“Arik!”
The scream reverberating inside my head drove my knees to the ground. I let out a scream of my own as the telepathic message my father had thrust inside my brain snuffed out, the loss howling through me, leaving behind an emptiness deeper than anything I had experienced in the hundred years I had been alive.
And then a single image flashed behind my eyes: Maddox, his face a mask of hatred, his sword arcing toward my father’s neck.
The image made no sense. My parents, Rivalen and Anna, had practically raised Maddox. He was closer to me than a blood brother could ever be. Across the decades it had been Maddox, Sun, and me. The three of us had shared everything, all our lives. Everything. Maddox would not hurt my family.
But the blankness was there, along the line that had tied me to my father for a century. Gone. But where…
Mother!
I lunged to my feet, already running, even as I sent the cry, the question to my mother. The searing pain that echoed back threatened to overwhelm me, the image of Anna struggling with my best friend, Maddox’s hands on her, the gluttony in the shifter’s eyes as he forced her—
“No!”
I choked against the rush of acid rising up the back of my throat and ran faster, following the link to my mother with a desperation that turned to violent despair mere steps from the front door of the home I had been raised in. The moment my mother’s life ended. I slammed inside anyway, unable to stop, unable to turn away from all that remained of my parents.
Scattered ashes.
They were gone.
The next minutes were black, blank. I remembered nothing, not even kneeling amid the mess of broken furniture and fixtures. Nothing until the door burst open behind me.
“Maddox,” I choked out, only then realizing tears drenched my face. I did not turn to see who had entered. It did not matter. I placed my palm on the floor, right in the ashes of my betrayed father.
“It was Maddox.”
* * *
Hours later
I ignored the whisper of movement at my back, my focus centered on the pyre I had struggled for hours to build. No help. I had not wanted it. While my clan reeled, shocked and grieving, my own pain had coalesced into a hard, deadly force inside me—the need for vengeance. The need to feel Maddox’s blood dripping through my fingertips.
I would honor the two people who had given me life, who had loved me with everything inside themselves. Then I would bring their murderer to justice.
I had stacked each piece of wood on the memorial to my parents with careful precision, but as I touched a lit torch to one corner, watched the flames begin their dance along one edge, I knew the gesture was as empty as the pyre. The burning of the fire was merely symbolic of the flash of energy that had burned my parents’ headless bodies at the moment of their deaths, the same flash that delivered every Archai to whatever lay beyond when they were taken from this life.
Somehow the ritual no longer comforted me, not with the memories of the final horrific moments that my parents had drawn breath circling inside my head. My father’s blood coating the ground. The elegant finery of my father’s clothes a macabre contrast to the grisly detachment of his head from his neck. Anna reaching for her mate in desperation. In terror. My mother’s pain— I couldn’t bear to think of what she had gone through, what I had shared in those too-brief moments of connection. Choking, suffocating grief welled, tearing into my mind, my very sanity as I struggled to make sense of what had happened, to say good-bye to the two people who had nurtured me, protected me for a hundred years.
The two people I had failed.
I knelt, silent and alone, in the dirt, keeping vigil as the fire grew to a roar, the heated air a foul kiss along my naked scalp. My coloring had always drawn attention—the silver-blue of my eyes that shone in the night, the blond, almost white hair, a trait shared by the males of my long and honorable family line. All had worn their unusual hair far down their backs, a vanity of sorts, identifying them on sight as the purest and most ancient of griffin shifters. As had I. Until now. Now my head was bare, shorn in grief for the parents I loved.
The parents my closest friend had murdered.
I glanced down at the short blade on the ground before me, the knife I would use to carve the mourning cuts in deep diagonal grooves across my cheeks. But first…
“You will be avenged,” I whispered, swearing it as I rammed my knuckles into the ground, relishing the sharp pain echoing through them. Rage mounted with every throb, every breath, my heart a bottomless pit of boiling emotion in my heaving chest.
“Yes, they will,” a familiar voice said behind me. The slide of a sword from its sheath accompanied the threat inherent in the softly spoken words.
Shock sizzled through me. My head shot up, my incredulous gaze locking onto the point of Sun’s sword mere inches from my neck. The weapon’s unwavering position matched the lack of give in its owner’s expression. This male who had grown up alongside me, shared my triumphs and tribulations over the last one hundred years, my boyish mistakes and adult disappointments, now threatened me before my parents’ grave. What I could not understand was why.
“What is happening?” I asked, hating the thick coat of grief and confusion that weakened my words.
Sun held his weapon steady. I met his rainbow-hued eyes, an inherent trait of his phoenix form, and the emptiness I found there immobilized my limbs. The birdlike tilt of his head was at once familiar and utterly alien as he dissected the figure huddled before him.
“How can you pretend to mourn them?” he asked, the words filled with disgust. “How can you kneel there and contemplate their desecrated bodies, and not appear as anything but a loving son?”
I shook my head, frowning up at him. “I am their son.”
“But you do not mourn them. You could not. Not when it was you who killed them.”
“What?”
“You were seen, Arik.” The barest hint of anguish glinted in Sun’s brilliant eyes. “Maddox connected with me; he showed me. How could you do this? How could you conspire with the enemy to destroy your own people—your own parents?”
“I—”
“Silence!”
Solomon, the Archai king, stepped to his son’s side, his hardened features like granite in the bright light of the funeral pyre. His contempt glared down at me from eyes that matched Sun’s exactly, much like my eyes matched my father’s, though he was no longer here to compare, was he?
Because of Maddox; not because of me. And yet the accusation in Sun’s eyes declared otherwise.
I sucked in a breath. The tip of Sun’s sword touched my shoulder.
“Maddox himself told us he saw you with the Anigma leader, Bricriuu, in the woods outside the village just yesterday.” The king’s furious gaze swept across the memorial fire. “He came to us immediately, but that was not soon enough, was it? Not soon enough to stop this, stop you from killing them—and him.”
“Maddox is not dead!”
Sun’s single step forward embedded the tip of his sword in the thick muscle alongside my neck, though I felt no sting. “He is. I felt him. I was connected to him when you took his head.”
“That is impossible. He—”
Sun leaned in. His sword sank deeper, pinning me in place. Pain roared through me, nearly overshadowing my confusion. All it would take was a swift strike across, severing my spine, and Sun would take my head. I began to shake, the need to defend myself rising. The need to stop this nightmare. I could not acknowledge the rise of grief, though it was there. Grief at the betrayal of not one friend, but two.
Out of the darkness, shadows solidified into the forms of men, circling the pyre, surrounding me. I scoured each face glaring down at me. It was not only my friends or my king who had betrayed me. It was my clan. My people.
Your people are on that pyre. No one else matters.
I glared back at the ring of faces, at Sun, but refused to speak.
King Solomon’s cold eyes added to the bitterness welling inside me. “We may not have stopped you, but we will make you pay,” he warned.
“Get on all fours,” Sun commanded, his eyes a frigid match to the king’s. They meant to take my head here, now, I realized, the shock of it spearing my gut. Bending forward, I planted my fists into the grass before me, feeling the earth give at the pressure, the soil cupping my fingers—the only comfort I had received since the second of my father’s death. Rigid, stunned, I listened to the rustle of grass and stone as shifters formed a loose circle behind me, but I did not try to look at them, not even when swords slid from sheaths.
No, I stared straight ahead, at the pyre I had built with the hands now digging into the dirt.
Sun dragged his sword from my flesh, ignoring my grunt of pain, and moved to stand before me. His gaze drilled into mine as he repeated Solomon’s judgment. “You will pay, Arik. Right now.”
No one else matters.
I slid my gaze away from his. The male was no longer a friend but an enemy. I gathered myself instead.
And then, through the flames of the pyre, I saw the slightest movement. A familiar face. A triumphant smile.
Maddox.
Instinct threw me toward my parents’ murderer. I did not feel the cut of Sun’s sword as it sliced across my body, nor the sizzle of the fire along my skin. I did not register pain or hatred or despair. All I felt, all I knew at that moment was the need to kill Maddox, the male who had taken everything from me.
I would return for Sun. And for my clan. If it took destroying the world, I would do it. But Maddox came first.
In the end, they would all die. Rivalen and Anna deserved nothing less.