I couldn’t wrap my fingers around the hilt, couldn’t quite grab it to pull the blade free from my flesh. Dropping my left hand to the ground and pushing myself up to my hand and knees, I fought to get my feet underneath me. I slipped in the mud, not bothering to protect myself from the clods they continued to sling at me. We all knew I deserved it for falling for his lies, and maybe, if I was lucky enough, they’d find another throwing dagger and kill me before Caldris could bring me back to Alfheimr. My promise to my brother still resonated in my memory, the knowledge that I needed to die before I ever set foot on Faerie soil even more important now. I couldn’t allow Caldris to win. I couldn’t let him get that happy ending he imagined with me at his mercy.
“You brought him here,” one of the Marked accused, her voice cracking through the air like a whip as I struggled to my feet finally. I swayed, my head throbbing and arm useless at my side as I slowly turned to face them. “If it weren’t for you, we’d still be free.”
“We came here to rescue you. We wanted to bring you to a safe place where the Fae wouldn’t be able to find you,” I said, hanging my head as I looked back over my shoulder. “At least, that was what I believed. I didn’t know he was Fae.”
“A likely excuse,” she said, crouching down to gather more mud from where what had once been a garden touched the edge of the stone road. These people didn’t know me. They didn’t know anything about Caelum and I and the complex history we shared. But they were right that I’d been party to the decisions that had led him here, even if they didn’t understand just how unwilling my part had been.
Another mud clump thudded against my chest, splattering onto my throat and chin. “Enough,” a deadly quiet voice said. The air around me went still, seeming to freeze in time with his fury as it washed over me. I knew from personal experience, the fathomless anger that manifested in the quiet was far more dangerous than the shallow rage of a man screaming in my face.
Cold, calculated fury was far more terrifying.
I spun to look at Caldris in all his glory as he stalked toward me. The dead parted for him, allowing him to pass through without a word. He raised his hands to my face, grasping my head in his palms and brushing the mud from my skin with his thumbs. He glared at the scrapes on my cheek from rubble in the mud, his gaze drifting to the swelling on my other cheek where I’d hit the road as I fell.
He didn’t touch the knife in my shoulder, but I knew he had to have seen it. He would have noticed the gleaming hilt as he approached. His nostrils flared as he lowered a hand to my neck, hovering over my skin as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch me. When he finally did, his hand cupped my shoulder, his fingers touching the skin that throbbed around the knife. He pulled his hand away, staring down at the blood on his thumb for a moment before he drew it into his mouth and sucked the red fluid from his skin.
“Which one?” he asked, gesturing toward the group of the Fae Marked with a nod of his head.
I swallowed, shaking my head as I refused to answer the question. Even if I’d known which one had thrown the dagger, I wouldn’t have condemned them to the fate waiting for them. I could feel the fury pouring off of Caldris in waves, and I knew that whatever he’d do to the people he thought had hurt me, it wouldn’t be good.
“Will you kill the mates of your own kind?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.
A growl rumbled in his chest, the sound completely inhuman as he snapped his black eyes back to them. Indecision warred with fury on his face, fighting for dominance before he finally grasped the hilt of the dagger where it protruded from my shoulder.
He pulled it from of my flesh as I cried out in pain. My knees collapsed beneath me as he caught me, holding me steady while he used the same knife to drag the blade across his wrist.
The scent of his blood mixing with mine in the air drew a gasp from me, an unwanted shock of familiarity as he raised it toward my face. Blood dripped from the wound he’d made, splashing against the ground at his feet.
I swallowed, shoving down the odd twisting in my gut. An urge I couldn’t begin to understand swelled within me. It wasn’t hunger, wasn’t anything so familiar to me, but it felt like a recognition of completion waited within his blood. “I would rather feel the pain of a thousand blades than bear the knowledge that any part of you is inside of me.”
His head tilted to the side as his blood continued to drip to the ground. “Should I remind you that my blood is already inside of you? That you’ve taken my cock? That my very fucking soul exists within you?” he asked, his dark eyes holding mine captive.
He dragged his thumb through the blood on his wrist, pressing it against my lips, so the desire to open for him became almost unbearable. He pushed harder, forcing my lips to part so that he could touch his blood to my tongue. The flavor of it washed over me, drawing a whimper from my soul as he pulled back. The skin of his wrist knitted back together as I watched, feeling my own wounds heal with a tingling warmth that left the area feeling tight. “I will not have you suffer needlessly, my star. Especially when, no matter what you do, you will never be able to carve me out of your very bones. I own your soul. Nothing matters beyond that.”
3
ESTRELLA
Caelum’s army moved through the broken streets of Calfalls—the city that had once been his and where, as Caldris, he’d been worshiped by the humans who lived there.
The city he’d destroyed when they’d turned on him, torturing him and cutting him into pieces.
There was nothing quite as disconcerting as watching the finger bones of a skeleton tear fabric from the hem of a woman’s dress to wrap around the gash cutting into her bicep. The dead tended to the living, caring for their wounds as the surviving Fae Marked huddled in the circle of their protection and flinched back from the oddly gentle touches.
The remaining part of the army that he no longer needed dropped to the ground without ceremony, and the animation he’d instilled left them with the crumpling of their flesh to the ground. The thumps against the earth resounded through my soul, a reminder of the deaths I’d caused with my own ignorance.
Caelum moved to one of the fallen Marked that he hadn’t been able to save before the Mist Guard cut him down, touching his fingers to the man’s eyelids gently and closing them. He glanced over at one of the skeletons, watching as it walked to the dusty earth beside the stone-paved street and dug the bones of its fingers into it. It pulled the dirt onto the stone, clearing a hole as another skeleton moved away from the group to help.
“What are they doing?” I asked, watching with something between confusion and horror as they continued to dig. They didn’t stop, despite the fact that any living person would have felt the pain of all that dirt shoved under their nails.
Nails that they didn’t have, I reminded myself.
“Everyone deserves a burial,” he said, giving me a look that clearly communicated his disapproval.
“Burial?” I asked.
“It is an insult to the Primordials not to return all bodies to the earth so they can rejoin the cycle of life,” he explained, watching as the skeletons kept digging. He turned to me suddenly, stepping up behind me and leaving a breath of space between us. My hands twitched with the need to move and my feet with the need to increase my distance. But I wouldn’t let him know how much his proximity bothered me, refusing to give him that satisfaction. He would twist it into something different, on the wrong side of the line that barely existed between love and hate.