Chapter 53
Chapter Fifty-Three
Fenix
The dark fae general’s blood is still on my claws when I land back at the eyrie.
I shift back to human on the upper ledge, and the gathering crowd parts as I push past, taking the corridors, bound for our quarters.
I pass soldiers, healers, and eyrie residents who come to offer aid—all of them looking at me with something between awe and wariness.
News of me taking the dark fae general will have been swift to spread. I ignore every last one of them.
She’s coming. She’ll be landing with Atlas soon.
But I can’t face her here. Not with so many people.
And even before I see her, I know her eyes are full of questions I am not yet ready to answer.
For Molly.
She heard me. Through the bond, she felt it all—the rage, the name, the century of it. And she does not understand.
She will.
But first, I need to remember where it began.
One hundred years earlier…
“Steady, young warrior. No one will hurt you.”
Ah! What the fuck is this trickery? Get out of my head!
I wrestle for freedom from the giant claw even as I wrestle to get the voice from my head.
“He is bold,” the imperious voice announces again. “I like him.”
“He is frightened and has a coarse tongue,” another voice, this one dry, interjects.
A shadow falls over me, and I look up to find another griffin right before us, this one has gray wings with flashes of lighter steel.
“He can hear us,” the sardonic voice adds.
The gray griffin stops, head twisting and whirling, silver eyes inspecting me.
“Interesting,” a new and superior voice says—I would swear it comes from the gray griffin.
Then the air seems to implode, and where the gray griffin stood is a tall, built man with long black hair and simple leather armor.
I might scream.
Fine, I do scream, and back up into another… man.
“Where the fuck did you come from?!” I twist to eyeball the bastard who has me by the scruff of the neck. This one is no less impressively built, with short ash-blond hair… and a long, fancy silk jacket. “A little overdressed, aren’t you?” I snark.
Ash blond quirks a brow.
Black snorts a laugh.
“We are griffin shifters, lad,” ash blond says. “This is what I was wearing before the fae hordes decided to raid a peaceful community under our ward.”
His eyes are narrowed. I gulp, aware that I am part of the dark fae horde by association.
“A thrall,” the formerly grey griffin says tiredly—Atlas. “And scared witless. Put him with the others.”
“I am not fucking scared!” I announce, even though I am.
“He can’t go with the others,” ash blond counters—Darrion.
Gods, they are in my fucking head again!
Wait? Why can’t I go with the others? What special fuckery do they reserve for me? A sudden high scream redirects our attention.
Molly, her finery covered in mud and blood, thrashes against a soldier who is trying to carry her away. I don’t think—I react, shoving out of the griffin bastards’ hold and charging the soldier who has Molly.
Shoulder to his belly, I pitch a man twice my size away and drop to my knees in a mirror of Molly, hands up and out. “Molly! It’s me, Fenix.”
She claws frantically at her throat like she might get the collar off. “Stop, lass. You’re alright. These men are not going to hurt you.”
“Her master is either dead or fled through the portal,” Atlas says coldly, coming up beside me and motioning the soldier away. “So too whatever glamour he used upon her.”
“Get it off,” Molly sobs.
“Help her,” I demand.
Atlas rounds her. The air whooshes, and a giant griffin towers over us all. Molly barely notices. Two great talons hook the collar. Metal snaps like a dry twig, and the collar falls away.
She falls sobbing into my arms. “Tell me it is over, Fenix.”
I look to Atlas, once more a man, recognizing he is in charge.
“It is over,” he says. “We will take you back to our community, where the injured can be treated and given food and rest.”
“Before you make us another kind of slave,” I sneer.
“No,” Atlas says, his voice clipped like I have just slapped him with the gravest insult…
which I suppose I did. “You are free to leave at any time, or now. But these mountains are unforgiving to the uneducated, and I would rather not have to rescue you again. My lands include many towns, villages, and farms where honest men and women can find simple work as befits their skills.”
“Well, alright then,” I say, feeling like a chump now.
A man approaches and addresses Atlas. “We’ve managed to salvage a few wagons and enough horses to get the injured to Acton Trussell. Their leaders and a few of their soldiers fled.”
“General Adharde?” I ask, not caring that I’m interrupting.
Something ancient brushes against my mind—feathers ruffling, a beak clacking in amusement.
Darkan? Darrion’s griffin. How does that even work? Why does his griffin have a different name?
Atlas glares down at me with the look of a man whose patience has been tested to the limit. “You are lucky our griffins like you.” Then he turns to the soldier at his side expectantly.
“The general has fled, my lord.”
“He needs to pay.” I nod my head at Molly, who still clings to my arms. “He was the one who put Molly in a collar.”
“Sentiments we share,” Atlas says. “You are not the first raiding party he has brought into our lands, and nor will you be the last. They come to top up their thrall ranks, to steal our people, gems, or both. The dark fae are portal masters, and General Adharde has eluded us for many years.”
“I want to join the fight.”
Molly sobs quietly, and I comfort her as best I can, keeping my hands gentle the way my mother once comforted me.
“We believe you, lad,” Darrion says dryly.
Present day…
A century of waiting. And it is done.
I have carried Molly’s face with me longer than most humans live. The girl with the brown eyes and the gold collar. The girl who, against all odds, married a baker and had grandchildren and died warm in her bed surrounded by love.
She deserved that ending. And Adharde deserved his.
But there is someone else now. Someone who felt my rage tear through the bond like a blade and has no notion of why. She will be frightened. She will have questions. And she has earned the truth of me—all of it, even the parts I do not speak of.
Especially those.
Violet
I rode back with Atlas. We are home. And how good it feels to acknowledge it as such.
“Your other mates are waiting in our quarters,” Atlas tells me.
Tomorrow, I will shore up for the road ahead as Pride Queen, supporting our people as we all deal with the fallout of the war.
But today, and now, my heart is in turmoil.
These events will take time to reconcile.
But I also accept that I am at my limit mentally and physically, and that I need rest, and to connect, even if briefly, with my mates.
As we enter our quarters, I find Rafe, Lark, and Darrion already present. Then they part, and the final piece is revealed—Fenix.
His posture is guarded, but his pretty hazel eyes hold mine without reserve.
“Come,” Atlas says, guiding me over, and then speaking to the others, “Let us give the two of them some time.”
Fenix steps forward, and everyone else steps back as though by silent cue. “You have questions. And I will answer them as honestly and plainly as I can.”
Hearing the passage of feet and the closing of the main door, signifying that we are alone, I reach out and take his hand.
He looks down at it, then lifts it to his lips and kisses it in an unusually gallant gesture for a man who is not gallant at all.
And then he sweeps me into his arms, heads over to the comfortable couch before the window, and sits me on his lap where he tucks my head against his shoulder.
“For Molly!”
I sense the restlessness in him. My heart is beating too fast, clinging to his actions in holding me now. “You don’t have to tell me, if it is painful.”
“Yes, I do,” he says bluntly. “And even if Atlas had not just warned me to make this right or else…” There is a hint of humor, and it settles me somewhat even as I brace for what is to come.
“I do not talk about it often. Almost never. But I was not born in these lands. I was born into servitude, as were my parents and their parents before. Our home was the fae citadel, in another land through a portal, far from here. I don’t remember my father.
My mother died when I was six. I worked in the kitchens mostly.
My only other duty was feeding the captured orcs. ”
A sting pricks the back of my eyes, and a single tear trickles out to dampen his shirt.
I already know this tale is not going to be good.
“I witnessed how they make the rocklings. Force-feeding orcs tar from the Raba swamp. It changed them. Broke them. Made them huge, monstrous, and unfeeling. They called them pets. But rocklings are soulless beasts who follow the orders of the dark fae generals and lords they are bound to for life.”
“Humans, orcs, we were all worthless and expendable to the dark fae. They used us until we had no use left… and if some of the younger ones should take their fancy, they’d keep them as a different kind of pet.”
My tears fall in earnest. I press against his chest, feeling his heart pound beneath my cheek.
“She’d only been working in the kitchen a month, stolen from a farm far away during one of their raids where they top up the thrall ranks. Molly was just fourteen summers old when she caught General Adharde’s eye.”
Bitterness laces his tone. “I didn’t know her well.
Not at all, truth be told. But I remember her eyes that day, when General Adharde picked her from the line-up and had his men take her away.
The next time I saw her was when I was rounded up and taken to join a raiding party working in the food and supply wagons.
Only she didn’t look anything like the young kitchen maid I’d once known.
Now she was dressed in silk with a gold collar around her throat.
And her eyes were as vacant as the rocklings…
Fourteen fucking summers… And I knew what they did to them.
How they drained their blood over and over until they were nothing but a husk.
And other things too… and she was just a fucking child. ”
He shakes with the potency of his rage.
I’m shaking too. For Molly, for Fenix, for the many others who suffered the same fate.
“They must have miscalculated something… Or got caught off guard. The griffins came. Tore their rocklings apart and sent the general and his men scattering back into the portal.”
“He abandoned Molly there and the rest of us expendable humans. The bastard. And I’m glad he did. For once he crossed the portal, the glamour upon her was gone… It was Atlas himself who tore the collar from her throat.”
I’m fighting back the sobs now as his fingers stroke gently through my hair.
“Aye, it took her a while to heal. But the people of these lands are good and always ready to find homes and places for people such as Molly and me. She found a place working in Acton Trussell.
“My path took a different turn. As I found out that day, I could hear the griffins. All griffins. And that is not an ordinary thing.” The smile is back in his voice.
“I was a surly bastard, full of anger at the world, along with a hunger for dark fae blood… I used to call in at Acton Trussell, where Molly lived, whenever I could and check in on her. A few years later she’d up and wed a local baker and, well, as they say, the rest is history—for they went on to have a whole brood of kids… and grandkids.”
He glances down at me. I see genuine warmth in his eyes as he swipes my tears away with his thumb.
“Grandkids?” I am trying to reconcile the timelines. He speaks as though it were a long time ago, and I realize I don’t know how old Fenix is.
“She lived a long and full life,” he continues.
“Had she stayed with the dark fae, I doubt she’d have lasted more than a few years before her mind or body broke.
But she was a strong lass. A strong woman.
And that is a testament to her resilience that she put her past behind her to be a wife and a mother. ”
“She is gone now?”
“She is.”
“You made a vow to her?”
“Not in a sense that she would ever know. But inside.” He taps his chest. “I vowed to myself that one day, General Adharde would pay. And Atlas must have seen something in me. He worked me hard, gave me a focus and a place here at the eyrie. Trained with the young apprentices, rode griffins, and when the time came, I was taken to meet the sleeping griffins.”
“That is how you met Galeor?”
“I felt him almost at once. Stirring for me. Although it was ten years later before he finally roused. Chose me. And our souls bonded… I am young for a griffin. Barely over a hundred turns old. Time moves differently for our kind. Just as it will now for you, Rafe, and Lark.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for telling me. I’m glad that I know.”
All this time, I thought Fenix was the simplest of my mates. I could not have been more wrong.