Chapter 44 Loche
Loche
Venko went down first.
Loche didn’t even have to turn around after hearing Ardow cry out his lover’s name, but he did anyway, watching as the council member tumbled to the ground with a white sheet—a part of their sail—wrapped around his neck, the Oakgards’ Fae who was responsible not even giving him another look as he moved on to fight one of Loche’s men.
Air rushed behind Loche. He growled as he turned around, meeting the Fae trying to scale their ship head-on, shoving him off the railing he’d jumped onto, right into the waiting maw of a wyvern that kept circling their ship—probably on Lessia’s orders, as he’d caught a glimpse of her atop Ydren a few hours earlier.
His arms were heavy, but he allowed himself another look at the blond merchant he’d come to consider a friend, fear ripping through him when he realized Ardow was fighting to get to Venko’s too-still body, and that there was no way he’d make it.
Night had turned into day long ago, and while Loche had begged for the light those first few hours, he regretted it now that it was so clear that Ardow had no clue about the three Fae sneaking up behind him.
“Ardow, no!” Loche roared as he started his way, but Iviry’s soft call stopped him in his tracks.
“You can’t help him,” she said as she kicked a Fae so hard that he stumbled into the wooden railing, and then proceeded to push him off, actually biting him when he reached for her unbound hair.
They had almost run out of weapons. He and Iviry had barely gotten out of their room when the battle started, and while the ship they’d been on had been destroyed, his soldiers and one of Iviry’s guards had spotted them in the water, dragging them onto this one.
Loche’s eyes went from Ardow to Iviry and back again, and when the first sword slashed behind Ardow, the regent screamed again, “Behind you! Ardow, behind you!”
But it was too late. Ardow’s brown eyes latched onto Loche’s as the former stumbled, and Loche knew he’d never forget the look in his eyes—the pain and the rage—as he fell.
Ardow’s chest was still moving as he landed on the deck, but he did nothing to defend himself; he only reached a dirty, heartbreaking hand toward the blond lying too far away as another sword pierced him. Then another.
Until his outstretched hand relaxed and his brown eyes saw no more.
Until the two men who’d only yesterday danced and drunk and loved each other were together once again.
“Fuck!” Loche screamed, wondering if it would even be possible to heal from the pain of this battle.
Everywhere he looked, people fell. It didn’t matter whether they were Fae, human, or shifter. There was so much death.
He could smell it on the wind. He could see it in the eyes of the people still breathing around him. He heard it from the other ships—even over the fire and the cries and the sound of wood that kept breaking and breaking and breaking.
Loche screamed again, a cry of outrage that should have bounced against the too-clear sky hovering above them.
They wouldn’t win this.
Loche caught Iviry’s eyes and rushed up to her in a rare moment of relief. They both whirled when a heartbreaking screech echoed through the air, one that Loche felt in his soul, dragging its sharp nails down his back.
A wyvern had been pierced by one of those massive masts from the Oakgards’ ships, and her family screamed in unison—a raw human voice that could only be Lessia joining them in their sorrow.
The green wyvern twitched a few times before her body rolled over, displaying a soft underbelly that shone like the pearls Loche had seen in the old royal collection in Ellow, before she started sinking.
More screeches could be heard in the distance, and while Loche couldn’t see through the gray smoke gathering around too many of the ships, he knew from the way the wyvern swimming around their vessel cried out that more of them were dying.
So useless. So fucking useless.
It was the only thing Loche could think of as he dragged his fiery-haired wife to him and pressed tired lips against hers.
While Iviry didn’t wrap her arms around him—perhaps because of the blood painting her skin almost the same color as her hair—she responded like she’d done last night.
As if she were starving and Loche was the only thing that could satisfy her.
They’d made love so many times last night that Loche was a bit worried he might not be able to keep up, before she’d curled into his arms and had whispered once more that she loved him.
He’d just held her like that—neither of them sleeping, both just… appreciating the other’s company, appreciating not being alone.
Pulling back, Iviry’s sorrow-filled eyes found his as she asked softly, “Together?”
Loche nodded.
They’d go down together. He’d fight until his last fucking breath to keep her alive—because he had no doubt she could continue to rule Havlands without him should they somehow win this—but if it came to that, if there was nothing but the end, he’d hold on to her until the last moment.
He couldn’t even regret all the days they’d stayed away from each other the past weeks.
He wouldn’t have been here then.
He wouldn’t have felt the things he now did.
He wouldn’t trust another person with the dearest thing to him.
His people. His nation. His promise to create a better world.
Iviry seemed to understand where his mind went because her blue eyes shaded with tears even as she tried to smile at him. “I trust you too. I’m so—”
She didn’t have time to finish the sentence before someone screamed “Watch out,” and a cold thrill rushed down Loche’s back when Iviry was torn from him and he was slammed into the deck as he reached for her.
Jumping to his feet, he realized a large black feline stalked between the two of them, her tail whipping irritably back and forth as Iviry hissed at her, the Fae looking more like a cat herself as her fingers tensed—ready to scratch out those dark, evil eyes.
Loche swore to himself. But somehow… he wasn’t surprised.
His fucking mother had arrived.
Loche and Iviry had understood quickly that someone must have tipped off the Oakgards’ Fae, and he’d had his fucking suspicions from the beginning, but… they’d left his mother to rot in that cellar with the Oakgards’ Fae who wouldn’t bend the knee.
How the fuck had she gotten out? And why had she turned on everyone in Havlands if she was the reason the foreign Fae had found them—and without any of his spies noticing?
Gods, he’d never fucking hated anyone so much in his life.
Rebel leader…
He clicked his tongue when her black eyes bore into his. She wasn’t anything noble. There wasn’t a respectable bone in her body. She didn’t fight for the shifters because she believed in a new world for them. She did it for herself. For power. For fucking revenge.
A sharp smile spread across Loche’s face as he refused to look away from her.
“We’re not the same, you and I,” Loche spat at the feline. “You’re not my mother. You never will be. And when you die today… I will make sure no one ever takes your name or any of your nicknames into their mouth again.”
The massive cat roared at him, but Loche merely rolled his eyes. He knew the truth of his words. This… thing before him… she was nothing to him. She meant nothing to him.
She might have carried him at one point in her miserable fucking life, but that was it.
He felt it then. A final fucking shedding of his mother’s shadow.
It was time he stepped into the light, and that light was the fiery Fae whose blue eyes found his every time he searched for them, and who looked at him the way he wanted to look at himself in a mirror one day.
The feline hissed again, and Loche moved with his mother’s deliberate steps, his eyes leaving hers only to search for anything he could use as a weapon, with Iviry doing the same on his mother’s other side.
As the cat continued stalking while they came up empty, he could almost hear Meyah snicker in his mind.
I am going to win, her dark gaze seemed to convey as the feline blinked, its thick eyelashes fluttering. You are going to die, and I am going to live, and I am going to win.
Iviry must have felt something similar because she snarled so viciously that even Loche stopped in his tracks.
He shook his head at his raging wife, but it did little to settle her. She snarled, “You’re not getting away with this, you bitch. Loche is right, you know. You are nothing like him. You are but an embarrassment of a person, and we are going to erase you from this fucking world.”
Under other circumstances, he would have savored Iviry calling his mother a bitch, but right now? When they were tired after countless hours of battle, when they’d both sustained injuries, then there was no damned end in sight for this war? And without any fucking weapons to protect them?
No. Loche took a step forward as Iviry continued, “You’re a coward, Meyah. I’ve heard all about you. Leaving your son? Trying to manipulate him? Trying to fucking kill him? I am humiliated for you. Look at your people! They all left you for him!”
“Iviry,” Loche cautioned, watching the hairs on the back of the large cat rise in anger. “Iviry, that’s enough—”
“No! She should know what she missed out on!” she snarled back, her wild eyes finding his for a moment before locking back on his mother.
“You fucked up, Meyah. Loche is the strongest, bravest, most loyal and caring person I have ever had the chance to meet, and I am almost three hundred years old! You don’t deserve to breathe the same air as him, and you definitely don’t fucking deserve to kill him. ”
He knew what Iviry was fucking doing. She’d seen—not only on that ship, back when they fought the rebels, but on Korina—that he didn’t have it in him to kill his mother.
Right now? Iviry was trying to bait Meyah to go after her so that she could try to take his mother down instead. Loche’s hands clenched, and he searched the bloodied and dirty deck once more for any weapons, but there were none around them, the ship only slick with death.
None of his soldiers lived anymore. Black masks and bodies were scattered every few feet behind him, having joined Ardow and Venko in death.
It appeared the Oakgards’ Fae had decided to leave Meyah to it: The ship that had threatened their own steered toward where most of the screaming was happening.
The air stilled for but a second, and that was the only warning as his mother went after Iviry.
If Loche thought he’d known fear, there was nothing that could compare to his mother ripping a chunk of flesh out of Iviry’s side. His wife’s—his fucking mate’s—scream was the only thing Loche could hear as his body went warm, then cold again.
A rage he’d never known started in his heart and pumped out to every other limb until it felt like he was on fire.
Meyah hissed at Iviry as the Fae limped backward, blood gushing through the hand she had pressed into her side, and if the fury within him hadn’t already consumed every waking thought and reaction, Loche would have flinched at the roar that pierced the air.
It came from his own throat—from something that had slumbered deep within him, unwilling to wake, but that now ripped through muscle and skin and flesh as he leaped forward on large golden paws.
He saw his own reflection in his mother’s wide eyes when she turned her head his way.
A lion, one he’d only seen a pelt of once, stored in the cellars of the white castle of Ellow—with gray eyes narrowed to slits and teeth as long as his arms once had been—sprang through the air, and it was the last thing his mother fucking saw as he pounced on her.
He wasn’t Loche anymore. He was no regent or human or man. He was the lion, the animal’s instincts fully overtaking his mind, and he roared again before his teeth sank into his mother’s exposed feline neck, not hesitating for a second before he ripped her entire throat out.
Iron filled his mouth, and he spat and hissed as his mother’s now human body dropped from his maw, a paw with sharp claws ripping through it before it even landed on the bloodied deck beneath—making sure not even an ounce of life remained within her—before he took his mother’s foot in his mouth and threw her broken body overboard.
Loche—or the lion, he wasn’t entirely sure—roared again, the sound accompanied by the wyvern’s war cries, and the few shifters still alive cried back in whatever form they were in, their souls somehow sensing his.
He roared for the dead around him, for the energy bolting and rushing through him, and for the people he would continue to kill, until either his lion succumbed or he’d killed every last enemy.
A hand weaved into Loche’s mane, and he turned his massive head to stare into Iviry’s blue eyes. Before he even knew what he was doing, he’d curled around her, a soft huffing sound starting in his throat, and she grinned at him—actually grinned—when he jerked his head.
His wife understood what he’d asked. While she was tall, taller even than Lessia, Loche barely felt it as she pulled herself onto his back.
Her cry of outrage mingled with his next war call, the perfect harmony ringing in his sensitive ears as Loche threw himself off the ship, letting his long legs take them toward where all ships were now gathering.
Iviry leaned over his head as the wyvern that had watched them took his side. He’d never loved her more as she whispered, “Let’s kill some fucking enemies, husband.”