Chapter Nine
Haide
A gasp rips up my throat as I arch off the bed, pain exploding through my body. It’s like someone’s reached inside me and is trying to rearrange my organs with a rusty fork. I curl into myself, biting back a scream.
That’s when I see him.
The Nightkin. He’s there, but…not there. His massive form flickers like a bad hologram: gold horns dimming, tar-slick skin losing its sheen. Those eyes—red again, thank fuck—lock onto mine, wide with something I’ve never seen in them before. Fear.
“Yes,” he growls, voice echoing strangely.
He doesn’t finish. His body stretches and distorts. My chest caves in like a magnetic field, pulling him in.
“Stop!” I yell, though I don’t know who I’m yelling at. The Island? The universe? My own fucked-up body?
The castle around us groans, stone turning to dust and the walls crumbling.
“Open up, Hellpet. You know how much I like to be inside you…”
And then he’s gone.
Pain ripples through me in hot flares, like the sun itself is touching me.
I scream, my back spasming as power surges through me. Not in waves but all at once. Too much.
The ceiling splits open, exposing the dark sky, and I raise my hands to shield myself from the falling rubble and shards of glass, riding out the pain until it slowly starts to subside.
Numb. Everything fucking numb and silent.
I sit up carefully, wincing, and press a hand to my sternum. A strong and steady flutter, and then another. Not quite a heartbeat. More like…
My feet carry me across splintered glass, pinching into my skin as I make my way to the shattered ornate mirror. With every step, vines twist and turn as the island reclaims her chaos and strangles the serenity of the Nightkin.
I stare back at myself through the spiderwebs in the mirror. I feel…different.
Holy shit.
I squint into the mirror.
Sharper cheekbones. Puffier lips.
Where my eyes were once a muted green, they now burn with every shade of jade. I flex my arm, watching the muscles ripple beneath my skin. Taut and perfectly sculpted, like I’ve been lifting tree trunks and squatting bodies nonstop for months.
I run a hand down my stomach, feeling the hard planes of abs that definitely weren’t there before.
My skin is flawless, not a scar in sight, except for the bruise around my neck.
“Damn,” I whisper, brushing my hand through my silk locks. I look powerful. Dangerous. Sexy as hell. Not that I didn’t always give off an I-could-kill-you-and-fuck-your-mate vibe.
But this is something else.
I feel stronger, faster, more alive than I’ve ever been.
A grin cuts across my face. Whatever the Nightkin did to me—whatever just happened—I like it. I like it a lot.
My thoughts stop at that familiar rumble of laughter.
“It’s just as I thought it would be in here. A fucking mess. Tell me, Hellpet, have you considered therapy?”
I want to laugh but I can’t. I can hardly breathe I’m so overwhelmed, but not in a bad way.
I feel him. Everywhere. Like he was always supposed to be there.
“This is what a real bond is supposed to feel like. Not just your voice in my head, but our thoughts and minds linked as one. Like both souls are knotted together.” I rub at my chest, a painful decay eating up the center, only it makes no sense.
That’s where the warmth is coming from, so why does it also feel like a lycan’s claws have reached in and grabbed hold?
“Hellpet,” the Nightkin—no,—my mate, purrs, but his tone weighs heavy on my heart. “The bond was always real, but it is not yet whole. You’ve only accepted the darkest part.”
“As in you?”
“Yes, me.”
“But I accept you. I want you.”
For a long moment, he has nothing, and then I’m fed the piece I’ve been missing. “I am the demon born of the royal blood that courses through his veins.”
But how could I have missed this? It’s so obvious now. “Ethos. You… you’re Legend’s Ethos. His royal demon, born only of a…”
“A fated bond. Yes.”
“But I can still keep you?”
“Yes, but little mate, we still need the rest of him”
I go still. Memories of that stupid ball flash through my mind, Legend’s words echoing with painful clarity: “You’re nothing, you never were.”
A growl that is not my own vibrates through my chest cavity, rattling my bones. “Those were not his words,” The beast snarls in my mind. “They came from the bitch who has manipulated herself as his mate from the way of magic. Very, very, Argent magic. She will pay.”
I don’t answer, rolling my lips between my teeth and pressing my back to the wall. Anger and confusion war inside me and I’m ready to tear this fucking palace apart with my teeth. My claws rip from my skin and heat burns up my throat.
And then I feel it, the strange tickle at the base of my skull, and I narrow in on the beast in my mind.
“Mind Sedation. This is how you controlled the Island. How you calmed me.” I look around. Of course. How the hell else could the beast tame this place? “You’ve been using Legend’s principal power. This is why he couldn’t harness his magic. He’s split in two.”
“Three, Hellpet,” he corrects, “He hasn’t only lost the strongest part of himself; he’s lost half his soul.”
My heart beats wildly. “Me.”
“You.”
I swallow, my throat growing hotter with each passing second. “Well, that part he’ll just have to live without. I don’t want him. I only want you.”
“I am him.”
My eyes squeeze shut. “Beast,” I breathe, fingers wiggling at my sides. “What happens to you if you’re not returned to him?”
“That is the question, isn’t it. That is why, right now, it is all up to you to fix this.”
“How?”
“By taking what is rightfully yours and becoming what you were born to be. The island is weakening by the day, but you only grow stronger, more powerful. I can feel it even now.”
His words make sense, and yet they contradict everything I’ve ever thought to be true. All my life I was led to believe there is no magic on the island. A belief I never doubted when exile after exile were tossed here and brought not a flicker of magic with them.
But if there is no magic, then none of this would be possible. How could we die and come back to life?
How would we survive with virtually no food and not feel starvation?
How the hell would the Isle Kiss not only bloom here, but exist in the first fucking place?
We used to say it was a curse— and maybe there is one—but it takes magic to curse something at all.
I study the area as if taking in the island for the first time.
The shimmer in the air, the faint trace of sulfur.
I turn my hand over, staring down at the blue veins running through my fingers.
Beneath my skin, they start to roll, like restless snakes trapped in a glass cage, ready to strike the second they’re set free.
Heat, swift and eager, crawls across my palm, and a thread lifts, spiraling upward in messy loops, like the last exhale of a flame that’s been smothered.
Except this one doesn’t die into the air around me.
It hovers, pulling together and just—waits.
A strange sensation slips down my spine and, suddenly, I know what it wants. One by one, I close my fingers to make a fist and capture the smoke, allowing it to slip back beneath my skin.
My head snaps up, eyes narrowing on the empty skies. “We need to go to the dragons.”
“Why is that your first thought?”
Why was that my first thought?
“I don’t know, but I’m going.”
“At least they will not roast me alive if I’m living inside you,” he muses.
“Don’t count on it. Thyrix is spiteful, and I’m nothing special.”
The climb toward the dragon’s ridge is steeper than I remember, or maybe I’m just moving too fast to feel it properly. Gravel slides loose beneath my boots and I stop short the second the entrance comes into view.
It takes only a moment before the first dragon steps out.
She moves slowly, massive shoulders rolling beneath scales the color of tarnished silver, each one catching the light like fractured glass.
A Pyrite dragon.
Her body is enormous, wider than the cave mouth she emerged from, and the ground rumbles with every step she takes.
Her muscles bunch and release with each stride, powerful enough to crush every damn thing without much effort.
Scars line the underside of her jaw, old ones, pale against the dull metallic of her hide. She’s seen fights. Won fights.
Her eyes find me. Ringed black, they hold me suspended with the kind of ancient, disinterested awareness that makes my blood run cold. She doesn’t give a fuck about much of anything.
I’ve always found it comforting.
Her head lifts high, nostrils flaring as she tastes the air, wings unfurling in a heavy, controlled stretch that makes the ground tremble beneath my feet. She crouches and launches, the force of it knocking dust and loose stone from the cliff’s edge.
She rises straight up, body cutting through the air like a spear, until she pierces the low-hanging cloud layer and disappears from sight.
Another follows her path.
One by one they all emerge, each moving faster than the last, each different in color and size but identical in their exit.
The last to step out is Thyrix and he doesn’t hesitate, launching straight into the air.
The force slams into me like a physical shove, wind ripping across the ridge as he shoots upward as lethal as an arrow. I step forward without thinking, heart punching hard against my ribs.
“Hellpet,” the Nightkin warns.
I ignore him and keep moving, until I’m full sprint.
“Haide!”
The edge of the cliff appears faster than my mind registers, the ground dropping away in a violent plunge of jagged rock and crashing surf far below. My foot slides on loose gravel, and for one blinding second my weight tips forward into open air.
“Shit!”
Pain erupts through me, tugging at something buried deep in my core.
My body jerks back mid-step, arms flailing as I stumble sideways and slam onto my knees instead of over the edge. The impact rattles up my spine, and I suck in a breath that tastes like blood and salt.
“I said stop,” he snaps inside me.
I shove up onto my feet, fury burning hot in my chest, but my gaze is already locked on the sky.