Chapter 44
INISHTAR
SAERIS
FIRST CAME THE smoke.
Then came the scream.
The bloodcurdling cry painted the air with terror.
“Cut off its fucking head!”
This was the moment—this was the split second in time around which reality pivoted, where everything that preceded it was before and all that followed became after.
I was still smiling from teasing Hayden. I felt the strange shift in the pit of my stomach that came with exiting a shadow gate . . . and then we were in hell.
The sky was thick with black smoke, the air rank with it.
We were on top of a hill that overlooked a small township—small, neat little buildings with terracotta roofs below us, stretching out toward luminescent cliffs of chalk that dove into vast blackness beyond.
Fae warriors sprinted across my field of vision, swords in their hands, blood staining their skin.
The glow from campfires, kicked over and burning out of control amid the long, dry grass, washed over their faces and made them appear ghoulish.
At the bottom of the hill, one of the buildings exploded, sending a pillar of light and flame up seventy feet in the air. The ground rocked beneath my feet. I covered my head with my arms, trying to understand what the fuck was happening. And then my senses kicked in.
Hayden.
Where the fuck was Hayden?
My palms found the hilts of my short swords. The weight of the twin god swords was reassuring as I spun them around, power flaring up my arms.
The shield on my right hand lit up the chaos like a signal flare.
There he was, on his knees in the grass, choking. Books scattered the ground around him. “Hayden!”
Ten feet. Only ten feet. I could get to him.
My lungs burned as I bolted for him. He was fine.
No injuries. No blood. He tried to look at me as I crouched down in front of him, but his eyes rolled back into his head.
I slapped him as hard as I could. “No! Stay awake, Hay! There’s no time for that now.
” He regained a little control, an alertness coming back to him, pupils focusing.
“What the fuck’s happening?” he gasped.
“I don’t know. I—” Another tower of flames jetted toward the sky, briefly illuminating the hillside.
I heard the snarl before I heard the feeder.
It was a woman. Had been one once. It was naked, its breasts flat and droopping, its long hair snarled into mats.
Its ribs were visible, as if they might tear through the monster’s skin any second.
Its teeth glistened black ichor, red with blood.
It had fed.
The smoke cleared, and then there was another one, huge, clad in golden armor, the rays of a sun embellished into the blood-spattered chest plate.
It pinned a Fae warrior to the ground, its head bent to the warrior’s throat.
Its body undulated as it drank, draining the warrior dry.
The warrior’s hands groped, yanking handfuls of grass from the ground as he tried to do something . . . and then he fell still.
“Saeris! Gods, Saeris! To the left!”
Hayden’s cry shocked me from my stupor.
The naked feeder was coming. I got my blades up just in time to run her through with the points of both before she fell on me.
Light blossomed in my right hand, flowing down Erromar’s blade, and pouring into the feeder.
It lit up from the inside, its ribs stark and black as charcoal beneath the unnatural waxen white of the monster’s skin.
It trembled, vibrating, letting out an ungodly scream, and then burst into flames.
Move, Saeris. Fucking move.
My boots pounded the ground as I sprinted. My hand closed around the top of Hayden’s arm. I dragged him to his feet. “You need to run,” I yelled.
He spun around, eyes wild. “Where?” Ren had carried me to a bed my first time through a shadow gate, and I was telling Hayden he had to run?
Fuck. I didn’t know which direction to point him in anyway.
The hillside was all smoke and killing. There was no shelter here.
Nowhere for him to go. I cast around, searching for Fisher, but no . . . he wasn’t here. He—
Something slammed into me from behind. I went down, rolling, sticks and debris poking me through my clothes. A mindless groan filled my ears, and then there were fingers clawing at me, trying to open my leathers and find skin.
I slammed the hilt of a blade into the feeder’s face. It was fresh, its skin still flushed pink. A male, maybe twenty or so. Human. It let out a high-pitched keening wail. “Pleeeeeease. Please!”
More than fresh. It hadn’t fed yet. It wanted me to be its first. I threw my leg over its shoulder and flipped it, groaning with the effort. It was heavy. So fucking heavy. It was wearing armor—
Teeth snapped too close for comfort. I watched, horrified, as those teeth fell out of the feeder’s mouth and new, razor-sharp, needlelike fangs speared from its gums to replace them.
It lunged for me again, snapping its jaws together like a rabid dog, and I scissored my short swords and separated its head from its body.
I was on my feet and running back up the slope to where I’d left Hayden.
“Banking right! Right, right, right!” a shout came.
I recognized the voice. Had no time to process who it was.
Suddenly, there were feeders everywhere.
The warriors who had been evacuated from Cahlish fought them all around me, but there were more of them than there were of us.
A flicker of blistering white-hot light forked across the hillside, landing multiple strikes, and the smell of char and ash hit the back of my nose.
I blocked and I parried, throwing off each feeder as it came for me. I took arms and opened their stomachs. I claimed their heads as quickly as I could in my haste to get back up the fucking hill.
Carnage and screaming, everywhere I looked.
No Hayden to be found.
I barely paid attention as more feeders came for me and fell afoul of my blades.
Angel’s Breath crackled through the air to my right. At least I knew Lorreth was somewhere amid the fray. But where the fuck was Fisher? Why couldn’t I sense him anywhere?
Where are you? Come on, Fisher, tell me where you are!
Deafening silence rang in my ears.
Had he stepped through the shadow gate and run straight into a feeder? Was he already among the fallen, bloodless and dead? No, there was no way. I’d know. I would.
“Hayden!” I spun, slicing a gangly feeder open, nearly slipping in its rotting entrails as they spilled like wet, glistening snakes from a tear in its stomach.
It lunged for me, trying to rake me with its claws, but I slashed with both swords, carving the monster in two and sending its head rolling back down the slope.
“Saeris!” I nearly eviscerated the blood-soaked figure who came running out of the smoke; I saw the flash of gold in his mouth and stayed my hand. “Thank the gods,” Foley panted. “You’re all right. Where’s Fisher? We need a blanket approach to this, and we need it now.”
“He was with you! Didn’t you come through together?” My heart couldn’t beat any faster, so I stopped it altogether. The thunder in my ears wasn’t helping.
Foley swore in Old Fae, spinning around and peering into the melee. “I thought he might have been with you. He was right behind me. I came through just now and was met with this. Took me a second to get my head on straight. He—”
I didn’t hear what he said next. A feeder barged past him, nearly sending him to the ground in its haste to get to me.
It didn’t spare Foley a second glance. Foley was a vampire, after all—he had nothing that a feeder might crave.
Me, on the other hand? I was half Fae, and apparently the scent of half-Fae blood was still enough to drive a feeder into a frenzy.
I threw up my hands instinctively, projecting my shield, the white-blue light flaring bright. The quicksilver icon had almost taken shape in the air when the feeder barreled straight through it.
The creature hit me square in the chest, knocking the breath out of me. I didn’t need it anymore, but the impact still shocked me.
My ass hit the ground hard. My feet were up in an instant, preventing it from sinking its teeth into me, forcing it back.
“Stop!” The authority that had fallen to me when I’d been crowned queen of the Blood Court rose up inside me—I felt it there, a tangible thing that I might have been able to take hold of.
“STOP!” I repeated, imbuing the words with as much command as I could .
. . but the feeder didn’t even flinch. My command held no power over it at all.
Fuck!
I was about to drive the sword in my left hand up through its jaw and into its skull, but suddenly the feeder’s head was gone.
Red mist rained down on me, spattering the front of my leathers as Foley came into view over the feeder’s headless shoulders.
He held a weapon the likes of which I had never seen before: a length of thick chain with a wooden handle on one end and a heavy metal ball studded with vicious spikes at the other.
The spikes dripped red.
“I only swore fealty to you yesterday, and I’m already saving your life?
” he said. If it weren’t for the horror show taking place around us and the fact that neither of us knew where my mate was, I would have thought he was trying to be funny.
The decapitated feeder slumped sideways into the grass.
Foley went to help me up but then caught sight of the god swords I still held in both hands and thought better of it.
Back on my feet, I wiped my face and faced him. “Tell me he came through with you.”
“I thought he had. But when I turned around, he wasn’t there. The shadow gate closed, and . . .”
I knew it before he’d confirmed it. No matter what the circumstances were, Fisher would have answered via our bond if I’d called out to him. He hadn’t come through the gate.