Страница 18 из 105
The soft orange light cast from the city beyond the castle gates lit the corner of my eye; the villages between the city walls and the woods beneath me dark and slumbering. That wasn’t the case for others as I flew closer toward the mainland, Errin, the human’s kingdom, tucked beneath the stars in the ever-stretching distance. Some villages, farms, tiny towns, and the old mine were nothing but husks, a darkness that might never see the light again.
Faster, I had to move faster.
I’d flown countless times as a youngling before I’d learned to control it, to conceal what my parents deemed a curse rather than a gift, but never this fast. The wind barreled into me, attempting to steer me north—back home—when I needed to keep going south, so cold as it ruffled every one of my downy feathers.
Unable to help it, I looked to the right, toward the ravine over the edge of the forest, the cliff’s jagged edges and the trees on the other side visible even at night. Vordane spread beyond those trees. A lush, tree-populated entity of hidden gloom. Sprinkles of light glittered like faraway stars from its heart—the city across the river from the palace that watched over all at Vordane’s northernmost corner.
Shadow Keep.
It had been years since I’d glimpsed it from the skies. I’d never visited. We’d never dare. To do so was as good as welcoming an untimely death.
The thought withered when the wind delivered screaming that tugged my gaze southeast. Banking, I surged, and it wasn’t long before I saw it.
Flames, carnage, murder…
All the blood.
No sign of the prince and his soldiers. They had crossed the border, then, and were possibly already home. Which left only my father and his small troop, who’d been making the journey home.
Steel clashed against steel. Beasts dived on limbs. Blood sprayed like bursts of rain falling from the sky and puddled just the same.
My heart burned in my chest, ash flooding my mouth.
I was too late.
It was too late, yet I circled back to keep out of view and dropped beneath the trees, swooping through a vacant barn beyond them and out through to the broken fencing. The grass might as well have been concrete beneath my feet, I landed so hard, but I didn’t shift.
A large shadow against a rotted-out stump, barbed wire curling in the wind behind me, I could do nothing but stand there and stare.
So many. Stars, there were so fucking many. Wolves of differing shape and color, some with wings, most double the size of any human man, snarled and lunged and ripped—
Too many of them to have crossed a makeshift bridge thrown across the ravine or river in the dead of night.
I stumbled back on my webbed feet.
Fang.
Me.
My fault.
A wolf, larger than any I’d ever seen before, crashed through the air and into the middle of the clearing, his maw stretching open with a roar so ferocious it shook my feathers and every blood-soaked blade of grass.
Cream furred wings, blackened with blood and gore, fa
The blood king.
The fighting didn’t cease—but it wasn’t fighting. My father’s soldiers, Fae who’d been trained since their bodies had matured, fell like insects swatted beneath giant paws.
It was a massacre.
Move. I had to move, but to join the battle would guarantee my death, and the repercussions of that would spread far and wide.
I was the last living heir. An heir to provide my family with another.
But my father, bellowing with fury as he fended off three attackers, took a hit to his side. His white-gold hair was coated in blood, his face nearly unrecognizable… I couldn’t just leave him.
I couldn’t leave any of them.
If I shifted back, I’d hopefully still find that dagger strapped to my thigh, though I knew it’d do little good with beasts that quadrupled the size of my shifted form.
The largest beast—the king—advanced through the fallen, crushing them beneath his giant paws as though they were already soil that belonged to the land and nothing else.
My father, fending off attacker after attacker, weakening more by the moment, didn’t see it coming.
I screamed, the sound little more than a honking call to the wild birds who’d long scattered—useless and pointless.
But he heard.
My father looked my way with wide eyes, no longer soaked with rage but with bright fear. Fear for me. His eyes darted to the trees, indicating, pleading for me to go.
I should’ve listened, but he couldn’t expect I’d be able to move an inch as the wolf rose onto his hind legs and wrenched my father off the ground by his neck.
Then shifted as his paw struck, claws and fur punching deep within my father’s chest.
The beast, now a male in a familiar black cloak, lowered to the dirt with my father’s neck still in his fist, his other inside his chest, twisting, pulling, as my father released a silent scream and turned his eyes skyward.
Fang.
My stomach dropped, and my vision blackened as my father’s lifeless form fell to the dirt, his glimmering heart in the crimson guard’s—in the blood king’s—hand.
Cheers and howls sliced through the clearing, through my airless chest, as the king, Fang, lifted my father’s heart to his mouth and tore into it with his teeth.
Teeth that, just hours ago, had scraped over my lips.
My father’s lifeblood cascaded over his and down his chin as he raised the dead organ toward the night sky, his kin’s approval thunderous, vile, and deafening.
The few remaining soldiers couldn’t be helped. I knew that.
So when my father’s heart fell to the grass beside his dead body, I retreated, shrank back into the night in search of the forgiving light of day to end this twisted nightmare.
He’d lied.
All along, I hadn’t been meeting with some rogue guard from the enemy’s kingdom. I hadn’t spilled precious words into Fang’s ears. Stars, his name wasn’t even Fang.
The monster of Vordane had multiple names.
The blood king. The king of wolves. King Dade.
And I was a fucking fool.
Before I could reach the barn or the husk of a farmhouse, I felt it, the warmth of eyes at my back. Twisting my neck, I found the king standing at the fence I’d just left—in the very place I’d watched him murder my father, his face stained with his blood, cloak billowing, and those blue eyes swirling with nothing I wanted to read into.
He didn’t know. There was no way he could possibly know it was me.
All he saw was a large black swan.
And so I turned back and flew for the cover of the woods, hoping they’d shield me, that my wings would carry me the entire way home when my soul felt so heavy.
If he’d known it was me, I had no doubt that he would’ve easily given chase, yet I flew alone.