4. Wren
Wren
The shadows belong to me. I linger inside them, watching her, hard as fuck already.
Forest has his eyes on her again with a longing he doesn’t understand. He has no clue how he gazes at her—like she is the only light left in this rotten carcass of a world.
I want to rip that immortal bird right off the ground and break his neck. Again. Maybe this time he’ll stay dead for five minutes before he annoys me back to life.
Forest always did look best dying.
But he doesn’t remember me. He doesn’t remember what’s been started with my arrival. Or his introduction.
A part of me hates him for it. Hates him more because he doesn’t recollect what he is. What any of us are.
He flies from tent to tent, smug in his immortality.
I’ve tried to murder him more times than I can count, useless asshole. And I’m on the sidelines for now even though I initiated this mess.
At least she’s living somewhere with dense timberland and ancient ties. The woods—yes, the woods are a vast improvement. Dark roots tangle deep in the earth, branches bend and knot overhead, hide secrets. So much better than that heat-bleached desert bullshit where we lost her before.
Here, the woods hold darkness like they’re praying for night. As soon as the sun goes down, the trees crowd closer together, ready to shed their leaves for fall.
This place remembers. It remembers her. It whispers of things buried and waiting. When she finally retrieves her name, and ours, it will be mine she calls first.
A vulgar smile lifts my face.
Shadows tighten, and even the troll roar can’t pull them apart.
Nicholas drifts to my side, sharp-edged, silent as winter, until Helene turns her head.
He halts, dead still. The abrupt click of fangs splits my silence before I look at him. “You’re late.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
We both hold our ground when the troll lumbers out of its hiding place. Let it come. She doesn’t know who she is, not yet, but her blood knows. Her body will move the way it's made to.
Instincts this old never die.
The troll rushes as quickly as trolls are able, dragging a beastly knotted club behind it. Its swollen wooden head mangles several tents on the outskirts of the festival.
It's one troll. She’ll be fine.
This one isn’t particularly hideous, either. On the smaller side of brutish, rough, exaggerated features droop down to a pair of coarse tusks. It drags a knobby club across dirt, beady black eyes locked on her.
Beside me, Nicholas inhales once. Sharp. Starving. Like he’s caught the scent after centuries underground. His pupils blow open enough to swallow the iris whole.
“Careful,” I murmur, marking the way his eyes brand Helene. “You know how jealous I get.”
“Someone is going to see you.” His baritone scrapes rich and rough like earth shoveling over a coffin.
“Humans could watch the world burn and call it weather. Mortals don’t see shit unless it’s trending online.”
Nicholas jerks his head in her direction. “They notice her.”
Helene. Her name is Helene Blake. I’m sure in this life she’s had no formal combat training, but she is still a shieldmaiden.
Still a Valkyrie.
She doesn't need help, and if she does, bird brain is there beating his chest and oozing testosterone.
The rest of the sheep scatter in different directions through another roar gusting out in sulfur yellow waves. The troll takes down a wave of tents. Fabric flies and a wooden beam burrows into the dirt like a god’s toothpick.
Rather than running away from the danger like the flock, Helene steps into it. She braces, welcomes it with open arms, searches for her weapon, giving her sister time to wheel away.
My grin widens. Ah. There she is. I laugh under my breath because fuck, I missed this.
Nicholas locks himself in place so hard the earth cracks beneath his boots. Like he’s afraid to move, because if he does, he might lunge for her throat.
“She is still the same,” he grunts. “Incredible.”
Helene takes a broken table leg and hurls it at the troll. It spears the creature in the thigh.
Yes, look at her go.
“Why would she change?” I ask. “The body may be different, but Odin himself can’t touch her soul.”
Nicholas knows better. But we’re not friends. An easy truce persists no matter how many times we’ve fought against it.
About as many times as I’ve tried to kill Forest.
Nine hundred years of loving the same unattainable woman will do that. It’s been thirty reincarnations now.
Close-cropped hair black as ink curls slightly over his forehead. He keeps it short, beaten back. Sable brows arch over eyes dark as burned-out stars. They held warmth once. I remember it. Now, they watch.
Helene launches herself at the troll and knocks it in the side with the sharpened, broken point of one of the tents. The troll’s noxious scream ripples the leaves above our heads.
Helene doesn’t falter—of course she doesn’t—but the image of her falling plays behind my eyes with every strike she takes.
If she bleeds, I will unravel. Nicolas will pretend otherwise although his face remains stone.
He’s trained himself to exist within violent constraint and show none of the fractures to his composure.
Her pulse thunders through me despite the difference. Strong and unbroken. The sound hits him next. I watch it happen.
“I’d love to see her gut the thing and bathe in its blood.” A wistful indulgence rumbles my chest. “Remember when she took down the berserker and his arterial blood painted her in rust? Amazing.”
His jaw flexes. His throat works once. The beast inside him strains at the leash. “Stop talking about blood, Stonebreaker.”
“Or you’ll what, Silver?” I dare him.
Helene moves like fire, fierce and certain, and an iron tang coats my tongue from biting back the need to go to her. With a yell, she grabs another piece of detritus to use as a weapon.
Nicholas and I both tense, the clock ticking. Are we needed?
My fists flex, then curl back into stillness.
He stares ahead down the straight bridge of his nose, and his jaw tightens until his fangs punch clean through his lower lip.
Blood beads against his skin, dark and useless.
He doesn’t notice.
He glances my way once, his shoulders locked. “More piercings?”
“Oh, Nic. Keep staring at me like that, and I’ll get ideas.” I trail a finger along the line of metal to the newest loop at the tip of my pointed ear. “See? Under your murderously repressed longing, you care...”
He scoffs. “I don’t.”
I tried to suck his cock one time about a hundred years ago. The beloved of my beloved is my beloved, or some bullshit. He lasted about ten seconds before shoving me into a wall hard enough to crack plaster and threatening to slit my throat if I so much as breathed on him again.
Honestly? Mixed signals.
It’s pretty fucking difficult not to breathe when you’re railing the same woman.
“But you noticed,” I murmur.
Nicholas catches me looking at him and sneers. “Must you?”
“I’m sorry if my longing gazes do something to the bitterness etched in your bones.” I chuckle. “Would you believe me if I said I missed you?”
“No.”
“Fair.”
His weaponized silence stretches. His dusky skin hasn’t aged. He’s trapped at twenty-seven, lean and strong, a fighter, a soldier. There’s stillness in his posture but no softness.
I’ve seen him move. He always led with brute force. Now he wears shadows as a cloak and walks like a predator trying to pass as human.
And all the black...
Like he’s some kind of swarthy Vampire Lestat but without the charm. He’s all brood. The goddamn cufflinks he picked up in Victorian England. It’s black all the time. Helene, in a past incarnation, loved those cufflinks.
So I ate her out until she forgot his name.
I smile. I don’t mean it kindly.
The raven calls out a kraa and divebombs the troll, driving his sharp beak into squinty eyes. At least bird brain is doing his share. At least he’s present to provide backup, although we all know he’s not accomplishing shit in that body.
The scrape of metal on stone reverberates across the earth before Helene lifts her weapon overhead. Unfortunately, the troll swings, one hand against his wounded eye, the other making contact.
“How are your Bloodletters?” I keep my attention on Helene, falling on her spine with a furious growl, but lean closer to Nicholas with the question. Hidden where trees end and progress starts. “The queen still keeping them in line for you?”
Every spike in Helene’s heartbeat drags his attention back to her mouth, her pulse, the contour of her throat. “Hard to hear your sibilant tone with the ruckus.”
I glance to the left and right. Nope, we’re still alone. “Who are you trying to impress with your SAT studies?”
The man is resentfully loyal with rage issues out the ass. He refuses to process his grief or divert his gaze away from Helene.
“How are the Dokkálfar doing?” he asks, changing the conversion.
I count the heartbeats between her strikes, tracking the troll’s breathing. Weighing whether it falters or not.
“They’re leaning in hard to the mortals' new romanticism and have embraced the term ‘dark Fae.’ It’s fucking annoying.”
He watches her like starving things watch open wounds. “Sounds like it.”
The longer he holds his stillness, the sharper the need to break it becomes.
“They miss the old ways, though. They’re spoiling for a fight.” I pause, and my throat burns like I’ve swallowed iron. “They’re pushing boundaries under the king’s name. He’s eager for fresh territory.”
“They can keep spoiling for one until they rot.”
“Aw, come now. Be serious.”
“I am serious.
He’s always been the same way. Not much has changed in the centuries since we both willingly stepped into this loop, this endless fucking existence of rinse and repeat looking for a way to break free. There is no freedom.
There is only Helene, currently strangling the troll with another vendor’s banner.
Her features twist into the violence I’m used to seeing. Her intrinsic expression. She thrives in the heart of battle, no matter what skin she wears. The song of war calls her name.
At least she’s back to being blonde this time around. I fucking love her as a blonde.
Although redheaded Helene was sure fun. She had nipple piercings then, well ahead of her time. And it’s always exciting when she is an ebony-haired beauty.
Blonde just looks more natural on her.
“God, can you not?” Nicholas side-eyes me. “You’re hard?”
I shrug and adjust my cock in my pants. “You are too. You’re wearing a coat to hide it better.”
The urge to intervene still claws at my skin like restless, hungry ghosts.
“I can’t wait to taste her again.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been celibate waiting for her arrival.” He says it in the tone of you? Seriously? Disbelieving and mocking in the same blow.
Visigoth prick.
I shrug again. “Why? You want to help me with this little problem?”
“Emphasis on little,” he grinds out.
“Hey, if insulting my cock is how you get your kicks, then have at it,” I quip. “I, however, have been faithful to my one true love.”
I press my hand to my racing heart.
Whereas this is not love, or loyalty, or any real bond. It’s merely a tolerance of each other that only nine hundred years can bring.
The troll goes down on his knees, and the jolt sends Helene tumbling over its head.
The rest of the festival goers have long scattered, rightly so.
They aren’t equipped to handle this kind of intrusion of reality.
Their neat and tidy existence only encompass what they see right in front of their face. And what they buy in their bulk stores.
Certainly not the different layering of worlds, one on top of another.
“Should we be worried?” I jerk my nose at the troll, stumbling to its feet.
“Why? Because one snuck through the veil? She’s got this handled.”
I smirk and say, “Her skills are not in question, Fangs. I’m talking about the bleed over and what it means. Our buddies from Jotunheimr should not be here. Not now.” Not yet.
The threads of fate tighten around me in a noose. We’re all caught in the webs, and the more we move, the tighter they pull.
“Fucking trolls.” His claws lengthen another inch every time she bleeds, and he slides them into his pockets. I’ve seen Nicholas thirsty before.
This isn’t thirst. This is whatever wakes up in monsters when they find something that once belonged to them.
The raven pecks at the troll's other eyes and draws blood.
All those human screams have faded, replaced by the terrible grunts of battle. Helene has always worked silently and allowed her actions to do the talking for her until she gains victory.
She somehow gets the troll on its ass. Its movements are sluggish now, slow in the face of her competence.
Helene lifts a table leg with a growl and sends it flying through the troll’s gaping mouth, pinning the creature to the ground.
Any hint of the sister and her wheelchair is gone now. Hopefully the poor frail little thing has moved on, far away from this fight.
“I guess this settles it.” Nicholas groans. “Now you’ve started the cycle by drawing her to you, now that Forest got close—”
“Agreed,” I interrupt.
He whips his gaze around to latch our eyes together.
“There’s no reason not to approach her,” I finish with a smirk.
“Separately?”
I nod curtly. “Of course.”
Masculine laughter echoes off the trees, and Nicholas and I turn in unison.
“Gods. What an asshole. Hot,” I say loudly.
The raven is gone, and Forest—fucking Forest Ulfson—stands in its place wearing a gauche cape of feathers, his hair now a violent reddish-blond.
“Wow, he’s a son of a bitch.” Nicholas skulks to the edge of the gloom and hisses.
“Let’s leave his mother out of it. The poor woman gave me the fuck of my life when I bent her over his furs,” I laugh, although I agree with him and his sentiment wholeheartedly. “I’m partial to her.”
Nicholas scuffs the dirt and flashes fang. “He’ll ruin everything.”
“He’s never shown himself this quickly in a cycle before, either.”
A man can only make so many excuses, can only offer enough understanding, for someone in Forest’s position. Bird brain doesn’t remember that he doesn’t remember. And yet....
I tap my finger against my chin. The and yet part bothers me. The pieces have fallen into place like cogs in a wheel every single lifetime. Life after life, repetition makes things boring while the stakes continue to mount.
I’m a man on a rack being pulled in four directions.
“Ruin is a strong word,” I reply to Nicholas. “Perhaps this is exactly the way it needs to be.”
He descends into the gloom, silent, until only the whites of his eyes are visible. Stupid vampire.
The clock has started. This time it feels different.