Chapter Twenty-Four
Doran moved so fast. Casteel, merely bait, could be left. The wolf-soul had his full attention, and the moment Nero had spoken his surrender the priests had him laid out and bound.
Casteel struggled for strength but he could barely move a finger. He wasn't important. Discarded the moment he had fulfilled his purpose.
Nero lay strapped to a blackwood frame tilted just enough to keep him from what seemed the real risk of drowning in his own blood.
Braided iron bit into his forearms, shoulders, and hips; hooks had been anchored with leather through his skin to stop a shift before it began.
Priests had painted his chest with sigils in a paste that steamed where it touched him.
Each stroke had raised welts that refused to close, as if the letters themselves gnawed at his skin Blood seemed to cover him nearly everywhere from small cuts, so much so that Casteel barely breathed for fear he would run out.
But what could a stable boy do? His only value had been when he possessed the wolf-soul.
Nero was a force to be reckoned with before he even got the wolf.
Casteel was pathetic. A nobody. Doran and his acolytes clearly agreed because they had discarded him in the corner.
Casteel glanced back at Nero—not that his attention wandered far.
Silver still trembled beneath Nero’s skin. Doran wanted that web. He intended to pluck every strand from Nero’s ribs. The room itself seemed alight with it.
“Begin,” the High Priest murmured.
Two acolytes laid copper plates along Nero’s sternum.
At Doran’s count they pressed—slow, inexorable weight, not enough to crush, but precisely enough to grind.
Nero’s breath shortened, but he refused to make a sound.
Casteel felt his pain through their thready bond anyway—a hot lance that pierced his own chest and made his vision swim.
“Here,” Doran said gently, guiding a veiled priest’s hand. He slid a filament of that same black glass beneath Nero's first rib and tilted. Silver flared along the bone, bright as a struck star. “There it is. You hide so deep, little god.”
A third priest tightened the braids until iron creaked.
Another passed a rod over Nero’s bare skin; wherever it traced, the light recoiled and hissed.
Not enough to extinguish but sufficient to harrow.
Casteel found strength enough to yank at the bonds holding his arms, and nails bit his own palms until his fingers shook.
Yank at his bonds.
Casteel stilled. He had been tied, but poorly. They hadn't cared and considered him expendable. No threat, certainly. He wasn't yet free, but he wasn't immobile certainly.
He took the measure of the chamber the way he’d once took measure of a fractious mare—where it leaned, where it was likely to kick.
The guards stood in two ranks beyond the chanting priests, one line facing inward to the ritual, another angled outward toward the approaches.
Their stances were loose, the laziness of men assured of magic more powerful than strength.
Oil lamps guttered in iron brackets at precise points that corresponded to the carved arcs in the floor.
Casteel took a slow breath. No one was watching him.
No one considered him a threat. He could even see a woman imprisoned.
One that had arrived with Nero so she must be important.
Above him, the woman remained trapped in her circle of light, but her fingers worked steadily at something—a vial, a blade, Casteel couldn't tell.
Casteel forced himself to stillness, to watch with the patience of prey that had learned when to be invisible.
No, not prey. The memory of the first time he'd seen Nero in that tower slammed into him. Still as one of stone Fenrirs, but poised to fire that arrow into Casteel's heart. An assassin sent to kill him.
Stillness, invisibility, hadn't made Nero prey. It had made him an assassin. And Casteel understood stillness. Some stillness wasn't an absence of movement. It was a stillness in your soul. Horses understood that. He'd calmed many a fractious animal with that sort of stillness.
He fastened his gaze on Nero and watched the ritual progress with horrible efficiency.
Doran's voice never rose above a conversational murmur, but each word seemed to hook into Nero's flesh and pull.
The silver light beneath his mate's skin grew thinner, more desperate in its clinging.
Blood ran from the corners of Nero's mouth now—not from external wounds, but from something being torn loose inside him.
"Beautiful," Doran breathed, his pale eyes reflecting the dying light. "The wolf fights so hard to stay. It knows what waits beyond once I have it within me."
Within me? Thats what Doran wanted? Casteel stilled in shock and horror. He never wanted Casteel to control Nero. Well, he did, but not to control him forever.
He meant to take the wolf.
He meant to transfer the wolf-soul. He knew it had happened once and thought he could do it a second time.
Or no, he'd barely found that out a day ago.
Realization slammed into Casteel. This had always been his plan.
He had always meant to take the wolf for his own, and whatever else Casteel did tonight, he couldn't let that happen.
A priest adjusted the copper plates. Nero's back arched against the restraints, tendons standing out like cords. Still, he made no sound, though Casteel felt his agony like acid in his own veins.
The guards grew more relaxed as the ritual deepened. Several leaned against pillars, crossbows lowered. The ones facing outward had turned to watch the spectacle, drawn by the hypnotic pull of the silver light being slowly strangled from Nero's body.
Casteel worked to rid himself of the rest of the ties. The priests had been thorough with Nero because they feared his strength. They'd been careless with Casteel because they saw only what he'd always been—a stable boy who'd stumbled into a prophecy.
They weren't entirely wrong. But they'd forgotten that stable boys learned to work with their hands, learned to slip knots and pick locks when horses needed tending and keys went missing.
They'd forgotten that anyone who'd spent years around fractious animals learned to move very, very, carefully when their livelihood depended on it.
Stillness.
The leather binding his left wrist had stretched slightly when they'd dragged him here. Pain shot up his arm, but he worked it free.
Nero's breathing grew more labored. The silver light was almost gone now, reduced to mere flickers that pulsed weakly with his heartbeat. Doran stepped closer, his hands weaving patterns in the air that seemed to catch and guide the remaining wisps of light to himself.
"Nearly finished," the High Priest murmured. "Soon you'll be free of this burden, and it will serve its true purpose at last."
Casteel's right hand came free with a muffled pop of leather giving way.
The sound was lost beneath the rhythmic chanting of the priests, their attention fixed on the ritual's final moments.
He kept his posture slumped, while his eyes tracked the slow death of the man he loved.
The man he adored, and the man he never intended on letting go ever again.
The silver light had become so thin it barely existed—gossamer strands clinging to Nero's heart like the last defiant threads of a spiderweb in the wind. His mate's chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular bursts. Through their bond came only distant flickers, a candle guttering in a storm.
Doran raised the black glass blade again, this time positioning it directly over Nero's heart. "The final strand," he whispered, reverence and hunger mingling in his voice. "Come to me, wolf-soul. Your true vessel awaits."
The silver light trembled, resisting even as it was drawn inexorably toward the blade's edge.
Nero's back arched one final time, his eyes flying open—no longer flecked with silver but hollow with pain and something worse: acceptance.
This was the end. He had given everything for Casteel, and now nothing remained.
"Now," Doran snarled, and plunged the blade downward.
Casteel moved.
He barely felt the black glass blade pierce his own chest as he threw himself between Doran and Nero, his freed hands clutching at the High Priest's robes.
Pain exploded through him—not just from the wound, but from the sudden, violent return of the wolf-soul as it abandoned Doran's failing ritual and poured into the only vessel it could reach.
Silver fire erupted along Casteel's bones.
The transformation was instantaneous and brutal—human flesh dissolving into lupine power as the wolf reclaimed its chosen bearer with desperate fury.
Where Casteel had knelt bleeding moments before, a massive silver wolf now stood, its eyes blazing with primal rage.
Doran's scream of rage was cut short as claws raked across his throat. The wolf's jaws clamped down on the High Priest's shoulder, fangs punching through robes and flesh with bone-crushing force. Blood sprayed across the ritual circle as Casteel shook his prey like a rag doll.
"The bindings!" Veda's voice rang out from above as the wards flickered, disrupted by the wolf-soul's violent return to its original vessel.
The Silver Guard finally reacted, crossbows swinging toward the chaos, but they were too late.
Casteel's wolf form moved like liquid death, tearing through their ranks with supernatural speed.
Claws opened throats, jaws crushed windpipes, and silver light blazed from his coat as the wolf-soul expressed its rage through violence.
A crossbow bolt hit him in the shoulder, spinning him around. Another grazed his flank. But pain only fed the wolf's fury. He pivoted and leaped, landing atop the shooter with enough force to drive the man's ribs into his lungs.
Above them, the disrupted wards finally collapsed entirely. Veda dropped from the gallery, her twin daggers finding hearts before her boots touched stone.
Doran, somehow still alive despite the massive wounds in his throat and shoulder, crawled toward Nero's trembling body. His pale eyes burned with fanatical determination even as blood bubbled from his lips. He didn't seem to realize there was no wolf-soul left in Nero to harvest.
"The ritual...is not...finished..." he gasped, raising the staff with shaking hands.
Dark energy crackled along its length—not the silver light of the wolf-soul, but something older and more terrible, and Casteel’s wolf smiled.
For you it is.
Casteel padded forward, silver light rippling beneath his fur like captured starlight. The wolf-soul had returned to him changed, tempered by its time in Nero's warrior heart. Where once it had been wild and uncertain, now it moved with deadly purpose.
An assassin's purpose.
Doran raised the staff higher, dark energy writhing around his bloodied fingers. "You cannot...stop what has already...begun," he wheezed, his pale eyes reflecting the unholy light. "The old gods...hunger..."
The wolf lunged.
Dark energy exploded outward, then collapsed back on itself with a sound like reality tearing. Doran's scream rose to an inhuman pitch as the backlash tore through him. His body convulsed, pale flesh blackening as the corrupted magic consumed him from within.
Casteel’s jaws closed around Doran's throat and tightened on a crunch.
"Casteel." Nero's voice was barely there.
Casteel instantly dropped Doran, discarded to the floor and rushed forward.
Nero was alive, and Casteel made short work of the bindings.
Nero was a bloodied mess but Casteel very gently slid his arms under his mate's body and carefully lifted him into his arms, his weight nothing for his wolf.
They needed to move. Nero needed care and he wouldn't get it down here.
Nero hissed in pain but his eyes were open in wonder. Casteel dropped a kiss on his lips. "We're getting out of here, but I want to say one thing. What you heard me say to Eryken. I'd already—"
But Nero raised a shaky hand and pressed his finger to Casteel's lips. "Hush. We're going to build a home and raise horses with our son."
Casteel smiled because Nero was right. He didn't need to say anything else.