Edinburgh castle was a frozen wasteland.
The air dropped a good thirty degrees the moment Kianna and Aidan stepped past the gates. But this wasn’t from incubi or any magic. At least, none that Aidan had ever seen before.
Snow blanketed every surface. Whereas outside the world was coated in glistening rain, in here, everything glinted white. Not a beautiful snowscape, however. No. This was no holiday card. Odd statues dotted the undisturbed courtyard, figures Aidan was positive weren’t there when he visited with his mum. They were too angular—humanoid, almost, with outstretched limbs coated in snow. Paired with the ice sheening the castle walls, the dark red stone beneath glinting like blood with every flash of light, and the scene looked pulled from a nightmare.
He’d been having too many nightmares lately.
For the first time in this entire attack, Aidan felt the cold twinge of fear. As he stared at the courtyard of ice-rimed statues and perfect snow drifts, watching thick flakes drop from the sky and sizzle against his skin, he wondered how everything was so undisturbed. It looked like no one had come through here in days.
“The hell is that?” Kianna whispered. Aidan looked to where her sword pointed.
He thought it was just a statue at first. Propped a few feet away, arms upstretched as though embracing the heavens, icicles dripping from its arms and raised sword like fringe. Then another bolt of lightning shattered the sky, and he realized it was human.
Aidan crept closer. “I don’t recognize him,” he whispered.
The statue was clearly human and clearly dead. And he clearly hadn’t been expecting to die so suddenly. His eyes and mouth were open in shock, his tongue blacked with frostbite and exposure; small flecks of white dotted the tip from where snow had fallen past his teeth. Through the ice riming his young body, Aidan could make out the leather blacks of a Hunter, though it wasn’t anyone within his Guild. He had personally trained or trained with every single member of their army. This man wasn’t one of his.
Which begged the question...was this man from another Guild? Had London sent up troops unbeknownst to him? Or was this man from a different time altogether? He seemed perfectly preserved in the unending ice. What if he was from before Aidan had even reached Glasgow? Before Glasgow had even been a Guild?
“Aidan,” Kianna said. He looked to where she pointed at the top of the wall. More figures, completely frozen. These, however, were facing away from him. Guards? But that didn’t make any sense.
He stepped past Kianna, toward one of the more misshapen forms. Lightning flashed, and he nearly jolted back from shock.
It was a kraven.
The Howl stared at him with eyes as bulbous and white as a decaying fish. Like so many of its brethren, it had been broken and torn in the act of being created from Earth—very little of its humanity remained. Its jaw had unhinged, cracking open and expanding to twice the width of its skull, teeth as long and sharp as a tiger’s. Its entire spine was bent, its vertebrae pressed through flesh like jagged spines, and its arms and legs had elongated as well, each skeletal finger ending in a fierce talon.
Kravens were grotesque, but—Earth being the heaviest and thus quickest Sphere to tire—they were the backbones of the Dark Lady’s army. Aidan had gotten used to the walking nightmares.
As used to a monster as he could be, that is.
“Maybe they were being punished,” Aidan mused. He tapped the kraven on the forehead. The ice cracked. Not coated as thickly as the Hunter. Had it been frozen recently? Maybe Calum had killed them as an example, or out of boredom—Calum was an incubus after all, which could account for the frigid air and frozen guards. He was probably insane—who knew how his mind worked?
“They look like guards,” Kianna whispered. She crept up to another kraven and poked it with her sword. The blade went through easily. When she pulled it out, a thin stream of black blood dribbled down like sap. “And they haven’t been frozen long. An hour or two, tops.”
Again, that shard of doubt. Calum wouldn’t have killed his own guards when his palace was under attack. Someone had come here before them. Maybe a rogue necromancer, wanting to claim the throne for themselves.
But there weren’t any tracks in the deep snow. No sign of struggle. No blood.
Another rumble shook them. The kraven beside him toppled, crashing to the snow with a soft thud. Even though he was accustomed to dead kravens, he still had to look away from the sight of its obsidian blood leaching into the white.
“I don’t like this,” Kianna muttered.
Aidan didn’t like it either, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. He pulled deeper through Fire. Burned the fear away.
“Scared?” he asked.
She elbowed him in response, then started walking up the sloped path without him. He rubbed his ribs. One day, she’d learn how to show affection without leaving a bruise. Maybe.
He unsheathed his daggers, curling flame around the blades, and followed her deeper in.
Every step revealed another frozen guard. Every step and the air dropped another degree, until it was only his hold on Fire that kept him from freezing. He glanced at Kianna. She wasn’t even shivering.
The castle layout was simple, and the frozen monsters were a veritable breadcrumb trail leading to the heart of the castle. They followed the bodies up and around a few outlying buildings, the world outside practically forgotten in the deep quiet of this place. Aidan kept glancing around, staring at the snow and the abandoned structures, the gargoyle fonts and the old cells and the café. The statues that weren’t statues, and the bodies piled up like haystacks. How much of this had just been sitting here, frozen and empty, for the last three years? How much was recent, and why?
Coated in snow and swept of any sign of historical importance, the castle seemed like any other broken structure in this new land. It pissed him off. The castle had once been prestigious. Grand. And just like the city, Calum had bastardized it in his arrogance.
Aidan would restore it, that much he vowed.
When he was on the throne, he would ensure this place of ice and despair would be something better. A light in the dark. A pillar of his power.
It didn’t take long to reach the building where Calum waited. Past the barracks and under a high arch, into a courtyard that had once bustled with tourists, he found figures of another sort. More guards. A dozen or so. All of them facing outward. Human necromancers and kravens and probably a few higher-level Howls. All of them dead without a wound. They stood in an arc before the raised entrance to what Aidan thought was once a museum. A stone horse and lion and old regimental guardhouses flanked the tall doors, the etched words above scratched out.
“This is not good,” Kianna whispered, echoing Aidan’s thoughts.
Aidan squeezed past the guards. Tried not to look any of them in the eye.
“It’s either this or retreat,” Aidan said, glancing back at her as he put a hand on the door.
“Retreat has never been an option.”
She stood next to him. Placed her hand on the other door.
He wanted to have something witty, something assured to say. He’d visualized this moment so many times—bursting or burning the door down, entering in a billow of flame and vengeance, his army at his back as he reclaimed Scotland for the living. Dozens of scenarios, dozens of ways to save the day.
None of them had looked like this—the quiet, frozen courtyard filled with bodies; the distant echo of thunder and magic in a battle he hadn’t taken part in; the fear that this was all a trap.
“Let’s go,” he whispered. Even that was off from his daydreams—he didn’t sound reassured or confident in the slightest.
He pushed open the door, and the two of them crept inside.
Frost glistened on every surface, lit by a few candles dripping from sconces, everything ghostly in the glow. Past the small gated foyer, he stood in a long hall stretching far to the left and right. The hall was almost churchlike in appearance, the high ceilings and shimmering windows, the white stone walls and slab floors. Church-like, save for the bodies.
Everywhere—everywhere—were more corpses, just like those outside. They crowded before him, a veritable maze. Unlike those outside, though, these weren’t random bodies.
These were crafted.
Sculpted.
In front of him was a man, nearly naked save for a cloth wrapped around his waist, his arm raised and his hand holding a caduceus and his back leg extended behind him, as though in flight. His standing foot was nailed to the wooden pedestal he rested on. And there, beside him, a girl in a tutu, frozen in a pirouette, her eyes glassy and staring. A woman kneeling beside a fallen deer, both gazing to the heavens in reverence. Everywhere he looked was another statue, another twisted corpse.
He’d expected an attack. He’d expected Calum to be at their throats. But this room...it was so cold, so silent. So dead. He stepped forward, trying to figure out a way to navigate this maze of statuesque corpses, trying to ignore the fear that muted the heat in his chest. Trying to ignore the works of grotesque art. There was a sadism here that made even him blanch. Each of these people had been murdered and shaped, or shaped and then murdered. It was beyond his Sphere’s usual need to consume. This was pure, human evil.
“What the hell is this?” Aidan whispered.
Kianna didn’t answer him.
Someone else did.
“Amazing what a few years of boredom will do to a man.”
Aidan turned on his heel, daggers ready, Fire blazing in his chest.
To see Kianna, crumpled on the ground in the foyer, a man slowly straightening up behind her.
A man in black jeans and polished shoes. A man with dark olive skin and tousled black hair, his shirt unbuttoned and smooth, chiseled chest gleaming in the candlelight. Gleaming like the glint in his perfect white teeth, and his copper-flecked eyes. Gleaming like the spark igniting in Aidan’s lungs.
The incubus from Aidan’s nightmare smiled. Spread his arms in a half bow.
“Welcome home, my prince.”