After draining his dark magick in battle, he would be ravenous for light magick.
“Tell the Sun Sovereign and the fools tempted by his offers that death awaits anyone who comes here uninvited. Tell him—” Her throat tightened as she remembered Archeron as he once had been, wounded—but full of hope. “Tell him that we don’t have to be enemies.”
Realizing he was being spared death, the Asgardian raider relaxed against the stone wall and closed his eyes. “I will. Now, please. I am bleeding out. I need a healer.”
Haven turned on her heels to go.
“Wait. Don’t leave me with him. He’s a—”
“Monster?” Haven finished before meeting Stolas’s stare.
Stolas’s eyes flared wide with surprise as he realized she was letting him fully off his leash.
A wicked grin brightened his face, showing off ivory fangs she’d only glimpsed a few times before. He’d always been so careful to hide this side of himself from her.
To protect her from it.
But she refused to avert her gaze, to cringe from the primordial instincts that were part of him.
Another flicker of surprise—followed by a vulnerable emotion she didn’t dare name.
But whatever passed between them, it was almost instantly devoured by the beast he let himself become. His pupils elongated into thin, feline slashes, his fingers unsheathing black talons.
That hungry gaze fixed on his prey. “Did you think you could sneak uninvited into my kingdom, the sacred home of my ancestors, and there would be no consequences? That you could murder children sleeping in their beds without facing my wrath?”
The wild terror in the Asgardian’s half-rolled back eyes reminded Haven how truly feared Stolas was. Those glassy eyes shifted to Haven. “Please, Goddess-Born. Not him.”
“So it’s Goddess-Born now? What was it you called her before?” Stolas’s voice came out in a low, rumbling snarl more beast than human. “A mortal whore?”
“No. I will carry your message to the Sun Sovereign—”
“I have my own message for the Sun Lord, but you may not like what it says.”
Even Haven had the good sense to still as Stolas quietly glided toward the Asgardian.
The male began to pray. Stolas was silent, wholly focused on the hunt. The low, purring growl he made reminded Haven of the feral stable cats in Penryth after they’d been thrown leftover pheasant legs.
How long can I play with him? Stolas drawled into her mind.
As long as you want. Just . . . keep him alive enough to relay my message. Is that . . . possible?
Possible, yes. With the right amount of control. Although he will be ruined for anything beyond that simple task.
Haven didn’t even want to know what that entailed.
A pause and then Stolas murmured, Thank you.
She nearly laughed at the façade. As if she could deign to give him permission for anything. He could take what he wanted, when he wanted. Especially here, in his own lands, where his powers thrived so strongly that sometimes she felt his roiling magick all the way on the other side of the castle, a living, breathing creature.
His insistence that she command him was for ceremony, to convince the world—or herself—that she was a descendant of the Goddess.
But his gratitude wasn’t for her permission. In the Netherworld, he’d had a steady supply of souls to meet his needs, and she was never confronted with his dark hunger or the actual act.
He thanked her because she had recognized his hunger and hadn’t cringed from it.
Truthfully, a part of her was curious how the draining of light magick worked. What it looked like. Felt like.
She knew from previous conversations that Stolas could make the act pleasurable, almost euphoric—if he wanted.
But when he didn’t . . .
She made it barely twenty feet before the first scream began. And it continued until she was out of earshot.
4
By the time Haven trudged to the dining hall for a quick, tasteless meal of tepid oats, washed down by a scalding cup of ale, her weariness ran soul deep.
The hours after the attack raced past in a numb blur. There was so much to do before the approach of night and threat of new attacks. The wards inside the towers had to be checked, the weakened ones reinforced. Centuries before, during the Darkshade reign, the towers drew their power from the eternal demon fires that had been gifted by the Demon Lords.
But the fires had long since guttered out, and the ancient runes carved into the dark stone towers were eroded, worn away by the battering waves and ferocious storms surrounding the island.
The few rune scholars on the island spent their days and nights in the subterranean libraries below the city, scouring every ancient tome for the proper spells to fortify the wards once more—but less than half had been discovered.
Which meant every night when the silvery, ethereal light that blanketed Shadoria drained behind the Ravenite Mountains, fresh horrors followed.
And every morning in that magickal hour of dawn when the Goddess’s light spilled over the mist-shrouded city, Haven forced her tired body through the streets to visit the families of the dead.
There was the cobbler’s son, newly married with a baby on the way. The elderly couple who had been together for nearly sixty years. The family of six, slaughtered before they could leave the bed they all shared. They were still wrapped around each other as if sleeping, legs and arms entwined around the woolen covers.
Haven had rushed from the stone dwelling overlooking a dilapidated courtyard, disturbed not just by their tragic deaths, but by the way they had lived. The easy love that was evident in the way the mother held the eldest daughter close to her chest, the two youngest boys clinging to their father’s legs.
A warm, familial love Haven would never know.
It was in that moment, surrounded by the leftover carnage from the night, the crush of citizens who’d come out to see her, their eyes still somehow, somehow adoring despite her utter failure to protect them, that Haven felt more alone than she ever had before.
Every offering they’d tried to press into her bloodstained hands, every precious herb or beloved trinket or bit of coin they tried to gift her felt like a lie.
Pulling her cloak over her head, she’d fled to the palace, hoping a meal would ease the hollow gnawing in her breast. Thankfully the long communal tables where the Seraphian sentinels and the rest of the Chosen ate were near empty. With her unusual rose-gold hair hidden, and the iridescent fleshrunes that mapped her skin covered beneath layers of clothing, the one table of soldiers hardly spared her a second glance.
She ate in silence. Even if the soggy, watered down oats were quite possibly the foulest thing she’d ever tasted, the food helped.
When was the last time she’d eaten? Or had a full night’s sleep for that matter?
It was easy to forget she was mortal when the world seemed to be crashing down around her daily.
Her silver spoon scraped the bottom of her bowl. A rumble in her belly demanded more, but the need to wash the sweat and gore from the morning won out.
The sulfurous tang of the communal baths wafted through the corridors as she neared the huge chambers. The large rectangular pools were fed from the hot springs that traversed the island, the steaming water a crisp, inviting teal.
Her eyebrows gathered as she took in the amount of soldiers in the first pool, their laughter reverberating through the high-ceilinged chamber.