Quiet as a mouse, I crept behind her, using slivers of darkness to camouflage myself. She danced her way through empty corridors, stumbling over her feet as she did. A spray of moonlight fell over the red carpet from a tall, arched window. The girl climbed up onto the edge, grabbing a handful of her skirts off the ground. Stars pinpricked the black, humid night. “Beautiful.” She gasped, looking out over the home she had grown up in. Most of the girls had been brought here as children, then raised within the walls, taught etiquette, and made into ladies-in-waiting, to tend to the princesses’ needs.
I was not bestowed such privilege. I wondered, bitterly, if my sister would cry for her lost friend.
I stepped forward, dagger pointed outward. Slices of white light illuminated my murderous eyes. I enjoyed the hunt more than I cared to admit. I’d attempted the moral high ground, the façade that I was above murder, but truth be told, I was the perfect monster. I had been carved by two decades of hatred, isolation, and pain.
Fear hesitated me when I reached her back. She didn’t turn, too captivated with the world ahead of her. Would it be like slaughtering an animal for my sacrifices? It was so wildly intimate, watching something die. I craved the last moments, wishing I could stretch them out, but in the end, all hearts had to stop beating.
I inhaled sharply. Her perfume lingered around us. She rubbed the side of her neck, then stumbled. She grabbed the frame but toppled, her fingers slipping.
“No!” I grasped a handful of silk.
She screamed and pulled forward, almost dragging me with her. I pulled back with a burst of strength, and the side of the blade pushed against my stomach. We both fell, landing into a heap of dresses and limbs. Her scream had alerted all close to our presence. Footsteps carried through the corridors. She turned her head from the pile we were in and looked me in the eyes. She smelled like spring flowers. Her eyes were large with fright.
“You’re the princess, aren’t you? The one they hide?”
Her chest was heaving, and her hands shaking. I held the handle of the dagger tightly, until my knuckles turned white. There was no way I could kill her, cut out her heart, and make my escape in time.
I scrambled to my feet, then hightailed it out of there just in time for them to reach her. Sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eyes. I gulped in precious air as I reached my room. I ran my hands down the door, looking for the handle. I pushed it down and fell into the confines of the bedroom.
Relief pulled the weight from my shoulders. I hadn’t killed anyone.
Yet.
But all I had done was delay the inevitable.
She had seen my face. No one knew I left my room at night. I could have let her fall to her death, and I should have. She mustn’t have been allowed to see me and live to tell the tale. I prayed she would keep her seeing me to herself, but I knew her type; gossip was their livelihood, and I was the biggest rumor of them all.
Darkness squeezed the air from my lungs. Pain pricked my fingertips. I didn’t sacrifice the girl, and now I would be punished.
***
Eyes paler than the moon watched me from the shadows. Lips bluer than glaciers grinned when I whimpered. Branches reached down like fingers, trying to grab me.
“Yours or theirs?” the man whispered, his voice echoing into a thousand shards around us.
I tried to escape by breaking into a run, but invisible constraints pulled me back, rooting me to the spot. He tilted his head and looked at me from the darkness of the forest. The tree line wasn’t far, but how had I been so stupid as to enter the trees knowing what waited for me?
My heart hammered against my chest. A sheen of sweat coated my forehead. In the humid night buzzed thousands of insects, their songs erupting around us.
The forest was alive, and so was he. No longer a soul that echoed in my thoughts, he was flesh and bone with eyes redder than the flames of hell.
I snapped open my eyelids. My breaths rattled as I sat upright. Looking around my empty room, I sighed with relief. I was alone, but not for long. My master had penetrated my dreams, twisting them into nightmares and warning. I’d never promised him such sacrifice until now, but he was impatient. The keeper of ritualistic magic. The necromancer. The last of his kind. He wanted human hearts… hers.
Yours or theirs.
The words swung back into my mind.
I had to kill someone. Tonight.
CHAPTER THREE
I blew out a long, weary breath. Zalia’s eyes were wild, her lips downturned. She looked positively murderous. Her hair was the same color as the trees that broke off into knotted branches in the woods to our left, so different to my blonde strands.
She pushed me against the stone wall, knocking the air from my lungs. Her heavy breaths hit my nose. “I know it was you!” she said accusingly behind clenched teeth. On her face were angry, red pimples with whiteheads threatening to burst at any moment.
I curled my lips behind my teeth, holding back my laughter. “You look awful,” I managed to say, before letting a chuckle escape my lips.
She growled under her breath. “Father will not listen. He believes you wouldn’t turn to dark magic, but I know.” She loosened her grip on my shoulders, slumping me down the stone wall. “I know, and I swear I will reveal you for all you have done. The strange hexes and animal sacrifices… I told Father that the devil lives within these walls, but I didn’t tell him it is you.”
“It sounds like you have a lot of accusations.” I glared, tensing my arms.
Her eyes rounded the way they had when she was a child, when curiosity took her and magic was beautiful. The glimpse of innocence softened my heart, carrying me back to days lost to time. “Why do you hate me so much?” My words were clipped by short-winded gasps as I attempted to catch my breath. “I was there for you when you were a child. I loved you.”
The corner of her eye twitched, and her nose scrunched. “You know why.”
“If you mean the accident—”
“Accident?” She scoffed. “We both know what really happened.”
Finally, she’d said the words aloud. We both knew for years that she blamed me, but neither of us were willing to speak first, for the memory was too painful. “I never hurt him,” I countered. “Why would I?”
“You did.”
My stomach dipped. “He was our brother. I never hurt him. I loved him.”
“You ruin anything that loves you. You are ruin. Our brother, sweet and young, he lies as bone and skull in a mausoleum, a life ahead never lived because of you.” She pointed her finger into my chest.
Tears prickled in my eyes. “That’s why you hate me so? You believe me a murderer?”
“I know what I saw.”
“I was helping you!” I exclaimed, my eyes wide. “Your magic was out of control. I saved you.”
Tears streamed down her face. “No,” she cried, the blue in her irises scattering my shocked reflection. “Even if it were true, which it is not, then at what cost? You’ve grown darker with each day, hexing us, forcing us to suffer as you do. Our father despises you. We all do. Bless us all and leave this castle. You are nothing here.”
I parted my lips, and tears pooled between them. I watched her walk away, my defence silenced in my throat. Despite years of hatred, she still had power over me. Promises made in childhood ran the deepest. Her honesty ached my soul; it slid down my neck and lay densely in my chest. She wanted me gone, believing I was somehow responsible for the demise of our youngest brother, Charleston. He was father’s favorite. He had such big eyes—everyone who saw him commented on them—and a smile that filled me up. He was the sweetest of our brothers, although the king had seen a warrior in him. My father had envisioned strength, a ruler in Charleston, taken away only by his place in birth order. His death had ruined us all, but mostly the king.