Chapter Two
“They sent you to destroy me?” he asks, his tone tinged with dark, soulless humor. “You are nothing.”
“I’m your death, monster.”
“You’re a smidge on the pages of history,” he says.
I refuse to let him rattle me. Because of my small size and slender build, I’ve been underestimated my entire life, and this thing is no different.
But his misjudging who and what I am is something I know I can use to my advantage. “Cursed One, you’re under divine sanction. Your hunt ends tonight.”
He laughs. “Ends? My dear, it hasn’t even begun.”
His power skims over my skin, unsettlingly intimate. Goosebumps rise, but I hold my aim steady even as my pulse betrays me. The stories never said his voice could sound so rich and seductive, like temptation itself.
My training allows me the distance I’m sure his victims have no hope of finding, because the pull is real. Any mortal would be drawn to him.
Any. My mind allows me to see an unappetizing truth. He might have a magnetism beyond the normal, but he’s also dangerously attractive.
It’s an air of accessibility I know is not real.
Still… Even I can marvel at the tragic beauty of him, at how much he looks like a masterpiece abandoned by its creator. Divine once but fractured now. And all the more appealing because of it. That damaged perfection.
But it doesn’t matter.
Ending him is all that matters, and I need to time my shot.
“It ends. Tonight.”
“A female hunter.” The creature tilts his head. “How foolish to send you here to face me, the devourer of hearts. A trembling mortal girl.”
I grit my teeth. “I don’t tremble.”
He chuckles. “Not yet.”
I take a cautious step forward, heart hammering. The closer I get, the more I feel it—the pull, the ache, the…wrongness. My bow feels heavier in my hands as I lift it.
I steady myself, let my training blank it all out. Now the bow is sure. It’s part of me.
I release the arrow.
It flies true. The silver glints through the red night, but the instant before it hits its mark, he vanishes. The arrow strikes the tree where he’d just stood and embeds into the wood.
His laughter drifts around me again, closer this time. “You missed.”
I spin, but he’s already gone. How…? Only the faintest shimmer lingers in the air where he passed, like heat rising off desert sand.
I curse under my breath and draw another arrow. The trees creak. Somewhere above, wings beat and wind pushes down on me. And then, nothing.
He’s toying with me.
I force my breathing to steady. “If you want me dead, come and try your luck.”
A pause. Then, softly, “I don’t want you dead.”
The words shouldn’t sound like a promise. But they do.
Another gust of wind sweeps over me, and this time ash and feathers scatter. A single tattered feather drifts to the ground at my feet.
I pick it up. Warmth pulses from it, sizzling against my palm.
How strange…
The bottom of the feather is razor sharp and it nicks me. I shake my hand. It’s just a graze.
I tuck the feather into my belt and step carefully among the fractured pillars. The air is colder here, heavier. Moonlight washes over the crumbling marble, highlighting the jagged edges like the ribs of some ancient beast.
The wind stirs again.
Instinct fires before thought. I nock another arrow, spin toward the sound, lift the point to the trees, and release.
This time the shot hits.
A strangled breath breaks through the dark. He crashes from the treetops, branches snapping under his weight, wings flaring uselessly as he falls. He hits the stone floor of the temple ruins with a brutal thud.
Silence swallows the forest.
My heart slams against my ribs. He lies sprawled among the broken dais. The pale light washes over his bare skin, over the faint glow of the arrow shaft embedded in the center of his chest.
I swallow.
With eyes closed and body still, he appears to be dead.
And the part of me that should feel victory feels something unsteady instead. Something tight and wrong and unwanted.
Sliding the dagger out of my belt, I step closer.
Even his wings are unmoving, but there seems to be no blood. Not a drop. The wound appears clean. Dry.
Do cursed beings bleed? I’m not sure. The monsters I’ve always hunted bled.
I edge in until I’m standing over him.
Dagger raised, I lean in, needing to check. Needing to be sure the Cursed One is truly gone. That this kill, which feels too easy, isn’t simply a trick, so I reach out my hand—
His eyes shoot open.
My fingers touch his chest.
“No…” he hisses.
A sharp pain spears through the center of my breasts. A blinding white light erupts between us, stealing away the darkness and swallowing both of us, the forest, everything, whole.