Chapter Five #2
I don’t retreat, swiftly whisper something under my breath—a word I don’t consciously choose—and the air around his feet shifts just enough to throw off his balance.
Focus.
Precision.
Thank you, Professor Astra.
He stumbles, catching himself at the last second. “Holy fuck.”
“Yeah,” I say, circling him. “It wasn’t all bad there. Learned a trick or two in Spell Chem class.”
“Impressive.”
“Good shit came from being kidnapped, who would have thought?”
“How was the dick?” he shoots back.
My mind throws him at me in pieces. His lips. His dick, heavy and thick. Then blond hair spills through his fingers, wound tight in his grip. Something inside me snaps.
I drive forward hard, pushing him back with a force that makes his boots skid across dirt. He laughs at first, but the sound changes when I don’t slow down.
“Wait,” he starts, adjusting his footing. “Haide, hang on—”
I don’t. I feint left, twist right, and thrust.
The resistance gives beneath my hands in a way it never has before, and for a heartbeat I don’t understand what I’m feeling when I meet the panic in his pretty eyes.
Why is his breath stuttering instead of airy cackles working up his throat?
His fingers wrap around my bloody palm and I look down slowly to the branch buried in his chest, deep enough that my knuckles brush bone when I try to pull it free.
“Zev,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
“Haide…” he murmurs, but his voice is wrong.
It trembles with fear instead of the promise of vengeance on the next round.
“You’re fine,” I insist, dropping with him, my hands pressing against the wound. Soon he’ll die, and this fucked-up island will stitch him back together. But the look in his eyes… My pulse pounds heavy in my ears. “Why do you look scared, Zev? I’ve done much worse to you.”
“Things changed,” he rasps, and I hate how thin his voice sounds. “Luda…we don’t come back.”
My mind rejects it instantly.
“No,” I breathe, because that’s impossible. Because that’s the rule. Because this place may be cursed and rotten and violent, but it has always given us that one mercy. Sometimes curse. “That’s not how this works.”
His fingers tighten once more around my wrist, weaker now.
“It is now,” he says, and the word lands somewhere deep in my spine, splintering up through my ribs. “Be careful, Luda. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Then his grip loosens, his weight shifts, and his breath leaves him without returning.
For a second, I just kneel there, hands pressed to his chest, waiting for the twitch, for the jerk, for the curse he’s about to throw at me when he pops back up and calls me an idiot for panicking.
He doesn’t move.
Rage rises fast, violent and blinding, burning hotter than grief ever could. It tears through my veins, answered by a different piece of me altogether.
The scream that rips out of me is not a plea.
It is a threat. The force of it slams into the trees, loosened leaves cascading around me as the birds scatter from the canopy.
But all I can focus on is the blood coating Zev’s chest. Not red—darker.
Almost black. It clings to my fingers as I keep pressure on the wound. But—my fingers.
They aren’t fingers anymore.
Curved claws extend from my hands, sleek and lethal and very much not human, slicing the air when I flex them in disbelief. I don’t remember summoning them. I don’t remember deciding I wanted them. They are simply there, as natural as breathing.
I jump when the ground beneath his body starts to cave. The dirt swallows him whole before I can move to grab him, leaving no trace except for the blood staining the soil.
The air shifts behind me.
I turn slowly, blood still dripping from the tips of my fingers.
The Nightkin stands at the edge of the clearing, composed as if he has been watching the entire time, as if none of this unsettles him in the slightest.
I cross the distance between us before I consciously choose to move, claws slamming into his chest and tearing downward, ripping through fabric and skin alike.
If we’re calling it skin. He staggers back a step under the force, more surprised than anything, dark eyes flashing as he looks down at the black blooming across his shirt.
Tar.
He bleeds the tar he’s made of.
“You let me kill him,” I breathe, and the words come out jagged, ripping through my throat on their way out. “You knew what would happen and you let me!”
His hands curl weakly around my wrists, not to stop me, not to pry me off, but to steady me.
“I didn’t let you do anything,” he says, and there’s strain there, but not guilt.
“If I could control you, mate, we wouldn’t be standing here in the first place.
But if you want someone to blame…” His deep voice rumbles, his red eyes flashing.
“Blame the part of you that still feels him and the anger he feeds you.”
The accusation digs deeper than any blade.
Maybe he’s right. That place where the bond lived, it still exists.
It bleeds like an open fucking wound deep in my gut. Or, it did.
Right now, it pulses.
Reaches?
What the fuck is it reaching for?
I groan, gripping my hair and spinning with my eyes closed. “What is happening to me?” I scream.
Two massive arms wrap around me. I struggle against the hold, kicking and yanking, but then my back meets the beast’s hard chest. A single breath later and every muscle in my body sags in defeat.
It’s like my body surrenders without permission and I don’t know what to make of it.
“When you are weak, I am strong.” The Nightkin breathes, or maybe his voice is back in my head. I can’t say for sure.
“Is he really gone?” I ask, and I hate the strain in my tone.
“What if I told you we can get him back?”
The world stills and I look up at him, his massive frame towering above me, horns gleaming under the sun. “Resurrection?”
“No.” His knuckles come up, and my skin tingles when they brush along the jewels at my temple “Exile Island rebels against us. The wards have fallen before the fates intended, and now the space between us has narrowed.”
“I don’t understand.”
He tilts my head upward, his nose falling into the crook of my neck as he inhales with a groan. “Die here, waken there.”
I tense and he hums in response.
“Yes, mate. Back to the place you were taken. Back to him.”
“No.” I try to scramble but he holds me still. “Fuck him. Fuck them! I would never go back.” A literal ache sweeps through my body—an ache reflected in the beast’s eyes.
He aches for me, but why?
Little Hellpet, do you want your friend back?
He glides his fingers across my closed lips, tracing the shape of my mouth. It shouldn’t draw a shaking breath from me, but it does.
“This isn’t just about you,” he says. “If the exiles learn the only way to get home is to pick a fight, there will be no going back. We must fix what’s been broken and return what doesn’t belong.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means our time has come, Hellpet.”
“Time for what?”
“For the guarded warrior to rise.”
His thumb drags slowly along my jaw, and my pulse answers him in a way I don’t understand, a low hum beneath my skin that feels too familiar.
“The fates have been wronged. Now they’re stepping in, and they come with vengeance,” he murmurs, red eyes dimming just enough for something else to surface beneath them. Something he clearly wants me to see.
Whatever it is, it crawls beneath my ribs and hugs me there, squeezing tighter when I try to shake it. It’s buried deep in that same place I trusted before—only the warmth morphs into acid and eats away at everything.
But right now, that gaping hole he once resided in beats like a living, breathing thing, trying to seal itself one stitch at a time. I can feel each little thread winding and binding the longer the Nightkin touches me until I’m but a bag of bones, sagging against his warm flesh.
The red in his eyes seems to swirl with satisfaction.
I stare up at him, struck by how right this feels and how wrong it is to even think such a foolish thing.
“Who are you?” I whisper, more to myself than to him.
“Hellpet,” he rasps possessively. “I am yours.”