Chapter 23 #2
She met his gaze. “No, but your blood will open the ward.” She produced a knife and Nero extended his palm without hesitation. The blade flashed. His blood fell in dark droplets that smoked where they touched the carved sigil. Veda did the same.
Smoke coiled upward in delicate spirals that smelled of iron and frost-burnt sage. Veda pressed her bloodied thumb into the center of the circle. Her whisper was in an old cadence Nero had never even heard from priests.
The ward shivered.
Nero felt it as a pressure against his bones, a low hum that set his teeth on edge, then a soft, unwilling release, like a clenched hand forced open.
“It will close again within less than a bell," Veda murmured, sending Eryken an understanding look. “You cannot follow."
They dropped down as a ravine opened. Slick stone tried to kill them with every step. The walls rose steeply on either side, swallowing the sky until only a blade of stars remained. Somewhere ahead, beneath, the air changed—cold turning colder, clean becoming foul and wrong.
Nero knew that wrongness; it lived in the walls of the High Temple. It was hate, and he was ashamed to think it had lived in him once too.
“Two sentries,” Veda breathed, when they hit the bottom motioning with two fingers.
Nero’s nostrils flared, scenting leather, oiled bowstrings, and old fear masked beneath incense. He glanced at her. Two nods, and they moved.
The first guard died without understanding that death had come; Nero was on him and then he was nothing but a shadow that smelled of blood.
Veda’s hand covered the second man’s mouth while Nero’s blade found the hollow beneath his ear.
They lowered both bodies into a cleft of rock, their faces turned toward stone.
No horns, no shout of death. The ravine accepted its offerings in silence.
Beyond a twist in the path, the ravine opened into a basin choked with winter grass and broken monoliths—the fallen teeth of a forgotten god. At its far side yawned a black mouth rimmed in carved wolves whose eyes had been gouged out. The Fenrir Crypts.
Nero’s chest tightened. His wolf pressed against his skin, restless, recognizing ancestral stone. The silver in his eyes sharpened the world: every runic groove, every hairline fracture in the columns, the wet gleam of blood daubed in fresh sigils above the entrance.
“Priest-marks,” Veda said, her voice a thread.
They slid into shadow. The chill deepened to a living thing that stroked the back of Nero’s neck with dead fingers. The tunnel angled down, the air tasting of damp stone.
A sound rose from below, so faint Nero at first mistook it for his own heartbeat: a chanting that scraped like bone against slate.
As they descended, the chant thickened into something rhythmic and wrong.
Male voices layered with the higher keening of acolytes, a percussive beat of palms on hollow bone that made Nero’s hackles rise.
The air stank of hot iron and rendered fat.
Veda raised two fingers: halt. Her other hand indicated a narrow alcove where the passage forked. From the left came the chant, stronger now. From the right—a draft redolent of oil and men.
“Guards approach,” she mouthed.
Nero counted heartbeats. Three shadows flowed around the bend—the first never saw his knife. Nero seized the second by the throat and spine, twisting until cartilage popped. Veda took the third.
“Move,” Veda breathed.
The right-hand corridor broadened into a gallery of low pillars etched with wolves whose ribs were stark beneath their skins. Between them ran copper wire and tiny bells. Veda swore softly.
“Trip-alarms,” she murmured Nero breathed shallowly, each inhalation a knife against the part of him that wanted to run blindly toward the chanting, even as he had to carefully step over the wires.
The gallery spilled them onto a landing that overlooked a cavern. Firelight washed the chamber below in a sick, honeyed glow. Nero’s fingers bit into the stone rail as he took it in.
A circle had somehow been carved into the floor, not ancient work but newly dug, its grooves packed with something that gleamed wetly.
Around it stood four priests in ash-gray robes, faces veiled to the eyes, knives curved like smiles in their hands.
Behind them waited a dozen Silver Guard, helms gleaming dully in the firelight, crossbows cranked and loaded.
At the circle’s heart, bound to a stone bier with braided iron, lay Casteel.
Nero’s lungs seized. He registered details with brutal clarity: the split in Casteel’s lip, the bruise darkening along his jaw, the way his chest rose and fell too quickly as he fought for breath.
Blood smeared one shoulder where hooks had anchored the bindings to his flesh.
Through their bond came a pulse so faint it barely stirred: pain contained, fear leashed.
And beyond the bier, calm as a saint at an altar, stood Doran. He wore no armor, only simple white that threw his pallor into something luminous and unclean. He held not a ritual sickle he'd seen with the priests, but a straight blade of black glass, its edge oiled and somehow smoking.
Veda’s breath hitched once. “If we—” she whispered.
She didn’t finish. The shadows at their backs breathed and became men.
A wall of heat slammed into Nero as braziers along the landing flared to life.
Wards written in ash flashed across the stone beneath their boots, blooming like frost. Pain went down Nero’s spine like liquid fire, locking the wolf hard against his bones.
Runes flared around his boots in a ring of blistering white.
A second circle flamed into being around Veda, capturing and imprisoning her with priest-magic.
It was a reaction to the Fenrir blood, corrupted by Doran.
“Welcome,” Doran called, his voice floating sounded gleeful.
Nero moved, fur charring along his shoulders, the scent of his own burnt skin dizzying. He fell to one knee, jaw clenched so hard his teeth creaked as he tried to pass through the ward.
On the floor below, Doran lifted the black glass blade, admiring the ugly glow it caught from the braziers. He looked up and met Nero’s eyes with the slow delight of a torturer presented with a fresh canvas.
“Your alpha arrives, little vessel,” he murmured to Casteel, his voice paternal, indulgent. “Shall we begin the lesson?”
Through the ragged thread of their bond, pain pulsed like a heartbeat. Casteel turned his head on the stone, searching for Nero. When he found him, his gaze steadied. His lips shaped a single word.
No.
“Do you know,” the High Priest mused, “what happens to hearts when they break? They bleed so beautifully.” He lowered the blade until its edge kissed the thin flesh just below Casteel’s sternum.
“But you’ve always been brave, haven’t you, Casteel of Abergenny?
But too weak to make your bravery into anything someone stronger couldn't manipulate.”
Nero rose, forcing the wolf through another inch of ward-burn. Muscles tore, healed, tore again.
Below, Doran’s smile widened, tender as a lover’s and twice as obscene. He did not look at wards or priests or arrows. He watched Nero struggle and reveled in it.
“You forced me to this,” he said mildly, and pressed the point of the black glass blade into Casteel’s flesh.
The sound Casteel made was small and dragged with breath—the constrained agony of a man determined not to gift his enemy with a scream. Nero felt it ripple through the bond, and it lashed him harder than any flame.
“Stop!” The word ripped raw from his throat before he knew he’d spoken. It was not a plea. It was a command that snarled with the wolf’s authority.
Doran cocked his head, delighted. “There it is,” he said softly, as if coaxing a child to speak again. The black glass sank another cruel finger’s width. Skin split, bright blood welled and ran. Casteel’s breath hitched. His eyes never left Nero.
His wolf raged, trapped, battering the confines of his bones. The bond hammered at him—Casteel’s pain, yes, but threaded with something else: apology. A vow. Love.
“Doran,” Nero said, each syllable a nail in his body's coffin. “Take me. Release him and take me.”
The High Priest’s smile barely altered. He turned the knife, an infinitesimal pivot that made Casteel’s muscles lock. “Do you think we came this far to negotiate?” His eyes lifted, serene and hateful. “I have you both.”
He clung to Casteel’s gaze, that single fixed point in a world tilted viciously wrong. “I love you,” he whispered, and knew Casteel heard him because his mate’s gaze glittered with an unspoken reply.
“Watch closely,” Doran advised, and drove the blade in another inch.
The world narrowed to the black knife swallowing Casteel’s blood, to the hitching catch of his breath and the pallor that stole over his mouth.
Nero struck the ward with everything he was; light burst in his skull.
His hands tore; his knees hit stone. The wolf clawed, howled, battered itself bloody against everything sent to keep him from Casteel.
Then Doran paused, his hand on the knife. “Surrender the wolf to me and I bind his wound. Make me take it and he dies, right now, right here.”
“No,” Casteel ground out but Nero simply lifted his hand in total surrender and slashed his own palm open. Silver flared in the wound, brighter than blood, and the smell of it—cold storm, struck iron—cut through incense and burning fat.
“I yield,” he said, throat raw. “Take the wolf’s soul—only for his life.”
Light peeled from him in shivering veils.
Silver mist poured into the air and coiled, alive with the memory of forests and home.
Doran’s face transformed—no longer vaguely humanly pleased, but rapturous, a penitent before the icon of his undoing.
He began to speak in the temple tongue, a binding litany that braided greed and command into a single strangling rope.
Nero's head fell back a scream strangled in his throat as it felt like his very insides were ripped apart.
“Now, little god,” Doran breathed to the light itself. “Come home.”