Chapter 20
Brand was up and after Lunara the second he stopped seeing stars, the others slower to recover from whatever the fuck she’d pummeled them with.
A problem for another time.
He leapt the rest of the way down the hill, boots tearing through soft, fertile soil. He ignored the produce he was ravaging—ignored her cryptic fucking words, doing their best to send him into an episode—and focused only on catching her.
Her hair streamed behind as she raced away, her strangled whimper as she hit the village outskirts loud enough to reach him even this far back.
“Lunara!” he shouted, desperate for her to stop and fucking think. “Please!”
He crossed some invisible line just as he was about to reach her and the fetid smell of decaying flesh hit him like a solid wall, even through his likely-broken nose.
His steps faltered and death forced its way into his lungs, demanding he breathe through his mouth so it could deposit its rancid essence onto his tongue, insisting he taste its devastation.
“Fucking shite,” he wheezed, coughing against the back of his hand. “Lunara, wait!”
Brand readied his power—to throw up a wall, an enclosure, something. Anything to stop her from possibly running headlong towards her own fucking end like an absolute—
That’s when he saw it. The blood.
Everywhere.
The tall, wooden longhouses were bathed in it. Indistinguishable pieces and parts littered the ground and rooftops alike, and Brand had to swallow back the rising bile.
Sisters fucking save them.
For some reason, his gaze fixed on a bed of flowers tucked up against the nearest home. On the yellow, sunlit blooms that were almost deranged as they fluttered in the breeze, untouched and ignorant of the tiny hand lying too still beneath their stems.
His feet tried to stop him right there—to root him to the ground in the miserable safety of that one horrific sight, instead of carrying on into whatever atrocity he was about to find—but Lunara’s choked sob wrenched him forward, propelling his legs into obedience.
Her speed was a mercy. Focused on her, the countless bodies were little more than streaking smudges as the world blurred by.
Brand followed Lunara between buildings and into the middle of the village where a tower kept watch over the massacred landscape. She stopped in the center of it all, tears streaming down her face as she seemed to orient herself, searching amongst the carnage.
It was wrong, so wrong, to see her there with blood soaking the hem of her dress, crimson droplets splattered across her face and shoulders from the puddles of it they’d run through.
Puddles.
Her head finally tilted up, her eyes locking on the watchtower, and she raced around the support beams to fling herself upon the ladder on the other side.
“Don’t—”
Brand lost his footing in the gore beneath his boots. He thrust his arms out to catch himself, retching at the squelching softness his fingers encountered, and couldn’t ignore his surroundings any longer.
His mind blanked.
He didn’t understand how his hands had gone from clutching Lunara mere moments ago, to being buried in the open chest cavity of a Wolflord.
How he’d just been looking into her impossibly blue eyes and trying to figure out how to heal whatever rift he’d accidentally formed between them, but now he was being met with glazed, golden ones that lifelessly pleaded with him from a face that had been peeled away.
Eyes so similar to Mag’s.
He blinked and jerked back, just for his sight to snag on a female’s mangled body, black streaks marring the skin that had been left behind.
On twisted limbs that battled for space amongst a sea of internal organs.
On contorted mouths locked eternally in their silent screams. Everywhere he looked, piles of hair and bone and teeth and blood.
Brand couldn’t breathe.
This wasn’t the cost of warfare—an unfortunate brutality he was well used to. Even when violence was needed, when he was required to use fist and sword alongside his brethren, it wasn’t this.
This was unspeakable.
Innocents, ripped away from their laundry and harvesting. Cut down in the midst of flirtation and laughter. Children in pieces, their ball still on the ground from the game they’d been playing. Mates slaughtered side-by-side, unable to protect their families.
Baldrir’s message came into focus—all too clear, too dreadful. The threat it was meant to be.
Glynmor thinks she’s safe and well, tucked tight in her field of green. But what do you and her flesh have in common? I know what I hope it will be.
Brand gagged as he righted himself, willing his limbs to work and his lungs to stop gasping.
He would’ve thought an eternity had passed, but Lunara’s feet were only just leaving the top rung of the ladder.
Fuck the message, he could deal with it later.
His greater half thrashed when she disappeared from view, clamoring to reach her. Ignoring the cold sweat that had broken over his brow, he stumbled through the mess, reaching the tower as Magnus tore into the village square.
Brand had never seen that look on his brother’s face before. Had never witnessed him freeze in utter disbelief, shock stilling his limbs.
“Help me!” Lunara’s voice was breathless above, harried.
It jolted Brand into action, and he threw himself up the ladder and onto the tower platform. It was dim beneath the roof, but he spotted her in the corner instantly, crouched over something.
Someone.
Weeping, fucking Sisters.
Here, in the frontier lands of Thodelebor, was a Fae. It was too hard to tell which species the female was under the carnage caking her skin. The Tempusrealm of Kohamaia was home to so many different types, he might struggle to know even if she were freshly clean.
Still, a single, spiraled curl had avoided the mess, its honeyed color shifting to lavender in a ray of sun that broke past the eaves.
A prismatic glow gathered in Lunara’s hands. “Tear the roof down. Now,” she said, voice curt. “I need the sunlight. She needs it.”
The tower rattled as Brand moved to obey, something in him incapable of ignoring her commanding tone. His teeming questions could be answered later.
Magnus pulled himself onto the platform and pushed past Brand before he could climb out, hopping up onto the low wall with grace that shouldn’t be possible for a male his size. “I’ll do it.” His brother’s rumbling voice was a shell of itself. “You stay with her.”
Solyrian crept through in bits and pieces as shingles fell to the ground, revealing just how horrible a state the Fae was in.
Her face was ruined and at least one arm was broken.
Gouges were raked across her flesh, her short dress in tatters.
Even with the light pouring in, Brand couldn’t accurately place the color of her skin.
She was little more than a heartbreaking splash of red and black and grey.
“What can I do?”
As soon as Magnus finished clearing the roof away, Lunara moved to lay her hands on the female’s chest. “Nothing. Unless you—”
Her words were cut off by her own tortured screams the second she made contact.
Brand fell to his knees beside her, shouts sounding from the ground. He had no words to spare for Hedda and Faldir, no voice to reassure them as he grabbed onto Lunara’s shoulders and was consumed by such searing agony that his body seized.
His teeth clamped down, right through his own tongue, eyes rolling back in his head. He couldn’t make his lungs work. Couldn’t let go. Couldn’t—
Relief was instant as he was thrown to the side, Hedda roaring over him.
And still, Lunara screamed.
“What should we do?” Faldir dropped beside Lunara, eyes wide, a look akin to panic on his face. Something about the way he was looking at her, like he actually cared…
“Don’t fucking touch her,” Brand ground out, unable to discern whether it was the twisting jealousy in his gut or concern for his friend fueling the words.
Fucking territorial Demon shite.
Hedda stood silent, looking back and forth between him and Lunara, and he could see the cogs turning in her mind.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, shaking his head as he crawled across the wooden boards beneath him until he was by Lunara’s side again.
She gave him a pointed look, nodding. “I’m thinking you’re the only one who shouldn’t ‘fucking touch her,’ as you so delicately put it, Your Highness.” With that, Hedda wrapped her arms around Lunara and tore her away.
They tumbled to the ground, the sudden silence deafening. Brand lunged to gather Lunara from his Second, cradling her against him and murmuring things like I have you and just breathe and don’t fucking scare me like that ever again as he rocked back and forth.
Hedda groaned, rolling to all fours. “Weeping Sisters, even I felt it.”
“I know it was a bleeding mistake,” Lunara mumbled, lids fluttering as she half-consciously tried to free herself from his hold. “Yes, yes. Perfect. Wonderful advice. Your logic is flawless, as ever.”
She was speaking complete nonsense, her tone sarcastic.
Confused, Brand cleared hair away from her pale cheeks, her skin clammy beneath his touch. “Shh. It’s fine. You’re fine.”
Her eyes shot wide when he said that, gaze scanning his face like she wasn’t sure where she was, who he was. He saw the moment she regained control, and was already mourning the loss of her in his arms before she’d even started scrambling away.
“She… I don’t…” Lunara thudded onto her backside, fighting to detangle her skirts as she dragged herself over to the Fae.
Brand gasped, ready to wrench her back when she lifted a hand and let it hover bare centimeters above the female’s body.
He trembled with the desire to rail at her, to save her from her own bloody recklessness, but he forced his mouth to stay fucking shut.
He’d done enough damage today, even if he didn’t have the slightest clue what he’d done to set her off.
Either time.