“What are you doing?”
“Proving myself,” he answered and jerked my head toward his, fingers digging into my skin as he parted my lips with his tongue. He tasted cold but sweet as he kissed me hungrily while cupping my heat with his other hand. It was indecent. It was carnal. It was lust. I didn’t want it to end, but as that thought blossomed in my mind, he released me all at once, and I was left dizzy and aroused as he urged Shadow forward into the thick of the woods, putting distance between us and his army, still making our way toward Revekka. Now all I could focus on was the hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. My fingers curled into my palms as I thought of how I wanted to be full of him.
“Hold on to that passion, Sparrow. I will make you sing again.”
I did as he guided me against him, my head resting on his shoulder. He drew his cloak about us and lifted my tunic, hand dipping beneath my leggings, where his thumb brushed my clit. I heaved a sigh that shook my bones.
“Are you always this insatiable?” he whispered against my ear.
I swallowed hard and answered truthfully—there was no reason to merely think it. He would hear, though I kept the answer short, clipped. It slipped between my teeth angrily. “Since you,” I said.
Even so, he rewarded me, sliding into me while his thumb teased and circled. The closer I came to release, the harder he breathed, the more kisses he peppered down my face and neck. He stayed deep, curling inside me, and as my muscles clenched around him, he siphoned pleasure from me until I came.
When he was finished, he pressed a kiss to my temple, and it sent a strange rush through me. It was the first time he had kissed me like that, but I felt as if I’d been here before—held by him, touched by him, just like this. It wasn’t just the action, it was the way he had done it—gentle and sure, as if to ask are you all right?
I lingered on those thoughts as we slowed our pace so the soldiers and their vassals could rejoin us, and then I fell asleep in his arms.
Later, when I woke, we were beneath the red sky. From a distance, it always looked one shade of red—a crimson color that reminded me of fresh blood—but now that I was here, I saw it for what it was: shades of red that deepened even to black. It felt so ominous—a representation of the threat vampires had presented over the last two hundred years. How else had this landscape changed over time, I wondered. Did the rain fall in crimson sheets? Did the rivers run red?
Behind me, Adrian chuckled. “That is ridiculous,” he said.
I glared at him over my shoulder. “You live beneath a red sky and spread plague at will. How are my thoughts so ridiculous?”
He did not respond, and I sat up a little straighter in the saddle.
The sky wasn’t the only part of Revekka that had an unnerving effect on me. All around us were tall, naked trees, and while it was winter, it was evident that even in the spring, nothing grew here. The bark was scorched and black, the earth at our feet barren, and it was like that for as far as I could see.
I had never felt so uneasy, especially in nature, but this place felt wrong, and the only way I could think to describe it was that something horrible had happened here. I could feel it—a heavy dread that was just as present as the clothes upon my body.
“This is the Starless Forest,” Adrian said. “The trees—they sprang from blood.”
“What happened here?” I asked.
“Witches were hung from these trees during King Dragos’s reign,” he said.
I shivered. Revekka belonged to Dragos over two hundred years ago—before the Dark Era—and had declared that all who possessed magic should burn. Mobs formed, hunts began, and people who thought they would never kill were suddenly happy to murder anyone they suspected possessed the ability to use magic, even without proof.
It was the will of Asha, Dragos had said, to destroy evil.
“Do you think you would feel such horror if those who died here were truly evil?” Adrian asked, and I flinched, both at the fact that he had been listening to my thoughts and by his tone.
“Even the worst of us fear death,” I said.
I wished I could see Adrian’s face as I spoke. I wondered if he feared death, or did he feel like his existence was already some kind of end? Still, this wasn’t just the horror of those who had deserved it; it was the horror of the innocents who had died during the Burning.
“If they were not evil,” I said quietly, “what were they?”
“Powerful,” he said.
“Is that not the way of kings? To destroy those who would make them weak?”