence missions, vigilante justice, protecting mortals in the streets of Etherdale.
We were more than just prepared for battle. We were fucking starving for one.
Shifters rushed past me, their giant wolf and feline forms leaping and tearing into born flesh. A few local witches were also engaged in battle, defending the human villagers with protection spells, poison hexes, and conjured flames.
A poisoned dart flew into a nearby born, spearing him in the neck. One of my shadows impaled him for good measure.
The group of witches went utterly speechless as they watched me sink my teeth into the next born woman, draining her of stolen blood before snapping her neck and casting her aside.
The born’s blood was putrid, yet it almost felt like a betrayal to Evie to even feed from the enemy.
I couldn’t focus on that now, as more firebirds circled overhead, carrying more born.
My clan fought remarkably cohesively with Zander’s fleet. Turned by a different witch, his clan was born with its own unique strengths and magick. But the shadows were a constant force, even all the way in Valentin with Rune’s turned. Shadow magick manifested in a multitude of different ways, but there was still the same essential essence inside each of the turned. As if the same spirits or gods were rooting for all of us, allowing humans to be reborn into vampires for the sole purpose of righting some cosmic injustice.
I heard Evie’s voice in my mind for a moment, her philosophy on reciprocity and magick and fate.
My shadows yanked a born backward before he could sneak up on Harmony. I squeezed and rotted him from the inside out in a blink.
I had to stop fucking thinking about her.
It hadn’t cost me so far, but gods knew it was only a matter of time.
When a dagger flew at my head at the same time that a chain poisoned with blood onyx wrapped around my neck, I’d realized that time had come.
I’d been off my game for only fractions of a second.
I moved quickly, my shadows shielding me from the final judgment of the blade. But my power was losing steam as the blood onyx muted my strength and I clawed for air. I wielded darkness as a weapon, blinding the person at my back long enough to jab my own dagger into their face.
She dropped the chain, and my power slowly accumulated again once contact with the paralytic blood onyx had been broken.
To my surprise, it was a witch in all black who stood behind me, gurgling on her own blood as she fell to the ground. Behind her, I saw a glaring blond boy, barely twelve. He was wearing all black too.
Who took a child into battle?
“Harmony,” I hissed.
She homed in on the child immediately, retreating as weapons and magick flew all around us.
“I’ll cover you. There’s a store with mortals inside around that corner,” I said quickly as I pointed.
The truth was, I’d never been able to wield so much power at once in all my decades. An arrogant, impatient man would not have been able to construct the new world I was building. He would not have been able to resist showing off the depths of his godlike power, nor spend decades pretending to be weaker and more incompetent than he truly was.
I wasn’t a perfect man, so I did revel in my satisfied grin now, as I watched my shadows feast on flesh. I delighted in the way the born stared at me in horror, my mouth dripping with their comrades’ blood.
It was nearly frightening how powerful I was, how easy it would be to rot this entire village into nothing but decay and rubble. Worse was the way it went to my head, in biochemical and magickal processes out of my conscious control. It felt similar to feeding, but on a much grander scale. The rush, the adrenaline, the euphoria, the indescribable ecstasy of watching lofty dreams become reality, with all of its grit and bloodshed and horror and sublimity.
I was glad I was who I was. Because the idea of anyone else disrupting the order of the universe to this degree was a sobering thought indeed.
Though, I liked to think it was the born who’d caused the disruption, and I was merely the gods’ way of correcting that imbalance.
“You’re a fucking blasphemy. Lillian is going to torture your soul for all of eternity,” a born man spat in my face, rabid and grimy and clearly an underling in this nasty slave trading business.
“And you’re just someone’s meat puppet to defend an industry you would have never materially benefited from,” I said. I jutted out my bottom lip mockingly as I yanked my dagger back from his chest and then took a chunk out of his neck with my fangs.
His body slumped to the cobblestone.
“You’re the only one of us who’s facing Lillian today, my rat-faced friend.”
Harmony was back at my side. “We need to fucking move.”
This was the first time I’d heard her voice tremble with fear since we’d arrived. I read the severity in her features.
“We’re about to be made an example of,” Harmony hissed. “We need to get the fuck out of here. Now. ”
Even as she said the words with authority, her eyes were ripe with grief, with a sadness I felt at my core.
One of my eyes emerged from shifting shadows, making a symbol with his right hand I recognized immediately. He retreated back behind a shadow glamour in the next blink.
The surrounding battle was dying down. It wouldn’t have taken much longer to completely annihilate all born fighters and push any remaining out of the area. These were traffickers and henchmen for corrupt nobility, not a vast, organized army.
“King Earle is sending men as a message to the realm,” Harmony said, unable to hide the note of utter horror in her voice now, as I stayed silent and unmoving.
I watched Blade wield his favorite sword, making a kabob out of two born in a matter of seconds. He looked rather pleased with himself as he withdrew the weapon. A leopard shifter growled to my right, and my eyes locked on the child she was defending from hungry born scum. A girl with long blonde curls, sobbing and crying for her mother. Her dress was conservative and plain black.
Nausea churned in my stomach, as if I were looking at her instead. My angel.
I focused back on Harmony. I weighed two impossible choices, the heaviness of both stifling my head high in an instant: to leave or to stay.
The downside to my position of power was a crushing truth, a brutal lesson. The gods were no doubt laughing at me now.
Harmony clamped her hand down on my shoulder. “They are going to eliminate us.”