Chapter 33
I can think of no less than a hundred different things Vox needs to be doing right now, but he showed up at the docks this morning, insisting on accompanying the five of us to the waystone. He hasn’t spoken to me since that night in his bedchamber, but his black eyes wander to me frequently. Always with an edge of uncertainty.
I dare say the elf is feeling regretful for the hostile words shared between us. Or for throwing my sister off a fucking tower. Either or.
“Stay behind me once we start, and this should work,” Sin tells me.
Should. My least favorite word.
Sin stands facing the waystone, and by staying out of his sight, the seer should be blind to me. Drawing magic from Sin’s blood should agitate my own power into something lethal, and I should be able to slip into Sin’s mind, latch onto the seer’s collective, and trace the connection back to her location, creating a threshold that should allow me to hurtle both my blood and Source magics at her.
It should shatter her mind.
Sin turns to face me, stealing the breath from my lungs when he does. Because when he looks at me with those gorgeous downward eyes, a montage of images flicker in my mind. I see when they behold me as his wife for the first time, I see when they are droopy from bouncing a newborn babe on his chest, I see when they are aged and set in a face of wrinkled brown skin, and I see when they are framed by a mane of black hair threaded with silver. I see when both of us have grown old together, a privilege not bestowed to all.
I see all these versions of Sin, and I want to experience every single one.
Killing this seer won’t guarantee me a long life with Sin, but it will allow us to Bond. And if this war is going to kill me, at least I will die being sworn to the man I love. Mated. Our souls forever tangled together.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
I nod, though I must not be convincing because he takes my face into his hands and dips his head to meet my stare at eye-level. “I cannot bear living one more day without calling you my wife. Without claiming you the way I have yearned to since I first laid eyes on you, even when I didn’t understand it back then. That some primal part of me always knew you were sent to ruin who I was and forge me into a man desperate to Mark you.” His fingers trail down the sides of my cheeks, moving to cradle my jaw as he kisses me, slow and deep. When he pulls away, he raises his lips to skim them across my forehead and murmurs, “Take my blood, love. Every drop of it belongs to you anyway.”
“I hate that I have to hurt you to do this.”
The smirk he flashes me sends my heart somersaulting into my throat. “Consider it my final courting gift.”
He gives me his back once more, and I reach for his hand with one of mine. Unsheathing my dagger with the other, I run it across his palm.
Beautiful red sap pours out of him, coating my fingers in its thick, sticky warmth. Returning my weapon to my hip, I wrap both my hands around his palm and close my eyes. My magic rears up inside of me, writhing like a snake that has just been stomped on, and slithering through my veins in pursuit of its prey.
Sand scratches my throat. Gritty and coarse, it rakes across my tongue, desperate for me to sink to my knees and lap the Black Art’s blood like buttered rum. My own blood coats my veins in frost, my neck and forehead becoming slick with a wintry sheen as icepicks chip away at the vessels there.
Source.
“Open your veins, blood mage, then slam them shut,” Aeverie guides from where she stands at my left.
The soles of my feet plant firmly into the sand, having abandoned my shoes along the edge of the tiny isle when we disembarked, and I imagine my blood vessels slowly parting. A bitter cold presses in, turning my lungs to crystal as my veins suck Source into them. They suck and suck and suck, and when my vessels harden to diamond, I seal them shut, trapping Source inside.
“I’m ready,” I say, and this time, I mean it.
Sin displays no doubt of my assurance and places his other hand to the waystone, Ileana now moving to face the Black Art so that she is what the seer will glimpse when she weasels into my betrothed’s mind. I fling my collective outward and dig claws into his immediately, Sin’s presence so easy for me to sense now. His mind stirs beneath my touch like an undulating current as the waystone acts as a conduit and projects his call across the sea, his intention to reach the seer as clear as the dawn.
She tugs on his call immediately, her presence invading his mind like a swollen rain cloud. What an eager cunt. Sin gives a subtle nod to his Hand to let her know the seer is fully seated in his mind now.
“The Black Art does not appreciate being spied on,” she begins. “Your king declared an act of war by trying to coerce our prisoner into treason.”
I latch onto the seer’s collective, my talons brutally punching holes into its sides. She won’t be able to feel me, and for once, I am grateful for the bloodwitch power granting me the ability to rake my claws into her undetectably.
An attack on the psyche like this would normally leave her feeling ill in a few hours, perhaps a horrendous headache throbbing in her temples. I grind my nails in deeper, thinking about how much pain Sin’s endured in the past months from her surveillance into his mind. Unfortunately, she will not be suffering from the same throbbing tension in her temples that she caused my intended.
Because I’m going to kill her.
No one hurts my Mate.
Ileana’s role is to keep the seer engaged so she doesn’t sever the connection with Sin before I can trace the magic back to her—something we anticipated taking several minutes but feeling her inside Sin broils my blood. How dare she latch onto him and invade his mind like a godsdamned leech?
My mind melds so deeply with Sin’s, it’s as if I’m underwater, Ileana’s words garbled and distant. Carefully, I separate the seams of the seer’s mind from his until I slowly peel her back, hovering her collective just above his but no longer attached. Still immersed inside him, she won’t notice her grip has lapsed, unable to distinguish that it’s my collective that now holds her here, not his.
I don’t know how much time passes. It could be the several minutes we predicted, or it could be fleeting seconds. My mouth parts as a jagged breath razors across my chest and up my throat, fear threatening to carve its way inside my focus.
What if it doesn’t work? What if I accidentally hurt Sin in the process? What if I’m not strong enough?
As if sensing my thoughts, Aeverie quietly murmurs, “The blood, Wren. It is your instrument. Take more, then play it in only the way that you can.”
I open my eyes, and the sight of my hand covered in the Black Art’s nectar has me clenching my teeth and swallowing hard, forcing the sweet floral scent down. I run the knife across his palm again, this time deeper. Blood gushes from the slit, and my own liquid arousal leaks onto my thighs.
Sin is a god, and his blood smells fucking divine .
His hand twitches with the sudden scrape of my blade, but he otherwise remains still, letting me siphon from him. His willingness fills me with desire I can’t afford, and I have to lock my knees to keep from falling to them. From taking his cock out and milking him dry while he smears all that delicious fucking blood on my cheeks, my tits, my cunt.
For months, I barked at Sin that if we were to be Mates, he needed to trust me. That I refuse to be Bonded to someone who could not place their complete faith in me.
It’s time I extend that same trust to myself.
Foam dripping from her serrated teeth, my beast twists herself out of my veins, a snarl already vibrating in the hollow expanse of her parted lips. She tugs on her restraint, demanding… pleading.
I drop her leash, and she charges forward, tunneling through the waystone with the seer’s psyche firmly grasped in her salivating mouth. “ Die, bitch .”