CHAPTER ONE #2
Their faces were inches apart. She could see the amber of his eyes bleeding to gold, his wolf rising to fight her magic. Could feel his heart hammering against her palm, fighting to keep beating as she drained the life from it.
"Stop," he gritted out. Not a plea. A command. An alpha's voice, even dying.
"Can't," she gasped. Because it was true. The magic had its teeth in him now, and her control was already shredding. This was why she wore the gloves. This was why she never touched living skin. Once started, the draining was almost impossible to stop—
His blood touched hers.
She didn't see the claw until it had already cut—four parallel lines across her forearm, shallow but precise. His shifted hand, half-human and half-wolf, had opened her skin with surgical accuracy.
Her blood welled up, dark and thick with magic.
His blood, seeping from where her palm pressed his chest, mixed with hers on her arm.
The world exploded.
Magic detonated between them like lightning striking bone. Orlaith screamed as power she'd never felt before slammed through her body—not her death magic, but something else, something wild and primal and absolutely overwhelming.
His magic. His wolf. His—
The claiming mark seared into existence.
She felt it brand itself onto his skin beneath her palm: a burning sigil that wrote itself in blood and magic and something older than both. Felt her own magic respond, surging up to meet his, tangling and fusing and—
No no no NO—
The backlash hit them simultaneously.
They flew apart, magic repelling magic, their bodies hurled in opposite directions by the force of what they'd accidentally created. Orlaith's back slammed into the wall hard enough to crack stone. Stars burst behind her eyes. The breath left her lungs in a painful wheeze.
She slid to the floor, gasping, her bare hand pressed to her chest. She could feel it. Feel him. A presence in her mind that shouldn't be there, foreign and familiar all at once.
Across the chamber, Vahyn had collapsed to his knees. One hand braced on the floor. The other pressed to his chest—to the place where she'd touched him.
Where the claiming mark now burned.
She could see it even from here: black lines spreading across his skin like roots, like veins, like the death-curse but different. This was hers. Her magic. Her mark.
What have I done?
Slowly, painfully, Vahyn raised his head. Their eyes met again—and this time, she felt the connection like a hook in her chest, pulling tight.
His wolf was in those eyes now. Gold bled to molten amber, inhuman and utterly focused on her. She felt its attention like a weight, like a hand around her throat, like—
Mate.
The word echoed through her mind in a voice that wasn't hers. Deep. Primal. Absolutely certain.
"No," she whispered.
But the magic didn't care.
The claiming bond settled into place between them like a shackle, like a lifeline, like a sentence of death.
Because claiming bonds drained. That's what they did. The magic would feed on his life force, pulling it into her, strengthening her while killing him. She'd marked him for death more certainly than her poisoned blade ever could have.
Three moon cycles. That's how long he had before the claiming drained him to a husk.
I've killed him, she thought with distant horror. I came here to kill him, and I've killed him in the worst way possible.
Vahyn's hand pressed harder against the mark, and she felt the echo of pain through the bond. His face was twisted in something between agony and fury.
"What did you do to me?" he growled.
The words came out before she could stop them, raw and honest and terrible:
"What did you do to me?"
Because that was the truth, wasn't it? She'd tried to drain him. He'd bled her. Their magics had touched—
And created something that would destroy them both.
Outside, in the forest beyond the temple walls, something howled. Long and mournful, sensing the surge of magic. A death-knell or a warning, she couldn't tell.
Vahyn's eyes never left hers. "You're a Blackbriar."
Not a question. A statement of fact, heavy with recognition.
"You're a Greymaw," she countered. "The last one."
"Not anymore." His voice was bitter. "Now I'm a dead man wearing a corpse's name. And you—" His lips pulled back from his teeth in something that wasn't quite a smile. "You just made sure of it."
Orlaith forced herself to her feet. Her legs shook, but she locked her knees and stayed upright through sheer stubbornness. The bare skin of her hand felt obscene, dangerous. She fumbled for her discarded glove with her other hand, pulling it back on with trembling fingers.
Too late. The damage was done.
"The claiming will drain you in three moon cycles," she said, forcing her voice to steadiness. "Maybe less, with that death-curse already eating you. I'm—"
Sorry? Was she sorry? She'd come here to kill him. She'd succeeded, just not in the way she'd planned.
But the look in his eyes stopped her apology dead.
"You're a Conclave hunter," he said flatly. "Here on contract."
She didn't bother denying it. "Yes."
"To kill me."
"Yes."
"For what crime?"
She blinked. Of all the things she'd expected him to ask— "Does it matter?"
"It does to me."
Something in his voice made her pause. Not fear. Not anger. Just... weariness. The exhaustion of a man who'd been running for too long and knew the race was almost over.
Against her better judgment, she answered. "Territorial violations. Unsanctioned hunting. Refusing summons."
He laughed. The sound was harsh, scraping, utterly without humor. "Territorial violations. As if I have territory anymore. As if the Conclave has any authority over what's left of the old clans."
"The Conclave has authority over all supernatural beings in—"
"The Conclave," he interrupted, "can burn."
The words hung in the air between them, treasonous and true.
Orlaith should have been shocked. Should have felt outrage on the Conclave's behalf—they'd raised her, trained her, given her purpose when her curse made her useless for anything but killing.
But she felt nothing.
Just the claiming bond, pulling at her chest like a fishhook. Just the awareness of him, sharp and unavoidable. Just the distant knowledge that they were both going to die because of what she'd done.
"I can break it," she heard herself say. "The claiming. There are rituals. I can—"
"No."
The word cut like a blade.
She stared at him. "What do you mean, no? This mark will kill you. I can sever the bond before—"
"Before it completes," he finished. "Before I die of it.
" He pushed to his feet with predatory grace, and she saw the moment his wolf settled back beneath his skin.
His eyes bled back to amber, though they stayed fixed on her with unnerving intensity.
"And then what? The death-curse kills me anyway, just more slowly.
At least your claiming is honest about it. "
"You want to die?"
"I'm going to die regardless." He took a step toward her.
She held her ground, though every instinct screamed to retreat.
"The curse is too far advanced. Even breaking it would kill me at this point—I don't have the life force left to survive the unraveling.
So yes, Blackbriar. I want to die. But on my terms. Not the Conclave's. Not some demon's. Mine."
The claiming bond thrummed between them, and she felt the truth of his words echo through it. He wasn't lying. He really had accepted his death.
Which made him either the bravest man she'd ever met, or the most broken.
Probably both.
"There has to be—" she started.
The temple doors exploded inward.
Lesser demons poured through the opening in a wave of shadow and teeth and burning eyes. Four of them, maybe five, moving with the jerky, wrong-jointed gait of things that didn't belong in this world.
They'd been drawn by the magic. By the claiming bond's detonation, its surge of power like a beacon in the dark.
Vahyn's hand shot out, catching her arm. "Run."
For half a second, she almost obeyed. This wasn't her fight. She could slip through the shadows, leave him to the demons, let them finish what her claiming had started. Clean her hands of this disaster and disappear.
But the claiming bond pulled, and she knew—with sick certainty—that running wouldn't work.
Not anymore.
They were bound now. For better or worse. For three moon cycles or until death.
Which, given the demons currently swarming toward them, might be measured in minutes rather than months.
"I don't run," she said.
And called her magic.