KANE
LAZARUS’S MERCENARIES WERE GAINING ON us.
After touching the blade, I’d awoken from whatever Fae God
power had made me full-blooded to find an inferno of firelighte. That, and my father gone, along with the Blade of the Sun. He’d left me for dead in the explosion I could only assume was Arwen’s doing.
She hadn’t gone to Aurora as I’d instructed her to.
But anger was the farthest thing from my mind as I soared from the palace.
Guilt was what punched through my gut.
All this time I’d fought to protect Arwen. But she was stronger than I’d given her credit for. She’d fought through an entire kingsguard to get to me. She’d freed us both. And I’d almost caged the bird I loved—had nearly clipped her wings. If we made it free from these mercenaries alive, I’d apologize for that.
I’d apologize for a lot of things.
Though I didn’t think I’d get the chance. At least a dozen creatures had taken to the night sky behind us—harpies, manticores, sphinxes—scales and beaks and forked tongues lashing and whipping through the ether, high above the plumes of smog that covered the walled city.
A wretched, raging ball of fire whizzed past my hind leg, and though it missed, the heat still singed my talons.
My full-blooded Fae dragon form was every bit as powerful as I’d hoped, with a lengthier wingspan and sharper claws, and I was almost certain the incendiary ability to breathe fire. I could taste ash and flame in my lungs as if they were forged from my esophagus…
And when a foul, ghoulish rooster with long, scaled dragon legs—a cockatrice—squawked past and dove for Arwen, I reared my head back and gave my new lungs a try.
White-hot fire erupted from between my fangs. The cockatrice had no chance of retaliation. Its feathered crest and fierce beak sizzled in an instant, devoured by flames and reduced to cinders that rained down on the vast city below us. Arwen held tight to my ridged spine as I blazed another two creatures intent on torpedoing us downward.
Free of the closest assailants, I wound us lower, but not quick enough. The impact of one fireball cut through me like a knife in butter. I roared with the blow. Molten heat lit the membranes of my wing, and agony tore through and shuddered the limb.
Lower, and lower still I swept, fangs bared against the pain.
I couldn’t fly back to Evendell like this. The channel was safest when partially flown—a journey I’d made only once before and just narrowly survived. There wasn’t a world in which I didn’t fall from the sky in exhaustion.
We’d have to lose these last few somehow.
Another rush of fiery hail sent me even lower, diving through the thick gray clouds of filth and curving my ravaged wings up to cradle Arwen on my back. Her hand on the membranous fibers was both calming and invigorating at once.
Beneath me, through the pitch-black night, I could just barely make out the sentries and their fires atop the walls that protected Solaris from the rest of Lumera. Or, protected Lazarus from the atrocities he inflicted beyond his treasured capital.
Soon only barren land sprawled beneath us.
The harpy that led the remaining pack drew nearer. A maliciously beautiful Fae with the body of a hawk. Snarling, her claws cut through the
thick air so violently I could hear the wind howl. Could feel the gusts carried by her feathered wings cast over us as she soared closer. That wind
—awash with the promise of death. In the distance, Aurora loomed.
The slum nearest Solaris. Bordered by the Dreaded Vale. This would have to work.
Weaving through thick plumes of grimy fog, I plummeted, wrapping my wings around myself and Arwen like a tightly coiled bud yet to bloom. I sank down through the foggy sky, gaining speed, tumbling, until there was only the scent of ash in the air, the deafening, thrashing wind, and the heat from Arwen’s body, held against my scales.
Shifting back into my human form, I landed with Arwen still gripped securely in my arms atop some kind of awning.
Pain radiated across my shoulders, and Arwen groaned. Whatever stand we’d sank through toppled under our weight. Potatoes and turnips spilled out into the quiet night street.
That harpy shrieked from the sky.
Quick, quick—
I righted myself to stand among splintered wood and shredded canvas and smushed, pale vegetables.
“Hurry,” I urged.
It was only then I got a good look at her—
The paleness of her face, the tears at the corners of her eyes…and the deep red that had seeped into her thin gold gown, clutched between her fingers.
“Kane—”
No, no, no—
I had no time for horror. “You’re fine,” I gritted out, scooping Arwen up and taking off.
The impoverished slums only offered one long avenue, and without the walls of Solaris the entire road was shrouded in a thick, repellent fog. Crooked, stacked homes and half-toppling storefronts swayed into one
another, most windowpanes streaked with dust, most roofs in desperate need of reshaping.
The building behind me shook with the weight of whatever creature had landed atop it. I wasted no time taking off down a thinner, dirt-lined alley. Arwen moaned as my footsteps echoed against the peeling walls.
My eyes caught a shadowed alcove and I veered sharply into it. When I peered down to set Arwen on her feet, I saw my hands were coated thickly in her blood.
“What happened to you?” I hissed.
“Monster’s lair,” she mumbled. Then, warmly, “You flew.” “I’ve been remade.”
Arwen’s response was a wet, hacking cough.
She was losing too much blood. And not healing herself. My heart rate quickened.
A sickly male groan sent a spike of adrenaline through me and I whirled to find a bundle of rags. A man lurking beneath them shared the alcove with us. Through a cloud of mosquitoes, he moaned again and I caught sight of the festering wounds along his cheeks.
A mortal, poisoned by lighte.
He grumbled again and I urged him to be silent. The thundering feet and shouts for our capture drew nearer. The Fae mercenaries had shifted back to their human forms.
“Please,” the sickly vagrant begged. “More, I need—”
“Shh,” Arwen soothed, leaning up against the wall to support herself.
We didn’t have anything to help the man. No medicine, no coin, no lighte to offer him. My gut churned.
“Please,” he moaned loudly.
“We have nothing for you,” I hushed.
Mercenary feet shuffled outside in the fog-riddled alleyway. “But I need—”
“Be quiet—”
“It’s going to be all right,” Arwen muttered, dropping to the man’s eye level with a wince. “We just have to calm down—”
“Sir.” His voice pitched to a near whine as he craned his neck up to me. “Sir, won’t you please…”
I pressed a blood-soaked hand to his mouth.
“Kane—”
The man thrashed and spit.
My eyes peeled over the corner and into the street. A woman in nothing but a transparent shift that accentuated her wanton curves flashed sparks of pale blue from the tips of her fingers. A whore shilling her lighte.
And farther, around some crumbling corner—the wails of a baby. Even farther, the grunts of a brawl.
Nowhere safe to hide.
My gaze found the sickly man again. His eyes were unfocused and wild. “Kane, release him,” Arwen urged quietly.
“He’ll give us away.”
“You’re going to suffocate him—”
They were sure to find us. I’d have to fight the mercenaries off, which meant leaving Arwen here. With him. And if she passed out from her wound, if he sensed her lighte—if he touched her…I didn’t want to harm the vagabond. But I’d have to knock him out to ensure her safety.
“This way,” a mercenary’s voice echoed.
My hackles rose. The vagabond gnashed against my hand. I moved behind him, guilty, already regretting—
“In here,” a small voice whispered behind me. Arwen and I spun to see the wall beside us open into a shop. We ducked inside just as the herd of mercenaries passed.
My relief was as tangible as Arwen, back in my arms, sagging breathlessly against me.
Inside the shop was both ashy and humid, and smelled of burnt hinoki. There were no shelves. No glass cases to display jewels or crates with fruit. Just three thick candles sputtering for life, and a threadbare carpet with too many dark red stains for it to be a coincidence. Only a minuscule break in the panic, as relief was replaced by nagging suspicion.
“Thank you,” I said to the woman, who was wrapped in layers of dark fabric to keep out the heat and the rancid air. All I could discern were her sunken hound eyes and hunched frame.
“What is this place?” Arwen asked me too quietly.
The woman craned her neck to get a better look at Arwen’s wound. “She’s dying, your girl?”
I recoiled as if struck, cradling Arwen even closer. “No.” “I’m fine,” Arwen coughed, grasping tightly at her abdomen.
The woman only nodded from behind her rags. “Soon, though.” “Do you have bandages?” I asked. “Any medicine?”
The woman shook her head.
A cold sweat broke across my neck. Not from fear—I was strong enough to best this meek woman mortal, let alone full-blooded. No, the weariness came from something else. From the realization that this place was not a shop at all.
Arwen stumbled into me farther, dizzy from blood loss. “I need to lie down.”
“We’ll give you fifty coin for her.” “She’s not dead,” I snarled.
“Soon,” the woman said again. Like a promise.
My claws itched to shred through my knuckles. “Where is the Dreaded Vale?” I gritted out.
“South of here. You aren’t far. Daybreak will arrive any minute.”
I understood her warning: these slums were dangerous in the dead of night, but in the harsh red light of dawn…every soul in Aurora would be drawn to Arwen and me like buzzards to carrion. Lighte was the commodity in Lumera—the power in our veins the only currency that mattered. For addicts, for harvesters; to feed crops, to give power to those hoping to one day escape.
“Do you trust me?”
Arwen’s eyes had gone cloudy, but she swallowed hard and nodded. “Always.”
The alley behind the hidden door had been silent since we entered, and given the pallor of Arwen’s skin, time was not on our side. I managed my thanks to the woman and ducked us back out into the muggy, forlorn streets.
THE DREADED VALE WAS LESS of a valley and more of a winding maze of black, parched trees that rose so high into the night sky I couldn’t make out their tips from their trunks.
I couldn’t risk shifting and drawing the attention of any mercenaries still on our tail, nor flying too fast and passing the rebel king’s hideout altogether. I’d been walking for at least thirty minutes, Arwen cradled in my arms. Her eyes had begun to flutter closed.
“Hey. Stay with me.”
“I’m here,” she murmured. “Though I’d rather not be. This place is…” She wheezed. “Nightmarish.”
A morbid grin twitched at my lips. It was true. Among the tangle of parched trees, thick red ooze spilled from the creases where the branches sprouted and some pooled down by the roots.
I nodded toward it as Arwen and I trudged onward. “When I was young, my brother’s brute friends would call that stuff ‘viper come.’ It was an awful name, a play on a slur used for Fae that draw their lighte from blood.”
“Hemolichs,” Arwen supplied.
“Good memory. Nastier boys than Griffin and I would dare each other to eat it and find the consequences of that curiosity on the other side of a two- week stay in the infirmary.”
Arwen’s weak laugh became a steady cough and I urged my legs quicker.
As if sensing my rising anxiety, she reached a clammy palm up to my neck. I brought my lips over to the back of her hand and pressed them there once as I hurried. “It would be such a disservice to my grief to say I’ve missed you.”
“I know,” she murmured. “I don’t think I breathed properly the entire time we were apart.”
I hadn’t, either.
“What did you mean when you said you were remade? Why were you mortal?”
Was now the best time to tell her everything? Hunting for Hart’s elusive compound, black, spindly trees around us taking the shape of lurking ghouls and foes? Stumbling through snapping twigs and the rustle of cracked leaves while she struggled to stay awake?
But I had to keep her conscious somehow. Distract her.
“I went to see the White Crow. Mortality was necessary for me to become full-blooded.”
“You’re…like me?” Her eyes fluttered at her own words. “A full—” Arwen’s words were swallowed by her violent shaking in my arms.
“Shh,” I murmured to her as she convulsed, brushing dark hair from her clammy forehead. She was hot. Running a fever.
Fuck. Fuck—
Her lighte wouldn’t regenerate for another few hours at least. It wouldn’t be enough time—the wound was working faster than her Fae healing could keep up with. My pulse quickened.
“We need help,” I called out into the empty Dreaded Vale. My voice was too low. Gravelly and hoarse. “Anyone?”
Silence, save for the wind snapping and sighing through cracked, brittle branches leaching red gunk. Silence, save for the squawking, hungry crows, and for my feet pounding on what was once grass.
Arwen went limp in my arms, passed out. My mouth tightened. There was nobody here.
“Hello?” I called out again, louder this time, hefting Arwen more evenly into my arms. “Hart? We need help—this woman.” I studied Arwen’s too- pale face. Mouth slack. Eyes sunken. “This woman needs help.”
My words were swallowed by that wretched dry wind. My lips cracked.
My throat ached.
I said to her, “You’re going to be fine, bird.”
She didn’t stir.
My legs moved faster. We passed more branches. More long, gnarled trunks of trees and shattered stumps. More roaring wind. No sign of Hart or his clan. No sign of any life at all.
“Hello? We need…” I was—I was shaking.
We were too far from Aurora now to go back. Nobody there could help Arwen anyway. It was unlikely anyone had healing lighte—a rare ability. And if there were witches in Aurora or any of the other slums, I didn’t have time to find them. They could be anyone. Anywhere. Or nowhere at all.
The sun was beginning to rise.
Illuminating the skies bloodred and violent orange. The colors of daylight in Lumera. Panting, I ran deeper into the vale, my feet narrowly avoiding dried vines. When the rainless sky cracked bright with lightning, I only hurtled faster.
I almost missed the hiss that whipped through the trees.
“Hart?” I bit out through clenched teeth. Please. “It’s King Ravenwood.
We need—”
But it wasn’t Hart.
I trained my eyes on the slithering creature, wriggling itself free from the parched ground. Hairy, like a boar; ridged tail, like an alligator. Bright yellow eyes, like all the beasts born from Lumera’s ruined earth.
My breaths came faster as I backed away from the snarling creature. I couldn’t put Arwen down. Somewhere, in some far-off corner of my mind, I knew that if I released her and killed this beast, when I returned to Arwen she might be dead.
But I couldn’t—wouldn’t—think like that.
Instead I roared at the thing as daybreak cast it in crimson shadows. Spittle flew from my lips as they curled back from my teeth. As my jaw ached. I bellowed again, the veins in my head bulging.
Screaming not just at the snarling, bug-eyed beast but at all the pain, all the suffering the woman I loved had been forced to endure.
The creature froze, observing me, before slithering away.
I could only drop to my knees. “She needs help,” I begged, bowing over Arwen and holding her to me tightly. Rocking us back and forth. “She needs—”
Her skin was too cold.
“You cannot leave me,” I commanded her pallid face, brushing my fingers across her cheeks and chin. “Do you hear me? You can’t.”
Her head only lolled lifelessly to the side.
I’d already lost her once. And then heartless fate had returned her to me, alive and warm, only to wrench her from me again? So she could die here, shrouded in hot red sunlight, in this fucking barren valley of pitch-black skeleton trees because I couldn’t find a single soul for miles?
Despite the roiling, thrumming terror—I had to keep moving. When I stood and cast my eyes down to study Arwen, it was white powder that caught my attention, coating my knees and boots.
It was…chalk.
A boundary.
A witch’s boundary.
I turned, something small and hopeful flapping inside my chest. I dragged Arwen in the other direction, past whatever boundary I’d knelt on and roared again, my voice a fraction of what it had been hours ago. “Is anyone there? Hart?”
Movement shook the distorted trees before me.
A dozen women emerged. Dirtied hands wrapped in protective linens and feathers in their hair. And with them, slowly, as if the fabric of space were opening itself up to reveal what had been there all along—men in armor and children and horses and wagons. Crude huts and blacksmith tables and cabins and fires roasting plucked hens. The scents and sounds and sights of an entire encampment, hidden in plain sight in the Dreaded Vale.
Hart’s clan. At last.
Any relief I might have felt was devoured by urgency. “Where is Hart Renwick?”
“Who are you?” the woman who had stepped forward asked. She was narrow and angular, like a praying mantis. “How did you find us?”
“This woman”—I jerked my chin toward Arwen’s lifeless body—“needs help. She has a terrible wound. Her stomach, it’s—” My voice broke. “She needs a witch or a healing Fae. I’m the king of Onyx Kingdom and rightful heir to the throne of Lumera. I’m a friend to the rebel king. Please—”
“A wound like that…she is likely dead, King Ravenwood.”
“No. She’s true Fae.” Each word punched through gritted teeth. “You have to try—”
Before the lean woman could respond, the camp turned with the sound of lone heavy footfalls. Turned almost in union as a man emerged.
The man was soaked in blood. His chin, his half-open white shirt, his palms.
And he was laughing.
The loping man, too tall for his own limbs, hair swooping into his face with each step, came to stand before me, surveying us but not threatening. Just…curious. “The Kane Ravenwood? Could that really be you?”
“Yes,” I said, breathing hard.
“Valery, help this man,” he instructed the woman. Still with that playful smile. As if war were his favorite pastime. As if my grief did nothing to him.
The gaunt woman, Valery, with her many pendants, knelt before me and gently opened her arms to take Arwen. And behind her—
Their dark long skirts, the leather and beads on their clothes, and concerned expressions on their faces…
The Antler coven. As Briar had said.
It was all I could do to nod as Valery lifted Arwen’s body up and away from me. I missed her weight in my arms and lowered my head to my hand to suck in steadying, fortifying breaths, turning that razor-sharp fear inward and swallowing it whole.
“My coven is highly skilled,” Hart said. “I’d say she’s got a chance at least.” When I lifted my face he was tucking his hair aside, coating the
bronze strands in red. His eyes met mine, and he flashed me a crooked, confident grin.
