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My skull cracked against hard-packed dirt and stone to the point where I saw glittering stars, and by the time I skidded to a stop, I saw nothing at all. The rope tightened around my ankle and I knew that if I left it alone for too long it would begin to cut off circulation. If I couldn’t rise, I risked amputation.
Goody.
It took me longer than usual to get my breath back. To push myself to my knees and focus on the knot, although it separated into two distinct images at first.
Some surprise, Xanthe. Show of good faith, my ass.
Had she planned this little ambush for me as another way to keep me off guard?
I growled, my fingers unwilling to work to get the knot out, only succeeding in scratching myself further.
“Come on, you jerk,” I told the knot. “Something has to go right today.”
“Need a little help?”
Through the trees, the figure of a man detached itself from the shadows. One second there was nothing and the next there he stood. Smiling at me.
I couldn’t help myself. I burst into tears at the familiar sight.
“Dammit, York, where have you been?” And then the waterworks began. I gestured at the rope as I sat there utterly wrecked, with runny nose and watery eyes to boot.
But my wolf was here and he was smiling at me.
He still didn’t look one hundred percent, the way he had in the first days of our meeting, but beneath the dirt and grime was the handsome heartbreaking doctor I knew and loved. His eyes, huge and dark, were defined by long eyelashes that blinked innocently at me.
He limped slowly toward me and held out a hand to draw me up to him. I hissed when the rope tightened but relished those arms around me, holding me in a comforting cocoon of strength. The sense of homecoming that happened every time York and I stood in the same room.
Leaning back, he dipped his chin to stare at me, looking me over slowly. I did the same with him and soon our expressions shifted into matching grins.
“Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?” I fumed, framing his face with my hands. “I didn’t know where you were. You disappeared on me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not exactly sure what happened either. I remember the smoke, and nearly choking on it, thinking I would die for, like, the thousandth time in my life...” York tightened his hold on me. “Then I was here. I woke up alone. Your dad—”
“Where is he?”
York shook his head, nibbling on the inside of his lip the way he did sometimes when he couldn’t think. “I’m not sure. There were Fae all around us. I get brief glimpses of memory now and then but I think the fire was a distraction. And I get the feeling that your dad put himself in the way so they wouldn’t notice me. There was no one else around and no tracks, no scents for me to follow. I, ah, did the next best thing.” He gestured at the rope around my ankle. Then, realizing how tightly it held me, bent down to loosen the knot.
“What do you mean, a distraction?” I asked. None of this made sense to me. How did they keep tracking us? Why had they set the fire instead of coming for us directly?
And how in the world did Crius get himself captured by the Fae? Unless York was right and my father really had put himself in the way to keep the other man from sight. But what would that accomplish?
It would give you an in. Eyes on the heart of the operation, a sick part of me suggested.
Not sick, no. Logical. Crius did everything for a reason. If he allowed himself to be taken, then he must have a plan in place, a last minute ragtag plan that would help us get a step ahead.
I hoped.
York rose with a grin and I threw my arms around his neck. I didn’t want to let go. So I didn’t. “I get the distinct feeling that we’re going to end up on yet another rescue mission to break Crius out of...wherever he is. Please tell me I’m wrong.”
“I think we both know where the Fae took him.”
Where the journey would end for me. The Palace of Air and Darkness. The home turf of King Raguel.
“And how the hell did you get these clothes? Isn’t this your favorite pajama shirt?” York fingered the material.
I placed my hands on York’s shoulders. “We lost our guide, you know.” No sense in telling him about my little heart-to-heart with my grandmother.
Then I stopped. Was this what Xanthe had meant, throwing me a bone? Giving me York?
Ha. It didn’t make up for her nearly killing him.
York glanced around. “You mean Mòr?”
“She scried to find your location and brought us here to this...abyss of death,” I told him. “Then my grandmother showed up and now I have no clue what’s going on.”
Oops. Thought I’d keep that to myself and it slipped out anyway.
I watched his gaze harden and saw a wolf glaring at me through luminous human eyes. It vanished within moments, replaced by York’s usual curious face. “Nice of her to show up and not shove a sword through your gut. What did she want from you?”
“I can’t be sure what she actually wants, but I know it’s something, which is why I didn’t agree to her proposition to help me kill the king.” I stepped away from York, reaching down to take his hand.
And realizing that he stood in direct sunlight. Yowling, I knocked him down to the ground and threw my body over him to keep him from those rays. “The sun! Why aren’t you burning?”
His soft chuckle answered me. He didn’t seem to care that I crushed him. “Bean, it’s okay. You can let go of me now.”
My arms still shielded his face.
“Or if you would rather shift down and let me lay that beautiful body beneath me, I can arrange that too, although I’m not sure we’re in the best situation for late afternoon hanky-panky. Do you mind if we take a raincheck after we unseat a monarch? I mean, you’re gorgeous and I always want you, but we have things to do.”
His words registered at last and when I looked down, his gaze caught mine. Not a hint of a burn across his skin. Nothing that would indicate he felt his usual pain when the sun kissed his features. He hadn’t been able to stand direct sunlight since his experimentation on himself, and had been closer to vampire status when I first found him.
“Wha... I don’t understand.” I shifted so that I straddled him, pushing him flat on his back and studying him. Indeed, a beam of sunlight fell directly across the bare skin showing above his collarbone and yet nothing happened.
“I don’t understand either,” he said softly. “But I told you how this place makes me feel. Like the earth itself calls to me. Even the dirt is alive and throbbing with energy.”
During York’s experimentation to eradicate the lupine genome that turned him furry, he’d done a number of things to himself, including tainting his blood with a strain of otherworldly. In the simplest terms, he’d turned himself into a hybrid, a werewolf who had teeth like a vampire and needed blood to survive.
My blood.
Something gave me pause. I bent down to draw York’s scent into me, to see if I could find an explanation. No odd smell. He looked human enough to me. I knew better.
“Show me,” I demanded.
York knew exactly what I meant. He drew his lips back and I watched the fangs slip through his gums over his normal human canines. I shuddered, knowing intimately how those lethal fangs would feel slipping through my skin, and the nearly orgasmic reaction I’d begun to have to the act.
“I can still call them at will. I feel the draw of your blood and I feel it flowing through you,” York said, his tone slightly lisping due to the extended fangs. Then they snapped back into place as though they had never been. “I desire your blood as I normally do. Like I said, I don’t know what’s going on. But the sunlight in this place doesn’t bother me. It hasn’t since I drank whatever concoction you and Mòr decided to pour down my throat.”
“You expect me to believe that she cured your vampirism with some herbs from her backyard? Give me a break.” Nothing worked that easily. No matter how badly I wanted it to.
“We can discuss it later. As much as I love this new development, we need to go.” York patted my thighs to get me to move. “We need to find Mòr and get out of here. The castle awaits. We can’t waste any more time going around in circles.”
My stomach jerked. I followed York back toward the Killing Field and tried not to think about the implication of his renewed affinity for sunlight.
Find Mòr.
Find Crius.
Kill the king.
My to-do list had gotten much larger. Or had it always been that large and I simply didn’t want to see it for what it was?
I unhappily searched where I could for Mòr, going so far as to consult the Carlisle to see if being in this place did something to fill in the blank pages.
Another lucky break when five more pages filled. There were drawings in my mother’s hand I couldn’t decipher. There were words in a language I assumed to be Fae, the outline of a feather, and another note addressed to me. Nothing, I thought, that could help me.
But we had to sleep.
With no other choice at the moment, I helped York find acceptable shelter for the two of us, someplace easily defendable if anyone happened to walk by and think us easy prey. It was past nightfall by the time we settled into a crevice in an old tree trunk that I helped hollow out to make room for both of our bodies.
Unrelenting guilt for what I’d allowed to happen to Crius—captured by the Fae while his powers were stifled—kept me up for the longest time, playing in a repeat until I almost felt the guilt become a piece of me. A piece I knew would taint the rest until it consumed me from the inside.
Dreams were not kind to me when I finally fell asleep, dropping into the deep exhaustion that had been hounding us since our water voyage back to the States from Greece. My subconscious filled my head with all things dark and depraved, a melding of monsters and shadows until I became lost in a nightmarish haze.
I was running. Running faster than I ever had in my life, and no matter how I pushed my limbs when they wanted to give up, I made no headway.
For a brief time, I thought I heard the sound of Hades’ laughter trailing me. Urging me to flee although I had nowhere to go. Nowhere safe for me to hide this time around. Had there ever been a place in this world truly safe for someone like me?
No, never. None that I’d found. None where I could stride across the land in confidence. Where I could be myself and expect others to accept me for all I was. Dream Vienna remembered the smoke images again, taunted by them. By the impossibility of what she’d seen.
And when the shadows cleared and I stood in a summer meadow with the sun overhead, I heard a powerful, resonant voice rise in a taunt.
You think you have the power to stop me? You, who should not have been born?
“If I am not a threat, then why try to kill me?” I flung back with a voice that had no substance. This dream, unlike my last one with Hades, did not feel real.
Because I can.
I glimpsed a hauntingly beautiful face that would have made me ache with desire had I not found York. Perfect lips perfectly sculpted in a direct and soft contrast to the hard planes of his chin and cheekbones.
Raguel the Conqueror.
Did he stalk my dreams or was this a piece of me? An inescapable piece manifesting itself in a way I would understand?
Too bad I still didn’t understand.
I flung my arms wide and tried to call the power that everyone believed lived inside of me. The power that was mine by birthright and natural law. The power my mother had split her soul into pieces for me to accept and realize.
Until nothing happened and Raguel began to laugh in the same way my Olympian cousin had. Big bellied, boisterous. The king roared with laughter until it filled the meadow, and I dropped to my knees, covering my ears with my hands.
“Stop it!” I screamed.
There was no one here to help me this time. The small team of loved ones I had gathered to my side were forgotten. Dust in an invisible wind. Only I stood here, alone, and without anything to help me face what I chose to face.
My choice.
My choice to die.
You are incapable of controlling yourself. You will never have the ability to defeat me. Not as you are. Not as all you have ever been or will be.
I woke up in a cold sweat with my pulse racing and my lungs straining to draw fresh air into my lungs. Next to me, curled on his side, York continued to sleep. Dark lashes were drawn down over pale cheeks.
Trying to shift without disturbing him, I removed his arm from my stomach and slowly crawled from the confines of our makeshift shelter. Drawing the Carlisle with me.
There had to be something in here I could do, I told myself. A spell I could manage and control to help me unlock the rest of my abilities. Otherwise, what was the point?
I didn’t need the moonlight to be able to see the pages. My eyesight worked no matter the level of darkness. Pupils adjusting, I walked an acceptable distance from the tree—not far enough to be useless if anything happened to York—and sat cross-legged on the cool ground, flipping through pages.
I passed the spell I had supposedly used to disarm the soldiers the other day. The same spell I’d tried to use against Xanthe in the apartment to no avail, so I was pretty damn doubtful it had worked the second time around. Past the newest spell to the last of the pages that had been filled from my blood.
Symbols I didn’t understand. My Fae education was next to nonexistent. My grandmother had made sure to keep me ignorant, and stupid me, I’d let her. I hadn’t pressed the issue at all.
The next page in the book held a series of hand gestures meant for the reader to copy. I set the book between my feet and, concentrating, tried to replicate them.
At first the movements felt awkward and clumsy. My fingers were better suited to smashing skulls than delicate feats of magic. My joints didn’t want to move the right way. After several minutes of trying, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to fight off the burgeoning sense of failure.
When the time came, when it really counted, I needed to be able to follow through. I needed to be able to protect the people I cared about. Otherwise, what was the point of killing the king?
Revenge felt like a silly reason now, after everything we’d been through. Revenge was a stupid reason to risk the lives of my family. Yet here I stood, frustrated because my hands were refusing to twist in the right ways.
I practiced until my joints ached and my skin split in various places from beating against the ground when nothing happened.
And that’s where York found me when the sun split the horizon.