“The Mist Guard went after her,” he said.
“Fuck,” I cursed, hanging my head as I released his throat. Shadows gathered at the edges of Nothrek, forming a void that I’d become too familiar with in my centuries at the Queen’s side. I shifted my grip on my sword, plunging it into the man’s side and quickly withdrawing it. He sputtered, dropping his hands to push on the wound as if he could apply enough pressure to keep his life from seeping out of his body into the stone walkway beneath our feet.
His body sagged, sliding down the wall as I released his throat. I stared down at him, at the betrayal he thought I’d committed written on his face.
“I told you what you wanted to know,” he said, his head dropping to the side as it became too heavy for him to support. “You really are the God of the Dead.”
I crouched in front of him, meeting his stare and reaching up to pat his shoulder. “In death you will find peace that no longer exists in this place. In the Void, you will realize there are some fates worse than death itself,” I said, watching as his eyes drifted closed.
The shadowy void at the edge of the gardens drew my eye as his soul left his body, leaving nothing but a husk. I slowly stood, turning back to where the Queen of Air and Darkness prepared to set foot upon the soil of the human realm for the first time in centuries.
The shadows opened, parting for Mab as she stepped through with all the lethal grace of a female who had grown up as royalty, practicing her cruelty and honing it into the sharpest blade over her countless centuries of life.
Her dress gathered at her throat above where the delicate fabric draped down her body, spreading into a keyhole at her chest and clinging to her waist until the cloth that was as dark as night shifted to deep red. As if she’d dipped the ends of it into the blood of her victims, letting the stain trail across the grass as she turned her watchful stare over the chaos of Mistfell.
She breathed in, smiling as the suffering around her strengthened her. Her deep red lips peeled back to reveal the gleaming white of her teeth as her dark eyes found mine across the gardens. She took a step forward, raising her hand to drape in front of her as she waited.
I stepped forward, calling to the shadows and letting them carry me to her. They wrapped around me, trapping me in their void as I disappeared from the village of Mistfell. The whispering hands of her servants trailed over my skin when I stepped through the Shadow Realm, emerging in front of her and lowering myself to my knees.
Reaching up as I bowed my head, I took her hand in mine before she could put it into position, touching my lips to the back of the ring on her center finger. A single stone lay in the center of it, the gleaming black tourmaline matching the stone pillars twisted into the gold base of her crown. In the center of it, resting directly above her forehead and nestled perfectly into her hair, the gem of darkness glittered.
The Cursed Crown. The stone that had twisted Mab from a daughter of the Summer Court into the Queen of Air and Darkness.
I wanted nothing more than to shatter it and drive the shards through her eyes.
“Rise, my child,” she said, slowly pulling her hand from my grasp. I stood, forcing my hatred to abandon my face, so the mask of indifference could conceal me and shelter me from the cruelty she would use against me if she knew. If she thought she could gain a reaction to her hatred, to her bitterness and her pain, she would do far worse than treat me as a weapon.
“Yes, my Queen,” I murmured, meeting her malevolent stare.
Her dark eyes glittered, hard and unforgiving as stone, as she reached out to condescendingly pat my cheek. “There is work to be done.”
1
CALDRIS
Estrella’s knees shook before her weight collapsed in on itself, her body sliding down the wall at her back until she sat upon the jagged stones beneath. Pulling her knees to her chest and leaning forward to touch her cheek to the tops of them, she stared at the carnage around me in shock, the gaze in her green eyes going distant. Studying the wreckage I had wrought to save her life, she ignored the motives to focus on the end result.
Making me the villain of her story, when all I wanted was to be her everything.
Her bronze skin paled against her inky-black hair as she took in the mangled bodies of the Mist Guard that rose the moment their corpses touched the ground. She stared into a hole where a heart should have been, her eyes glassy as her full bottom lip trembled. Something inside me cracked, seeing the grief rife on her face as she tried to process what stood in front of her.
She weighed my confessions and everything she hadn’t seen, finding herself lacking for not acknowledging my deception before.
Her eyes traveled over the place where the dead surrounded the rest of the Fae Marked, allowing them to get comfortable in the circle as the fight trickled out of them.
Crouching down in front of her, I willed her to take a good look at me, instead of the aftermath of my fury, and see the male in front of her who would do anything to protect her. To finally see me beyond the illusion meant to keep her wandering in the dark.
Her eyes snapped back to mine suddenly as the bond arced between us. Nothing existed outside of the two of us, the world beyond our bond existing outside of the haven we created. Without my glamour to lessen it, the magic seemed to pulse through the air, the hands of the Fates and their threads working to connect us as we had always been destined to be.
From the moment I’d been created, from the very instant I’d come into this world and drawn my first breath, she’d been in the Void between life and death.
Waiting to be born. Waiting to be mine.
She tore her gaze away as sharply as she’d given it, the magic between us severing like a broken twig with the loss of her eyes upon mine. It was still there, still lurking and waiting for the moment when she would return to me, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that my human mate had somehow found a way to keep her mind closed to me.
I took half a step closer to her, watching as she tried to shrink further back into the wall. Within me, the intent to give her the space she needed to come to terms with her new reality warred with my desire to simply draw her into my arms and show her she had nothing to fear from me.
She’d fallen in love with Caelum, and from the terror on her face, I knew she thought him dead and gone. Lost to the monster I’d revealed myself to be. “I’m still me, Little One,” I said, holding out a hand for her once more.
I ached to pull her to her feet, to lift her from the ground that was stained with the death of an entire city centuries before she’d been born. To bring her to the palace that should have always been her home. To bathe her in the luxuries I had to offer.
“Is that supposed to comfort me? I don’t even know you,” she snapped, turning her head to the side. She refused to give me the blessing of her eyes, refused to look at me as best she could manage.
She knew as well as I did that what pulsed between us was undeniable; it would never again cease to exist or even be diminished. When she raked her eyes over the skeleton standing closest to her, I wondered if it was the first time my mate had seen such death and decay.
We’d both been fortunate that the corpses I’d left behind hadn’t decayed in the same way a body would normally have decomposed in the centuries since I’d leveled Calfalls. As the God of the Dead, I needed bodies to reanimate, and so left corpses to litter the ground after a battle where I brought death upon my enemies. I needed mindless servants for my army, and as such, the bodies of my victims would remain preserved until I, too, was gone from this world.