I swallowed, staring down at the new ink on my hand and wishing it away. I wanted nothing to do with the necromancy that he’d forced upon me, the insidious magic I hadn’t asked for or needed pulsing through my body. It crouched, dark, heavy, and menacing inside of me.
“It was time to awaken that other part of you,” Caldris said, tipping his head to the side as he watched me go to war with what was inside mine. I wondered if he could hear it. Did the mate bond gave him access to my internal thoughts—the one thing I’d thought was safe from him?
The only part of me he couldn’t touch.
“I don’t want it,” I protested, shaking my head and aiming a glare up at him.
“It’s as much a part of you as I am,” Caelum said, and I chastised myself for the name I couldn’t help but use for him. The God of the Dead wasn’t the man I’d spent weeks with. Caldris didn’t fit the man I’d fallen head over heels for despite my better judgment.
I’d known he would only lead me to heartbreak in the end; I just hadn’t expected this.
My heart hurt even worse after his admission that he was looking for Mab’s daughter; his presence here wasn’t even about me in the end, but about the daughter of the Queen of Air and Darkness.
“How can you be a part of me when I didn’t even know your real name? Why Caelum?” I asked, ignoring the cold dread in my veins that I wouldn’t like the answer. Would it hurt me more or less if the name turned out to be a throwaway? If the name I’d come to love with every fiber of my being turned out to be a lie.
But the Fae couldn’t lie.
“It's my birth name. The one my mother gave me when I was born—before Mab stole me from my crib and brought me to the Shadow Court to punish her,” Caelum admitted, answering the question of how he’d been able to give me a false name. In all likelihood, it was more his true name than the one the world had come to know him by.
Caldris was the lie, the name Mab had forced upon him to steal his identity.
The admission tugged at my heart. The thought of a baby stolen from his home and brought to a place he claimed was ruled by the most monstrous of the Fae was something entirely unimaginable. I couldn’t even begin to think of what that must have been like as a boy, growing up with the Queen of Air and Darkness.
My breath left in a sudden huff with the realization that struck me in the chest. She was his stepmother. His father’s wife. The woman he’d spoken of, who had been so cruel to him that she’d ruined his relationship with his father, was Queen Mab.
I shook it off, trying to shove away the pity I felt for a life like that. His tragic backstory didn’t make up for what he’d done to me, and what he clearly intended to continue to do.
I would not be a prisoner in my own life again, even if I had to kill him to gain my freedom.
He stared back at me, searching for a reaction I wouldn’t allow him to find even though it lingered inside of me, eating away at me slowly. I willed him to leave me alone, glaring at him to harden myself against the empathy I didn’t want to feel.
He pulled back slowly, heaving out a sigh of resignation as he twisted his lips in thought. He stared off into the distance briefly, before turning that blazing stare back to mine. “I have to go summon the Wild Hunt,” he said finally, raising his brow as if he waited for a protest from me. When he didn’t receive one, he turned on his heel and began to walk away.
The dead closed rank around me, entrapping me within the circle of their protection in his absence.
I couldn’t help the question that sprang free from my lips in spite of my determination to keep quiet. “Why did they fight you? Surely they have to know who you are.”
He looked at me over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth tipping up into a smirk. “You think a member of the Wild Hunt can see through the glamour of a God?” he asked, turning back in the direction he’d been walking and leaving me with that one bit of information. The arrogance in his voice made me feel foolish, realizing how little I understood about the differences between The Wild Hunt, the ordinary Fae the books called the Sidhe, and the Gods themselves.
The basic premise of their hierarchy was simple enough, the Primordials being the most powerful beings to ever exist and the Gods their children. But just how much power divided the Gods and the Sidhe?
Caldris sauntered over the rubble of the city street, leaving the Fae Marked and me behind, with his trusty army of the dead to guard us. I spun inside the circle my personal guards had formed around me, refusing to watch him walk away and shoving aside the memory of the day I’d watched his ass when he strolled into the hot spring the first time I saw him naked.
It was not the time, and he was not the man to be lusting over. He wasn’t even a man at all.
I took in the sight of the other Fae Marked on their knees, corralled into their own circle that I’d abandoned when I ran. The corpses kept them trapped within, but they moved freely inside the barrier. The glares on their faces felt heavy on my soul, with hatred for myself and what I’d led right into their midst overwhelming me.
“I’m sorry—”
“Save it, Fae Fucker,” one of them said, spitting on the ground as if I deserved nothing less than what fate had in store for me. Maybe they were right. I turned my eyes to the ground at my feet, letting them drift closed as I fought back the trembling in my limbs.
The first chance I got, I would set them free, but how was I supposed to do that when I couldn’t even help myself?
Something wet and sloppy collided with the side of my brow, obscuring my vision as it splattered across my face. The Marked laughed as I raised a hand to wipe the mud away, flinging it to the ground as a second handful launched through the air.
I twisted to the side to avoid it, wincing as the wet, half-frozen substance struck me in the side of the neck. It dropped into my tunic, warming as it slid over my skin. I looked over at the male who had spit on the ground when I tried to apologize. He glared at me, his mouth twisted into a snarl that dared me to reduce myself to their level.
To gather mud into my own hands and join in their brutality.
Another clump of mud came from the other side of their circle, catching me on the cheekbone. I held back the cry that burned my throat as the ground-up rubble from the destruction of the city bit into my skin. Another followed, and then another, the mud covering me and my clothing as they aimed through the gaps in the upright corpses surrounding me.
I turned my back to them, looking back the way Caldris had gone. He was nowhere in sight, and I suspected oblivious to the humiliation and raw agony the other Marked rained onto me.
I wouldn’t even have done this to a Fae. I wouldn’t have degraded and demeaned any living being in such a way, but they did it to me—one of their own. To someone who could have been a friend under different circumstances.
Pain burst through my shoulder. White heat that brought me to my knees. My hands clapped against the stone beneath me, my right arm collapsing beneath my weight. The side of my face struck the surface of the stone, pain radiating through my skull and making my vision swim.
Fighting back the nausea swirling in my gut, I raised my left arm over my head and twisted it behind my back. Reaching for the heat burning through me, my fingers brushed over the hilt of a dagger. It protruded from my shoulder, making my arm hang lifelessly at my side.