Chapter 25
One moment, Raina is in my arms on the cusp of bliss.
The next, she’s clambering off me, scrambling half naked across the ground toward a crow perched on a tuft of moss.
The bird takes off, wings flapping wildly, but Raina lunges, hand darting out like a strike of lightning, and grabs the creature by the wing.
She flings the crow to the ground, its screeching caw enough to wake the Ancient Ones, and before I can do anything more than sit up, she’s driving a knife through its thick chest.
“Gods’ balls, what in the bloody blazes?” I get up and go to her. My cock is still raging hard, and I’m lingering in a haze of lust, even though the woman I want has crow blood splattered across her bare chest.
Breathing heavy and fast, she jerks her hand back, bringing the knife with it. The sound of the blade leaving the bird is a disgusting squelch in the night.
I haven’t seen a blade in Raina’s possession since our moments on the village green, save for the Littledenn dagger I gifted her—the one I slipped from her thigh minutes ago.
But the blade she held to my throat wasn’t on her person when I collected her from the village.
Or at least I don’t think it was. In truth, I checked her for weapons and only found an empty belt strapped to her thigh.
Hel had a knife, though.
Raina looks up at me, her beautifully marked torso painted in blood. Her glassy eyes are wide and hard, a crimson-slicked knife in one hand, a dead crow pressed beneath the other.
Gods. Virago, indeed.
And yet, I’m still stupidly aroused. Maybe more so.
Shaking it off, I kick the dead bird away and, after a few moments, crouch before Raina. She’s already lowered the blade, shielding it behind her back like she’s trying to hide it from me. She takes a deep inhale and sits on her heels, then blows out a long breath.
“Want to talk about it?” I ask with a half-smile, an effort to dismantle some of the crackling energy and tension in the air. “I’m not sure what this was all about,” I gesture to the slaughtered crow, “or where you got that knife, but I’m all ears if you’d like to tell me a story.”
She glances down at her bloody breasts and back at me.
“Ah, that won’t do.” I procure a couple of cloths from the pack along with the bowl of melted snow from beside the fire—the bowl that she said belonged to her mother. “Join me?” I ask and motion to the log.
With the knife still clenched in her hand, she sits with me. She’s shaking, though not from fear. Rage rolls off her, and I figure she’ll tell me what’s wrong when she’s ready.
I slide a warm, wet cloth across her skin, following the pattern of her witch’s marks, which sparkle delicately in the firelight. I still want her so much, even though there’s a blade in her grasp and fury shadowing her eyes. Her violence does things to me that it probably shouldn’t.
It’s strange, washing her like this—her face, hands, body—but she lets me, almost like she needs me to. Outside of the bizarre crow murder, she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I glance at her hand, at how white her knuckles are, like she wouldn’t let go of that knife for anything. Setting the bowl aside, I retrieve her discarded bodice and undergarment. The heat of her attack is probably still boiling in her blood, but the cold will eventually set in.
Finally, she looks at the knife, then at me, and turns to clean her hand and the blade in the water, drying the weapon on moss. When I step close again, she accepts the bodice but keeps the knife at her side, out of my sight.
I extend a waiting hand. “I can hold the blade for you.”
She shakes her head, tucks the knife between her knees, and starts struggling into her clothes.
“At least let me help with the laces?”
She nods, and though it’s the last thing I want to do, I sit behind her, straddling the log, and help her dress. The moment we shared has passed, and that’s probably best. We’re in the midst of a terrible situation, one where high emotions can easily twist into unbidden desires.
She held a knife to my throat and almost left me for dead, the only other person in the vale she knew to be hanging on to a thread of life.
This lust—this attraction—will lead Raina to a rude awakening once we’re safe at Winterhold.
There’s so much she doesn’t know about me.
My darkness and her darkness are two very different things.
I’m nothing if not one big secret. Far from the kind of man she needs in her life.
Knowing that still doesn’t make me want her less.
After the last ribbon is tied, she retrieves the thigh belt, straps it on, and swaps out the old dagger for this new blade, still turned away from my sight.
She slips the dagger in her boot and returns to the log, surprising me when she tucks herself between my knees, clasps my face in her hands, and kisses me again. It’s a kiss that’s so sensual and deep I’m left breathless and starving for more when she pulls away and presses her forehead to mine.
Gods, I ache for this woman in my bones. Like I’ve known her for an age.
“You can’t keep kissing me like that, or we might never leave this place,” I tell her. My heart races like I’m a boy again, darkness and secrets be damned. “Worse yet,” I add, “I might never learn why you hate crows so much.”
It’s a bad joke given what happened in the vale, but a moment of levity is needed.
At last, the tension lifts, and a smile tugs the corner of her mouth, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. “The Prince of the East has been following us,” she signs. “His crows have been watching.”
It takes a moment for her words to sink in, but then…
I close my eyes on a sigh, feeling like a damned fool. Of course, he has.
Of course, a prince who can command a flock of crows would use them as spies. There is, after all, an all-seeing eye on his flag.
“But it is more than that,” she adds. “He has been watching me.” She pats her chest.
I frown, not liking the path this story is taking. “Through the birds?”
“Yes. And he comes to me when I sleep.”
My blood goes cold. “Why did you not tell me? And what do you mean, he comes to you?”
She shrugs and taps two fingers against her temple. “He appears. In my mind. It happened just now. He asked what my marks mean and thanked me for the show, and for…”
I narrow my eyes when she pauses. “For…what?”
She glances toward her leg—toward that knife—and after a moment of hesitation, unfastens the leather strap of her dagger belt with a trembling hand.
“This blade belonged to my father. He found it on the Malorian seashore when I was very small. He was a guard witch for the Northland Watch. He called it a…” Her hands go still again, and she bites her lip, the look on her face one of internal strife.
“You can trust me, Raina.” I push a lock of hair behind her ear. “I swear it.”
She unsheathes the blade and holds it before me in one hand. With the other, she signs, “A God Knife.”
My mind stumbles around her words, maybe because I’m still torn between desire and utter confusion, but…
I look at the blade. Really look at it. There’s no blood covering it now. No lovely hand wrapped around its hilt. No stunning woman hiding it from my sight.
My magick, buried and held to task, wails like an animal in a trap.
Shaking, I stare, breaking out in a chilled sweat.
It’s been so long since I last held the knife, so long that I didn’t recognize it at first glance.
I don’t sense it anymore. The blade is still black as midnight, and the Stone of Ghent still shines, but any bond I ever had with this creation feels broken—at least for me.
“This is fucking impossible.” Instinctively, I push away from her. My heart trips over itself, and I can hardly breathe. “There was only ever one God Knife, and it vanished many, many years ago.”
I press my hand to my chest, seeking power I cannot reach.
She blinks once, watching my reaction so closely. “But it is real,” she says. “You know what a God Knife is?”
I have to fight not to scoff at that. “Yes, I know what the God Knife is.” I scrub my hand down my face, certain I’m frozen in a nightmare. “But you shouldn’t, and you certainly shouldn’t have it.”
On impulse, I reach for the knife, but Raina’s too fast. She’s up and two strides away—knife sheathed in her thigh belt—before my hand can get so close as an inch from the hilt.
My mind still feels like I’ve fallen into a broken reality, even more broken than the one I’m currently in, trying to move all the pieces back to their correct places so I can make sense of what this means.
One of the pieces slides into place.
“Was that the knife you put to my throat? Have you had it all this time?”
She nods but then shakes her head like she’s confused as to how to answer. There’s no denial on her face, and why would there be? She owes me nothing, and she certainly owed me nothing before.
“Hel had it,” she signs. “I thought I lost it in the fire. I took it from near her cage.”
I never saw it. Never took the time to notice.
The shadow wraith used my dagger when it came after me on the ice, but when it attacked me in the wood?
So much was happening, and so fast, that I can’t remember what knife the girl held.
All I know is that the wraith had permission from its prince to end my life, called me sorcerer, and tasted the ancient shade within me.
That thing—and very possibly the Prince of the East—knows more about me than most anyone.
Heart pounding, I stand, hands raised in placation as another piece of our situation sinks and settles in my mind, followed by another and another until I’m imagining all sorts of fallout.
Raina has no idea the power she’s holding, how this weapon could turn the tide of our entire world if it falls into the wrong hands.
And the wrong hands are working very, very hard to acquire it.