Kianna knelt at his side. She didn’t touch him, didn’t try to offer support. He couldn’t blame her—every drop of rain and snow dissolved before reaching his flesh.
He couldn’t speak. Not that he wanted to; the words stuck in his throat were more than treason. If Kianna knew the Dark Lady was speaking to him... No, that she wanted him alive to do Her work, Kianna would kill him on the spot.
He knew this, because he knew he would do the same.
Or so he wanted to tell himself.
“The Howls are dead,” Kianna said. “Along with the troops. Jesus, mate. You went up like a bloody bonfire. Nearly lost my eyebrows because of you.”
“It nearly killed me,” he muttered. His words felt charred. He coughed. Even oxygen hurt.
“Sounds like loser talk to me.”
He grunted and pushed himself up to sitting, then shakily stood. His head spun with vertigo; he had to stare at the ground to keep from toppling.
The empty ground.
The Breathless One that tried to kill him had been reduced to less than ash.
Around them, the statues of their former comrades slowly thawed in the deepening gloom. He tried not to look at their faces. The last thing he needed was to put names to the dead. The moment he started doing that was the moment he lost sight of the end goal.
He tried to ignore them. But every single flash of lightning seared their faces into his mind.
Alexander, with whom he’d sparred every Friday.
Felicia, who showed him which of Scotland’s few remaining plants were edible.
Mhaire, who taught him how to control Fire’s more unstable urges.
He stared at his former friends, his former comrades, and tried to find some sort of sadness. Instead, he could only find relief. Relief that he was still alive, that his painful heart still throbbed, that his burning lungs still pulled in oxygen. He’d been close to death more times than he could count. But that was the first time he’d felt like Death had actively rejected him.
He looked in their faces, at their frozen forms, and could only be grateful that it wasn’t him.
And in some sick, twisted way, he felt...better.
Because he was still alive, and that meant he was still worth something. He just tried not to wonder who he was worth something to.
“What do we do now?” Kianna asked.
Aidan grunted, tried to get his thoughts in order. He focused on the waves, their ferocious churning. Trevor had to have realized by now that the attack had gone south and the wall hadn’t crumbled. Or maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he was too lost to the heat of battle.
Maybe he was dead.
There were two choices: Aidan and Kianna could run back into the battle and try to make their way to Trevor and the other leaders. Warn them of what happened. Try to come up with an alternative attack.
That was the moral thing to do. The right thing to do. Even if it meant risking their lives in the process. There was every chance they would be killed by a necromancer or Howl or one of their own before they even made it to Trevor. If he would let Aidan live long enough to give the warning.
The other choice, the one Fire reveled in, was to see this as an opportunity. Trevor was distracted. Calum would think his defense a success. The only way he would have known about the full extent of their attack was if there was a mole within the Guild. Aidan going in and heading straight to Calum would be entirely unexpected.
And unexpected meant Aidan had a stronger chance at securing victory for himself. For Scotland.
He pulled deeply through Fire, let the magic flood his limbs, turning the pain that lingered in his lungs into a force he could use.
“We do what we were destined to do,” he said, looking to Kianna. He felt the Dark Lady’s words twist in the back of his heart. “We make Scotland kneel.”
As he’d thought, nothing within Edinburgh had been saved from Calum’s destruction. Ages ago, Aidan had his scouts map out the hidden entrances within the wall, and the one nearest hadn’t been guarded. Everyone was focused on the frontal attack, just as he’d hoped. Still, it did put him on edge that all it took to break through the most heavily guarded fortress in this country—save his own—was pressing against the right camouflaged panel.
The structures within the wall were clearly never part of the city’s original architecture. There were no rising tenement buildings, no historical parks, no cobblestone or sandstone. Years ago, the city had been an architectural marvel, marrying the prestigious past with the neon present. Every vantage had been awe-inspiring. Now the buildings were as slick and black as the wall that guarded them, everything covered in a permanent sheen from mist and magic. But there was no beauty laced through the architecture. The Earth mages who crafted this place hadn’t cared for aesthetics.
They’d wanted a prison. And that’s what they’d created.
Rather than winding rows of ancient architecture, the city before them was flat and stoic, a grid of two-story barracks with dark windows of twisted iron bars. The stench of death was overpowering; he couldn’t tell if this block had been used to house kravens, or the humans kept to feed or be converted into them. Normally, Fire relished in destruction, the offerings of life. But this...this made even Aidan’s burning heart turn cold. So much history lost in a heartbeat. So many monuments to great women and men, destroyed. Forgotten.
Replaced by something even more forgettable.
It made his heart race, the absolute feeling of loss that lingered here. But there was more to it. Something else unnerved him, a chill not even Fire could burn through.
Not from the bones scattered like trash on the street. Not from the scraps of clothing fluttering limply against iron spikes. But from the absolute silence.
Thunder boomed and wind howled nearer to the entrance, but over here, at the farthest edge of Calum’s kingdom, there was nothing. No screams for help. No growls from the undead. The city was a ghost town, and that made him sick. There had been hundreds of people imprisoned here only months ago; this place should have been brimming with screams for help. In the far-off corner of his mind, he knew the cells were empty because of him. Because of the attack.
There were a few hundred more Howls on the field tonight because Calum had been tipped off that this attack was coming.
Fire whispered that it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was alive and he was burning. If anything, it meant that there were a few hundred more bodies to incinerate. Even if that meant there were fewer people to save and, thus, worship him for their liberation. At least it meant a more glorious tale.
Fire’s urgings should have been enough. But not even Fire could convince him that this place wasn’t entirely, horribly wrong. Every step through the empty city tightened his nerves close to snapping. He drew deeper through Fire and Kianna held her weapons at the ready as they made their way closer to the castle. It wasn’t hard to track, not when it was the tallest structure in the city, always towering above the imprisoned as a reminder of how bleak the future truly was.
A reminder of who truly ruled mankind.
You, Fire hissed in defiance. The true ruler is you.
Thunder rolled overhead, as if the world itself agreed with the words. The ground heaved with another thunderous boom. Aidan stumbled against Kianna, who held him upright and steady as though she were carved from the stone at their feet.
“That’s the wall,” she said. She stared down the road to their left, as though she could see through the buildings in their way.
“You sure?”
“Is Scotland on a tectonic rift?”
“We need to hurry,” he said.
“Your observations are, as always, illuminating.”
He wanted to retort, but she was already off, jogging down the street toward the castle.
“First one there gets immortality!” she called out.
“I really hate you sometimes,” he muttered, and followed.
Shouts and roars echoed through the empty streets as the battle poured into the city. He kept expecting to be stopped, for a rogue necromancer or Howl to step into the street and end them. But the focus was entirely on the western entrance. It was eerie, the ease with which he and Kianna reached the great mound of earth that held the castle. Not that he questioned it. Fire sang in his veins with how right this was, how destined this victory. The city was created to be his—why should it not bow to his presence?
The castle towered above the heart of the city, its great pedestal-like hill of molten stone pressing it up to the lightning-streaked heavens. An offering to the gods. An attempt at bridging the gap between mortal and divine. Aidan stared for a moment. The imposing walls, the shadowed windows. Once more, he felt the twinge—before, the castle had stood proudly at the top of the Royal Mile, the great stretch of road layered with shadowed closes and touristy gift shops and pubs carpeted in tartan and decades-old beer stains.
All of that was gone. Melted.
And even though Fire burned in his chest at the might of it all, the more human side of him thought it was a waste. Now, all that existed within a wide arc around the castle was the hill and dead land and, further on, the prisons of the damned. It didn’t look like one of the most historic parts of Scotland. With the sharp angles and jutting iron and shadowed, black soil, it looked like a nightmare.
One he intended to make his own.
They raced across the swath of crystalline land, their reflections staring back at them with every curl of flame or flash of lightning in the sky. Aidan didn’t let the castle out of sight. Couldn’t. He couldn’t stop staring at the darkened windows in the towers, the shadowed arrow slits, the ochre stone. Every flash, and he saw shadows shift. He could almost imagine Calum standing from the highest turret, watching the battle unfold. Could almost imagine a dozen necromancers, waiting in the wings with flame and storm at the ready.
And yet, when they reached the top of the pedestal and stood at the castle gates, there wasn’t any alarm. There wasn’t an attack. Despite the flame within him, despite the rightness that pounded in his ears like a bloody cadence, the stillness here unnerved him, a chill up the back of his spine that his smoke and burn couldn’t melt.
He knew taking Glasgow would be easy; his plan had ensured it. But this...this was too easy.
This felt like a trap.
There is no trap you cannot overturn, Fire promised, and he let himself burn in that assurance while he surveyed his former army’s progress.
The entire western half of the city was chaos, a smear of fire and smoke, gales and lightning. He could barely see through the destruction, but he occasionally glimpsed a figure through the fog of war, someone running or fighting or dying, and Fire ached in his chest every time.
It wanted to be down there, coated in blood. It wanted to burn in the trenches, rather than watch from afar.
His hands clenched as he fought the urge to send down his own flames, to melt the entire city in a breath. He knew he could. He felt the power within his chest. If he wanted Fire to destroy the city, it would. Happily. It seared under his fingertips, ached to get out. So many souls to burn. So many lives to feed to the ever-hungry light.
“Not yet,” he whispered to himself. “Not yet.”
“Talking to yourself?”
“I’m a better conversationalist than you,” he said.
She snorted. “To quote the Scots, get tae fuck.” Then she sighed, almost happily, and said, “It looks like we’re winning.”
“Aye,” Aidan replied. He tore his eyes away from the battle. Looked to the castle. “I think we’ve already won.”