Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Crocodile House, Blood Kingdom
Lanlin
How dare Horus kidnap my blood bond Omega? My Queen?
To touch her is a death sentence.
I shake with feral rage.
I shall rip out his fangs and present them to my Omega as a wedding gift.
I prowl through the secret underground corridors of the punishment pits, which lead to Crocodile House.
My eyes glow. My shadows surge around me.
I don’t look around me. I refuse to remember the long months that I spent down here in the dark after the deaths of my family, while Horus and Sobek took turns attempting to break me.
My sunshine is somewhere above me in Crocodile House with Horus now, caught under his compulsion magic. I know intimately, carved into my skin, however, the cruelties of which my barbaric half-brother is capable.
Rage howls through me.
I can’t think, only feel the distress of my dearheart through our bond, when before her pleasure had warmed me.
I had lain, not knowing if Daire and his love for me was as fake as Dove’s white wings, which Heka’s magic had stripped away to their original black.
I had still dressed myself in my marriage outfit, a pleated linen kilt with an embroidered belt to match Daire’s.
I had placed my nestmates in a separate room not because I didn’t wish to marry them but because I was ashamed that I had lost control.
I was humiliated that I’d dared to dream I was someone who could be loved.
Also, I didn’t trust myself not to show them my dark heart, as well as the Void whispering inside my mind.
Except, I want to honor my endlessly beautiful Omega by looking good on her arm tonight.
I took time to wind ribbons through my waist-length black hair, adding glistening diamonds like stars. I carefully placed my crown, which is composed of two batwings around a diamond moon, on my head.
Then I smudged my eyes with Khol and smeared them with heavy gold and lapis lazuli eyeshadow, until they appeared cat-like.
Daire told me that he was friends with a cat called Five.
My heart ached.
Is that why he didn’t judge me for talking to animals? Being friends with them as well?
Daire is fascinating, deadly, and as close to nature as I am.
When I finished layering the gold collar over my bare olive-skinned chest, which fell around my obsidian scarab beetle pendant, along with the gold bracelets on my upper arms and wrists, I stared at myself in the broken mirror.
I looked like a proper Shadow Vampire King on his wedding night — or at his funeral.
I nodded grimly at my reflection, before I climbed onto my destroyed nest.
I sniffed the clawed bedding, chasing the faint scent of my Omega and Blood Lover.
Then I felt Freya’s soft kisses on our bond mark, followed by the pleasure that she was sharing with me.
Separated, we were still together.
I could feel Daire and her in the nest that I had torn apart.
I didn’t need to spend my final day alone.
Suddenly, my moth spies darted toward me like papyrus caught in a storm.
I sat up, on the alert. “What do you have to report, my honored moon-moth? Why are you fluttering with fear?”
The night is full of fangs, the moth whispered like velvet against my ear. We listened to your mates. But the fae. The silver-haired one. He won’t move. I landed on his hand. His nose. His lips. But he would not wake.
I threw myself off the collapsed bed, prowling toward the door.
What happened to my Blood Lover?
My pulse pounded in my neck.
No one had the right to drain Daire’s blood but me.
His blood was mine. He was mine.
The moth flew after me in a blur of wings.
And the other one—
“What about the wolf?” I growled around my elongated fangs.
They followed the cruel one into the dark. But they walked wrong. As a moth would after a lantern.
I slammed my fist into the wall, and Shadow rose from her bed with a roar. “She sounds compelled. Was it Hor?”
The cruel pretty one, the moth agreed. The wolf cries. But she follows.
Now, I rest my hands against the heavy doors that lead into the underground Crocodile House. The doors are obsidian with veined green malachite like a crocodile’s hide.
I am shaking with anger that Horus would dare harm my Blood Lover and steal my Omega.
Haven’t I made it clear that to touch them is to court death?
When I was first brought to the Blood Court and locked within the Scarlet Temple for training, Isis and her family were the ones who held the power.
They were cherished, from a noble family, loved.
Isis was the respected ex-Beta consort. She knew the other noble families and how to create a faction behind herself.
After my family’s death, she thought that she could tame and control me.
Nebet from the Scarlet Temple thought the same thing first, turning me into an assassin, long before Ruin and his cult transformed me into the sacrifice for the Void, after the disappearance of my twin.
But where is Nebet now?
I slaughtered her, staining her own altar with her blood.
I am going to teach Isis that she was wrong to try to leash a king.
Before I die, I will take my kingdom back.
In my feral rage, large leathery bat wings burst out of my back as I partially shift.
Shadows ebb and flow at my wings’ edges, as if they’re trailing the night with them.
I grab the massive bronze loop on the front of the door, which is shaped like a crocodile biting its own tail. When I pull, it awakens the door.
Deep within the stone, a hidden mechanism groans like something ancient shifting beneath water. Then the doors part, revealing darkness apart from flickering lights above underground pools.
Cool air scented with lotus and incense spills out across my bare chest and arms.
I take a deep breath, attempting to find my Omega by scent. The heavy perfume in Crocodile House, however, makes it impossible.
No doubt on purpose.
I prowl inside, steeling myself against my memories.
I have never willingly visited Isis’ territory before.
I was only ever summoned to Crocodile House to be chastised. It is a place of punishment and shame, where Isis hurt me in private, while pretending to be my kind mother in public.
Her love was fake.
Please, on the Shadow Devils, don’t let my nestmates’ love be fake as well.
I stalk through the immense, covered courtyard. I wind through the sandstone columns, which are carved like entwined crocodiles and serpents. The columns hold up the low ceiling.
The ceiling is painted blue. It is studded with thousands of silver inlays like a false night sky below the city of Sheut.
I cross the interconnected network of sacred pools on the stone walkways. When I glance down at the black mirror of water, a crocodile answers my call.
She drifts closer to me with a powerful sweep of her tail. Her armored scales break the surface of the water. The lantern light ripples across her jagged back. Then her snout emerges with its rows of pale teeth.
Her amber, predator eyes fix on me.
Silently, I command her to follow me.
One of the strictest roles in the House of Crocodile is that I don’t use the Power here.
Fuck the rules.
And fuck the House of Crocodile; it bathes in its own blood today.
“Hor!” I roar. “Where are you? Return my blood bond. I have stood before the Void Devils, staring into the abyss. I have watched visions of the destruction of the realms under Hadrian’s fire.
I have seen my ancestors die repeatedly, simply for being born with the gift of the Power.
Do you truly think that adding your blood to the crimson history staining my hands will weigh on my soul? ”
My hackles rise, when Horus’ light laugh rings out, echoing around the covered courtyard.
I spin.
Where is it coming from?
“That doesn’t sound very brotherly,” Horus calls, as if he is lounging indolently at one of the orgies that he loves to plan. “Come closer. I have a wedding gift for you. Aren’t you grateful? We are family, after all.”
I don’t miss the sneer on family.
We aren’t in public now. The House of Crocodile never pretended when we were in private that we were truly family.
When I was young and an exile from court, Lazarus and I dreamed about visiting the Blood Court and finally meeting our brothers and sisters.
We were na?ve fools.
I run, as shadows trail behind me, to the end of the walkway. The large crocodile lumbers out of the pool, following at my heels.
I can’t wait to feed Horus to his own sacred pets.
When I reach the marble terrace, however, my eyes widen.
Isis is casually sitting on the golden divan, which is stitched with emerald thread like crocodile skin, which overlooks the pools.
This is where the ex-consort likes to welcome the nobles, acting as if it is an alternative court to my own.
Like she always intended for the House of Crocodile to be the next dynasty.
Isis appears regal, even though she is wearing a simple linen robe, with her usual single ornament, a malachite crocodile badge, which is fastened at one side.
Her eyes are clear and bright.
Yet my gaze instantly snaps away from Isis to Horus, who is sitting on a high-backed ebony chair next to her.
He is clutching Freya on his lap.
Horus’ long claws rest dangerously close to the pulsing artery in my Omega’s neck, as do his fangs on the other side.
I drop my hand to cradle my Ankh mark protectively.
I can’t feel Freya through it, however, just like I can’t feel Daire.
Freya’s eyes are open but vacant.
She is too lost in her own mind, buried beneath Horus’ vile compulsions.
She looks like a doll.
My wolf should never look like that.
My bat wings beat in fury.
I will rescue you, my Queen.
Isis tuts. “What are you doing with our crocodile? You know better than to play with animals in this house.”
“And you know better than to play with someone else’s Omega.” I stride forward. The crocodile stalks next to me. Her claws click across the marble. Her heavy scales rasp, as her muscular body shifts from side to side. Horus swallows. “But here we are.”