Plague's Sweetest Fiend

Prologue

Thirty years ago

When the earth cracked open like an egg, it was fucking loud.

First came the sudden tremors that shook the ground, stunning everyone in my battalion. Training forgotten, our swords dropped and shouts lifted. Even our unflappable commanders went wide-eyed from the startling force.

The world heaved like it was trying to throw us off its back.

I crashed to my knees alongside dozens of others, the jolt sending pain up my bones. I tried to grip the ground like the mane of a bucking stallion, but there was no way to brace, no way to hold on.

Wildly, I looked across the training yard, searching for my brother. I shouted Trigg’s name when I saw him nearly smash through one of the archery targets, but he couldn’t hear me over the deafening roar of the violent shake.

Then the earth began to bulge, like pus filling a blister. The ground arced up in scattering lines, offshoots spreading too fast to track.

Behind me, the stable broke apart, snapping like a stick. Some of the horses managed to escape the wreckage, and I watched them stream by in a gallop, fully tacked and wholly spooked.

Our superiors were yelling, though it was impossible to make out what they were saying. I could only see their mouths moving, their hands flailing as they too failed to stay upright.

On my hands and knees, I went to the fence surrounding the training yard, but no sooner had I grabbed on to it than the whole thing collapsed, making me fall back.

With a curse, I sat up and spotted my brother again through the dust. He was helping one of our friends to the target, his mouth twisted in strain and worry.

His blue uniform was skewed from the struggle, his short brown hair blanched with dirt.

He looked so young all of a sudden, fear having drained his face of its usual gaiety.

Digging my hands into the gritty ground, I started to crawl toward him. Some soldiers were scrambling, trying to move, but others were flattened, too stunned to try.

An ominous groan made me whip my head to the left just as the barracks buckled. The screams from inside turned muffled as the three-story building crashed down into rubble.

That could’ve been Trigg and me in there.

I started to truly panic then.

“TRIGG!”

Somehow, my voice cut through the clamor. With his arms clutching the target, my brother’s fear-filled gaze snapped to me. I saw him mouth my name.

Varrik.

Only two years younger than me, he’d always followed in my footsteps.

When I went fishing as a kid, he hooked some bait and followed.

When I played music with our mother, so did he.

When I first got interested in girls, he decided they weren’t so bad either.

And when I joined the ranks, he notched his name down on the registry right beneath mine.

“I’m coming!” I shouted, but this time, even I couldn’t hear my own voice.

The shaking became so violent that it didn’t just jostle my limbs or knock my teeth in my jaw. It shook the very breath from my lungs. Rattled my brain in my skull.

I prayed to the Fates to make the earth stop.

Instead, it cracked.

As if the surface were as fragile as an eggshell.

With a gush of smoke, the bulging ground split, with me on one side and Trigg on the other.

The ferocious cleft cut the training yard in half and wrenched apart the rest of the buildings, catching people in the gaps, tearing down trees and sundering the hillsides as the crack spread toward the city with alarming speed.

I stared, mouth hanging open, my shock too great to comprehend that this was really happening. A thunderous roar then bellowed from the belly of the world, even louder than before. I shoved my hands over my ears, gritting my teeth against the onslaught, bracing for something unknown.

And the jagged cracks suddenly erupted.

My head jerked up to follow the path of the vicious red belch. Liquid fire spewed one hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet up into the air . . . and higher still.

As if the earth were battling the sky.

More magma chugged up, spilling onto the ground like seeping yolk. It spurted from the splintering earth just as blood does when it gushes from a wound.

Shouts became screams.

Shock became terror.

I swung my gaze around, taking in the horrifying devastation. My ears rang with the agonized sounds of my brothers-in-arms dying all around me while lava pumped from the gash. Some tried to run, but the flood was too fierce.

Too brutal.

It burned everything and everyone in its path. Spread harsh and smoking, gurgling as it gushed, taking over the landscape and bleeding it raw.

Heat fumed at my skin, and I looked over just in time to see lava flowing right toward me.

Pure adrenaline forced me up. I swayed, my legs bracing like a sailor caught in the middle of a savage storm, but I managed to leap out of the way.

I screamed my brother’s name again, trying to see him through the smoke, but my voice couldn’t compete with the earth’s beastly baying.

Another soldier, Hektor, fell right in front of me, his side slamming into a stream of glowing red. His scream pierced my eardrums and I pitched forward to grip his arm. I yanked, trying to pull him free.

But I pulled away half a person.

The lava was so hot it melted him right through. His muscles hung in strings, his bones dripped, his skin oozed. Stricken eyes stared up at me, his body spasming as his blood bubbled. The last of his exhale tore out, and his body heaved with gruesome death.

I dropped him and staggered back, my breath punching out of me, my thoughts glued down from the gore. Just last night, Hektor had been tossing back a drink with us at the pub, lamenting about having another year of enlistment to serve. Now, he was dead at my feet, his body melting into nothing.

I whirled around, terror pounding in my veins.

“TRIGG!”

I needed to get to the other side. Needed to find him. I lurched away from the flow as more rubble and bodies flooded past.

Take care of your brother. My mother’s voice, always in my head, always reminding me he was my responsibility.

I rushed in desperate panic toward the crack, but every time I tried to get closer, more lava spurted out. The fissure was now so widespread that I couldn’t see the ends of it. Couldn’t see where I could go around.

But—there.

A spot where lava didn’t yet flow out. Where the split wasn’t too wide for me to make the jump. I raced over, staggering with the quakes, my heart pumping, sweat dripping.

Find him.

Just as I reached it, a new spew bolted up right in front of me, nearly splashing in my face and making me skid to a stop. It arced up in a fiery spray, like it was coming from the very bowels of hell.

I tried to turn and run from the surge, but I was too slow.

Too close.

I felt it a second before that liquid fire struck out like the tongue of a serpent. It hit my back, knocking me off my feet.

The heat was so unfathomable that it seared ice-cold.

Lava poured in all around me as I lay sprawled on the ground, screaming.

It was an animalistic, rabid noise that ripped my throat to shreds.

With clawed hands, I desperately tried to get away, to move, but I had no hope.

I was caught in the torrent, swept away like a ship in the middle of a furious sea.

I smelled my own flesh crisping. Felt my skin melting. My blood boiling.

The agony was all-consuming.

I was burning, enduring ferocious pain, washing away. Away from my brother, away from life.

For seconds, minutes, hours, days—time didn’t exist.

Only pain.

I waited to die.

I wanted to die.

But . . . I didn’t.

And finally, after everything ceased except for the agony, I became aware that the shaking had ended. That the roaring had quieted, save for the echoes in my own ears.

It wasn’t until the flood splattered me against a scorched boulder that I stopped being carried off. Somehow, I managed to grip the scraped surface and roll myself out of the lava’s gush. I hacked up burning bile from my gut, and it smoked against the ground in a putrid glob.

When I looked down, I saw my entire body red and steaming. My clothes were burned away, belt gone, boots disintegrated.

But I was alive.

Hot all the way through, the tips of my pointed ears stinging, but somehow, alive.

I didn’t know it then, but I never would rid that fire from my veins.

Slowly, I staggered up the ruined landscape. On bare, blistered feet, I walked all the way back to the cracked earth where the lava first hit me. There, I found the remains of my scabbard lying on top of a chunk of charred stone.

Steaming metal glared at me from the chape, somehow still intact, even as my sword had completely melted away. I picked it up with shaking hands, staring at it as my breath heaved out and my veins smoked.

Magma continued to pump up from the gash, but slowly now. The earth no longer shook or roared or bulged, but the spewing eruptions were still ongoing, the fiery geysers reaching so high that they emptied into the atmosphere and melted away the clouds.

I searched for bodies upon the burnt earth, but there were none left to find. Only charred bones—if that. No one, nothing, was alive. When I finally found another spot in the crack that I could jump over, I hunted for any sign of Trigg. For hours, I looked.

Hoping.

Demanding.

He had to be alive. I had to find him. If I survived, he did too. That’s what I told myself. Because there couldn’t be a world where he was gone and I was still here. Where he didn’t follow me. Where he wasn’t two steps at my back, ready to take on whatever new notion I came up with.

Take care of your brother.

Ash coated my face and clustered against my eyelids in damp clumps. Night began to fall, but the smoking spew blocked the sky so that not even the moon or stars could pierce through. The glow of the ever-expelling lava was the only light I could use to look.

So, it was under that bleak red tinge that I finally found him.

Our uniforms had us all outfitted the same, but it was the steaming shoe that made me stop in my tracks and ripped the breath from my lungs.

His boot was unmistakable, because of the blue paint just barely visible upon the sole. I’d made that strip. I’d painted that line, just to fuck with him during uniform check. He’d had to run seven miles that day, and he retaliated of course—our favorite thing to do.

But now, that was all that was left of him. Just that boot with a smear of paint, and a single leg attached to it, the fabric of his uniform still smoldering.

Despair and denial went to war within me, my ribs collapsing with a fuming breath.

“Trigg.”

Tears spat down my cheeks. My body shook. I lifted my face and roared up at the bloodied sky as my fists pounded the blackened earth.

I mourned my brother. My fellow soldiers. My entire fucking world.

I grieved there until my lungs squeezed from the surrounding smoke enough to cinch my sobs.

With ragged breaths, I knelt over what was left of Trigg and tried to pry away his boot, but it was melted to the ground.

My jaw locked against bile, but I refused to leave without any piece of him.

Refused to not have him with me, as he’d always been.

So I gathered his pant leg instead, careful to get as much of it as possible and avoiding the charred skin beneath. I smothered the smoke that tinged the sides, and then coiled the fabric over my wrist, securing it as gently as I could.

“I’m sorry, Trigg. I’m sorry.” My words hovered, tears blurring my vision and choking my throat.

I blamed myself. I blamed the Fates too. Cast them a hateful glare as I looked up at the sky. With fury suffusing my grief, I cursed them with a ruthless tongue until I could no longer speak.

I didn’t know it then, but I was right to curse them.

Because this was their fault. Everyone knew the Fates favored us. Created us. Formed our world. And they embedded liquefied power straight into the earth’s core—and that’s what came spilling out.

Molten power.

All because they wanted to give our earth more magic, more beauty, more everything. For centuries, that power rooted up past mantle and crust, budding through the surface to flourish, making our world bloom with bounty.

But too much of a good thing can be dangerous.

And our earth couldn’t hold it all in. Not anymore.

So it burst.

I didn’t know it then, but the crack had spread much farther than I could have ever imagined. Across an entire continent, across multiple territories. Our sphere now held a gaping mouth right at the middle, hurling magma like a dragon roaring out flame.

Lands were ravaged. Cities burned. Air polluted.

Millions of fae who were caught in the eruption died, just like my brother.

But some fae—very, very few—survived.

Like me.

We came into contact with pure molten core power, and instead of perishing, our bodies were infused with it.

I didn’t know it then, but that burning heat that engulfed my veins and stung the tips of my ears was new power taking root. What the Fates originally gave to the earth was now a magic that flowed through our bodies.

And we needed that magic.

Because power wasn’t the only thing that would come out of these cracks. Something else just as deadly was soon to follow, and we would have to face that too.

But I didn’t know it then.