Aidan’s brain short-circuited.
He stared between Kianna’s prone body and Tomás’s glowing eyes, his heart paused midbeat and his thoughts stalled.
He couldn’t be—
She couldn’t be—
“Don’t worry,” Tomás said. “She lives. For now.”
Tomás stepped over Kianna’s body. Every inch closer and the heat between them rose, until sweat beaded across Aidan’s skin. So warm. So warm.
Despite everything, Aidan took a small step forward. Fire thrummed wildly in his chest. He knew he should be worried about Kianna. Should be panicking over a nightmare turned flesh. But this man...this creature...seemed less nightmare and more promise than Aidan wanted to admit.
“You’re real,” Aidan whispered. He couldn’t tell if his voice was husky from shock or desire.
“Of course I am.” That devilish quirk of the lip. That tilted head. That smile sending heat down Aidan’s spine. “I’m too perfect for you to dream up.”
In the dream, Tomás had been alluring. But here, in the flesh—and he was most assuredly in the flesh—he was intoxicating. He smelled of musk and vetiver, like the wildest, darkest parts of a jungle, the places where sunlight doesn’t shine and leopards prey. Everything about him moved with sensuous purpose—even the folds of his sheer shirt curled around him like a cocked finger. Aidan knew it was part of the Howl’s design, knew incubi were created to evoke desire.
He also knew that what he felt toward Tomás was more than just carnal want.
When he looked at the incubus, he saw a dream made flesh. Many dreams made flesh. He saw more than just a seductive man; he saw the promises Tomás had made. He saw his place as king.
For a moment, he forgot where he was. Felt himself thrown back in the dream. Him and Tomás in a castle. Him and Tomás, ruling side by side.
Then Tomás stepped past him, gesturing to the frozen corpses around them, and Aidan was firmly back in the present.
“My brother has always had a certain...knack...for eccentricity.” Tomás gently caressed the face of a man frozen with a sword upraised. “Personally, I think it’s a waste of good flesh. He doesn’t even play with them.” He patted the side of the statue’s face and turned back to Aidan. “At least, not while they’re alive.”
“What are you doing here?” Aidan asked.
Why hadn’t he already attacked Tomás? Why hadn’t he run to Kianna’s side to ensure she was okay? Why was he standing there, frozen, while one incubus stood at his side, and another lurked somewhere in the shadows?
For that matter, why the hell hadn’t Calum attacked?
“Helping you,” Tomás said. He circled around Aidan like a panther, looking him up and down. Aidan felt entirely exposed.
He didn’t hate it as much as he probably should have.
“Helping me? Why? How?”
Tomás’s grin widened. “Come now, my prince. We both know you couldn’t have taken Calum on your own.” He opened to Air. The Sphere unfurled in the incubus’s throat, and of all the things Aidan had seen that day, that scared him the most. Normal Howls couldn’t use magic—everyone knew that. Which meant...
“You’re one of the Kin,” Aidan whispered, fear and awe curling in his chest.
Tomás turned and bowed.
“Attractive and intelligent. You truly are an upgrade,” Tomás said.
“Upgrade?”
But Tomás didn’t answer. Instead, he waved a hand, and with a pulse of magic the statues before them parted, blown away in a gust of air.
Revealing a throne in the chamber before them.
Calum strained above it. Crucified and writhing ten feet in the air between the stained-glass windows.
Aidan nearly toppled back.
Blood dripped from the stakes pounded through Calum’s hands and feet. Those bloody rivulets turning to icicles that stretched like talons from his outstretched hands, crimson and thick against pale gray stone. Everything about the man seemed gray, bled out. His torn white shirt. The faded black jeans. Even his skin was sallow, a color Aidan had never seen a body go before. Calum looked like he was made of wax. A wax that breathed. Shallowly. Painfully. Every inhalation a curse.
And above the body, written in what could only be Calum’s blood, were four words.
MY GIFT, MY KING
“Do you like it?” Tomás asked, walking right past Aidan to nod at Calum. “I thought it was perhaps a bit much. But then I thought...” He looked at Aidan. “For you, too much is barely enough.”
Aidan stared at the Kin nailed to the wall. His gut churned with disgust and rage—anger at Calum, for everything he had done to Scotland; angry at himself, for not being the one to torture him so.
“You slit his throat,” Aidan whispered, staring at the blood congealing on Calum’s neck. How was he still alive?
“Of course,” Tomás replied, as though the reasoning was obvious. “I didn’t want him to ruin my grand entrance.”
“But how...”
Tomás cut him off by placing his hand on Aidan’s mouth. Even that move, forceful as it was, made Aidan’s chest race with desire.
“Oh, my Hunter. Why waste time with small talk? I have given you my brother on a silver platter. Now, you stand on the edge of greatness. Relish in it.”
It shouldn’t have been enough to sway Aidan’s thoughts, but it was. His mind was sluggish, unable to connect the dots, unable to do anything besides feel. Fire flamed so bright within him, he felt drunk on its power. And when Tomás pulled his hand away, he couldn’t feel anything beyond his own unveiled destiny.
“Why did you do it?” Aidan asked. He didn’t break his gaze from Calum—the ragged rise and fall of the man’s breath, the slow, crystalizing drips of his blood. “All of this.” Because he knew, too, that Tomás was the reason the guards outside were frozen. Tomás would have no problem dispatching a castle’s worth of minions.
The Kin had carved Aidan’s path to victory.
Aidan barely had the brains to wonder what Tomás would want in return.
“Because we seek the same thing,” Tomás said.
“And what is that?”
“Something better. Something more exciting than this.”
He strode forward, eyes locked on Calum. There was something about the way he moved up the aisle of frozen corpses that made Aidan think of a coronation, their bodies all witnesses to his ascension.
“Oh, brother dear,” Tomás said, head tilted, a broken marionette, “how far you have fallen.”
Aidan followed at his heels, up the row of frozen dead, until they stopped at the foot of Calum’s throne. Only then did he realize the throne was made of bodies. Naked and frozen, twined together with faces downturned, arms raised in supplication, the throne back a man and woman wrapped in what seemed like a loving embrace, save for the looks of horror etched into their faces.
In Fire’s embrace, the sight didn’t disturb him nearly as much as it should have.
“You were given a kingdom,” Tomás said to his frozen brother. “And yet you failed to bring the glory of our Mother to this world. You failed her, and she does not take kindly to failures. Or betrayal.” He glanced at Aidan, and that one look made Aidan’s heart flip with desire, with excitement. “We all reap what we sow, brother dear.”
Tomás walked around the throne of corpses and reached up, placing a hand on Calum’s ankle. Without the slightest bit of pause or ceremony, he yanked Calum from the wall. The sound of ripping flesh and snapping bones made bile rise in the back of Aidan’s throat, as did the thud and muffled groan when Calum hit the floor. Even that disgust was distant, though—he was too busy focusing on the way Tomás’s biceps corded with the motion, the flex and strain of his lats. Fire burned off whatever revulsion he might have felt. Fire saw only strength. Fire felt only power.
Tomás stared down at Calum, a sneer on his face, revealing his sharp canines, emphasizing the hard cut of his jaw. There were a dozen battling emotions in that face—sadness and rage and pity, all of it tinted with disgust.
“You deserve to suffer,” Tomás whispered, voice rising with every word. “For what you have done. For what you failed to do. You were never her favorite. Never. Never! I was the one she cherished! I was her perfection!”
Then Tomás shook himself, shuddering violently, and stood straighter. He held out a hand toward Aidan. “Come.”
Aidan never took orders. And yet his feet guided him forward, past the twisted throne, Tomás’s voice a hook in his heart that he knew he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—ever defy.
Tomás took his hand when he neared. The Howl’s flesh was hot and cold, a wave of fire that pricked Aidan’s skin with icicles. But when Tomás’s fingers curled around his, everything about that moment felt...right. His heart burned and his thoughts swum, his whole body moving as though through warm molasses.
He felt as though every atom in his body had waited for this moment, and now that it was here, he would soak up every molten second.
Even if it wasn’t how he’d planned to take down Calum, even though—in the farthest corner of his mind—he knew that accepting the aid of a Kin was borderline treason, this was the moment he had waited for the last three years. This was the moment he had lived and fought and bled and burned for.
And he was more than ready to take on the role of king.
Even if he was doing it hand in hand with a Kin he should have wanted to kill. Fire told him that this was how things were meant to be; Fire was a voice he could always trust.
He stared down at Calum, and perhaps he was only mirroring Tomás, perhaps the feelings were not his own, but he could find nothing but disgust for the creature sprawled and bleeding on the ground.
This close, Aidan could see every wrinkle in the Kin’s lined face, every scar on his waxen flesh. Calum was old—older than most humans managed to live. But he also seemed weak, and while Aidan stared down at the man who once was king, he could only think that Calum had failed in every single way. He’d been content to rule fields of nothing, cities of ruin. He had never strived for greater. He had never dreamed of more.
Calum was nothing, and Aidan could not understand how he had ever viewed the Kin as a threat. As an equal.
When clearly, Calum was subservient.
Tomás squeezed Aidan’s hand, searing visions through Aidan’s thoughts: burning skies and charred fields, squares of bowing servants and praying Howls, everything, everything, praising Aidan’s glory. Fire burned in Aidan’s chest. And there, in the darkest part of the flame, he heard the voice that had taunted him the last few days, the whispered words of a woman who spoke a deeper truth.
You will be a stronger ruler than Calum ever was, my child, the Dark Lady promised. You will make the world bend knee.
“It is time to take your place in history,” Tomás said, drawing Aidan from his dreams of destruction. “Fire keeps my brother alive. Destroy the affected Sphere, and you destroy him. Destroy him, and take your rightful place as King.”
Fire burned. Aidan knelt at Calum’s side.
That’s when he noticed the tattoos on the man’s abdomen.
In that moment, the world around him seemed to still. Fade out. Even Fire quieted.
He stared at the tattoos that curved over Calum’s hips, the sigils and symbols that crisscrossed over his belly. Aidan reached out and gently lifted Calum’s shirt. More symbols. No. Not symbols.
Runes.
He knew them. Some from the markings on his own arm. Some from study. And others...others he just...knew. Harsh and sinuous, burning black and glowing red, a half light haze that seared into his retinas. They whispered to him, hissing like steam, like serpents, like that internal oceanic whisper that pushed him toward the edge of oblivion. Like the Dark Lady herself inscribed them in his mind.
Entranced, his limbs moving on their own accord, he undid the buttons of Calum’s shirt, revealing more tattoos and more runes, lines and symbols that formed constellations over the pale expanse of his skin. And in the center of his chest, right where the Sphere of Fire was meant to be, a dark black circle was inked into his flesh, a black hole around which galaxies of runes danced and spiraled and were consumed. Within the black void, he saw the faint impressions of other markings: brands and burns, scabs and blank spaces of skin. More symbols. Layers and layers of runes, all spelling out words that hissed like poison in his mind.
Distantly, he felt Tomás’s hand on his shoulder, the Kin’s voice saying Aidan was meant to kill Calum, not undress him. Aidan barely heard it.
Not as the runes repeated in his mind.
Not as they became a language he thought he understood. A language he had known his entire life.
Every word a curse. A promise. Every word uttered by the low, feminine hiss he’d heard through Fire.
Be mine, and be consumed. Be nothing, and be reborn. Death and life are yours to walk between.
He heard Her voice, and it commanded him, moved him, hypnotized him. His hand shook as he traced the runes scarred into Calum’s body.
When he placed his hand on the dark mark of Calum’s chest, the shadows swallowed him whole.