Azra walked past them slowly, clinging to the stone walkway that led through the island. The carts rolled behind us, guided by their macabre skeletal horses and the ghostly riders of the Wild Hunt. Given the gruesome surroundings, I thought our procession likely fit in far more appropriately in this setting than we had on the gleaming frozen plains of the Isle of Ruin.
“If you understand that, why did you storm off when I didn’t welcome you inside my body? That was not the way an understanding mate should behave. That was how an entitled, arrogant ass reacts to being denied what he wants,” I accused.
Caldris chuckled lightly, pressing into me further as if my tongue was just another symptom of my lack of fear of him. I supposed it was. He might be taking me back to Alfheimr against my will, but I didn’t fear that he would hurt me physically.
Reasonably or not, I’d never once feared he would force himself on me, but I refused to allow that to be enough. It wasn’t consent unless it could be given freely, without fear of consequences. Incurring his wrath, even if it wasn’t violent toward me, for saying “no” negated all of that.
“You may find this difficult to believe, my star, but I did not react so negatively because you wouldn’t allow me to fuck you,” he said, giving me time for that to sink in. “I can say it one hundred times over and never convince you it’s the truth, but I would live centuries without knowing the pleasure of your body if you so much as asked that of me. What angered me was the way you shut me out of your heart, and the way you pushed me away when I got too close to you once again. I can be content without your body so long as I have you. Do not deprive me of the mate I have waited centuries to know; not now that I’ve finally been able to truly know you.”
That silenced me as I considered his declaration. He was so virile, and had been so desperate to be inside of me several times a night in those moments we’d shared in the privacy of our bedroom at the Resistance base. Imagining him as anything else was impossible.
Caldris tugged Azra to a stop with the shadowed figures of enormous rocks and half-dead trees the size of Mistfell Manor looming in the distance.
Black Water.
I could barely see it from where we stood, only the vague outlines of things too imposing to be real. From the books in Lord Byron’s library, I knew the village existed on stilts, of homes that rose out of the black river itself and were connected only by bridges.
“I’ll send a small team to investigate,” Holt said, walking his steed up beside us. I stared down at the village, watching as the flames of what I’d assumed to be torches glinted, burning brighter and brighter as they seemed to grow continually.
“It’s on fire,” I whispered, shock keeping my voice low as I drew the connection. I felt the moment Caldris and Holt’s attention turned to the village below with more acute vision, and felt the glance they shared with one another.
“Fuck,” Caldris groaned, undoubtedly torn between the need to keep me safe and the drive to help any of the Marked who might still be hiding out in the village itself.
“Go!” I yelled, waiting for Azra to obey my command. He didn’t move, waiting for the order from his master as Holt shouted his own commands to the riders behind us. A group of them remained to guard the carts of the humans, but he and a small number charged forward, disappearing down the hillside. “Would you go already?!”
Fenrir charged forward, the figures of the other wolves following at his heels.
“Son of a witch,” Caldris groaned as he tensed his thighs, and Azra darted forward with the shift in his seat. “If you get yourself fucking hurt, I will smack your ass until it’s red. Do you understand me?” The words should have elicited objectionable images, but instead all I could imagine was the way he would stroke his hands over my burning flesh when he was finished with my punishment.
The way he would build heat inside another part of me.
Not the fucking time.
He groaned as if he could sense the path my thoughts had taken, pressing his groin farther into my rear as we rode down the embankment. With the steep angle, I had no choice but to lean back into the comfort of his embrace or risk falling forward over Azra’s neck.
The lights of the fires came into view the closer we came to the wooden bridge that ran through the center of the village. The gnarled trees twisted toward the sky, ancient beings that had once been striking and powerful but had died after the Fae were locked out of our world.
The village of Black Water was burning.
The first riders of the Wild Hunt reached the bridge, their horses galloping over it as they went toward the flames. Riders jumped from their horses, submerging any container they could grasp to gather water to douse the flames.
At my spine, Caldris summoned the cold of a winter storm, filling the air with snow as we rode into the fray. I jumped down from Azra as we crossed, ignoring Caldris’s sharp curse as I slipped through his grasp and landed upon the wooden bridge. I rolled forward, absorbing the shock as I looked around.
The red stain of blood covered the bridge, turning the sun-bleached wood a deep wine. I barely restrained my nausea as I glanced over the edge of the bridge to the jagged stone teeth that curved to the sky. There were bodies impaled there and left to bleed into the black river below, hanging limply with eyes facing up, toward the indifferent stars.
Holt made his way to the hut at the center of the flames, the one where almost nothing remained, as I looked among the bodies to see if I could find any survivors. Caldris called my name, compelling me to turn to face him suddenly as he rode back toward me with a thunderous expression. The punishment he’d threatened waited for me, but I walked toward the edge of the bridge.
Away from the flames, away from the worst of the carnage, somehow, the figure in front of me drowned everything else out. I walked slowly toward him, moving as if in a dream as those around me dashed back and forth and tried to douse the flames that threatened to bring about the end of Black Water.
Kneeling on the bridge, I grabbed his small form and carefully maneuvered him to his back. The blank, unseeing eyes of a boy half my age stared up into the night sky, his vision as white as the moon itself.
Vaguely, as if underwater, I heard Caldris calling my name. His voice distorted with the rushing in my ears, with the pure ice flooding my veins. My fury rose; the neck of the child in front of me didn’t bear the mark of the Fae.
There was no reason for the death, no reason that a boy who’d had never been given the chance to become a man lay butchered in the street, the slash of a sword laying open his chest. The mark on my neck seemed to freeze altogether, silent, as if it could not bear the torrent of emotions inside of me.
It came alive just as suddenly, darkness bleeding out from my body. The stars twinkled once before the heavens darkened as if clouds covered the moon and stars and plunged us into a void where there was absolutely nothing.
Where darkness was our only friend—the only ally to bring about the end of all suffering. The end of pain.
Cool wind touched my skin, kissing against me as my rage surrounded me. As wrath filled me and threatened to consume me, to mold me into something I had never been before.
“Estrella, calm yourself,” Caldris whispered, stepping in front of me. His gaze snagged on the boy’s body before lifting to my face, the contact of his shocking blue eyes pulling me back slightly from the void.