It wasn’t just forbidden. Unless it could be proven that relations already existed before the second war, it was now treason to consort with the crimson.
That wasn’t what terrified me, though. No, what terrified me the most was this residual feeling of emptiness, as though he’d taken something from me that I couldn’t describe, couldn’t make sense of, and I wasn’t sure it was smart to attempt to.
Something I feared I could not get back.
At the entrance to the cave, I knelt and crawled out of the low-lying hole and stilled when I spied something in the grass to the right. Walking over, I kicked at it with my slipper.
Peppered nuts spilled from the pouch, and I didn’t need to bring them closer to my nose to recognize the foreign scent lingering on the canvas. Such a snack wasn’t permitted here.
Because it was eaten there.
The world shrank and tilted, the haze Fang had left me in clearing rapidly.
Stars. He’d…
Gazing back at the cave, I inhaled deep, then followed the trail, the strange scents, the signs I’d missed earlier while solely focused on trying to gather and control myself—and then all over again in a brand new way courtesy of Fang.
A howl came from deep in the woods, and then I was running, running and knowing I wouldn’t make it, knowing they were miles and miles away, and that if I had any chance, I’d need to change.
And so with a flash, my heart twisting, then pausing inside my chest, I did.
My blood roared and vibrated, my vision darkening and my senses illuminating in a rush that used to make me vomit for hours when I’d change back. Clumsy from panic and the disuse of this form, I almost flew headfirst into a tree before my wings spread and tilted, and I swerved around and through its branches.
Higher, higher, and higher, I climbed, cresting the treetops of the woods, leaving them behind within precious minutes. The moon rose behind the castle in the distance to my left, but I continued south and followed the dense line of trees and foliage that skirted the ravine.
The soft orange light cast from the city beyond the castle gates lit the corner of my eye; the villages between the city walls and the woods beneath me dark and slumbering. That wasn’t the case for others as I flew closer toward the mainland, Errin, the human’s kingdom, tucked beneath the stars in the ever-stretching distance. Some villages, farms, tiny towns, and the old mine were nothing but husks, a darkness that might never see the light again.
Faster, I had to move faster.
I’d flown countless times as a youngling before I’d learned to control it, to conceal what my parents deemed a curse rather than a gift, but never this fast. The wind barreled into me, attempting to steer me north—back home—when I needed to keep going south, so cold as it ruffled every one of my downy feathers.
Unable to help it, I looked to the right, toward the ravine over the edge of the forest, the cliff’s jagged edges and the trees on the other side visible even at night. Vordane spread beyond those trees. A lush, tree-populated entity of hidden gloom. Sprinkles of light glittered like faraway stars from its heart—the city across the river from the palace that watched over all at Vordane’s northernmost corner.
Shadow Keep.
It had been years since I’d glimpsed it from the skies. I’d never visited. We’d never dare. To do so was as good as welcoming an untimely death.
The thought withered when the wind delivered screaming that tugged my gaze southeast. Banking, I surged, and it wasn’t long before I saw it.
Flames, carnage, murder…
All the blood.
No sign of the prince and his soldiers. They had crossed the border, then, and were possibly already home. Which left only my father and his small troop, who’d been making the journey home.
Steel clashed against steel. Beasts dived on limbs. Blood sprayed like bursts of rain falling from the sky and puddled just the same.
My heart burned in my chest, ash flooding my mouth.
I was too late.
It was too late, yet I circled back to keep out of view and dropped beneath the trees, swooping through a vacant barn beyond them and out through to the broken fencing. The grass might as well have been concrete beneath my feet, I landed so hard, but I didn’t shift.
A large shadow against a rotted-out stump, barbed wire curling in the wind behind me, I could do nothing but stand there and stare.
So many. Stars, there were so fucking many. Wolves of differing shape and color, some with wings, most double the size of any human man, snarled and lunged and ripped—
Too many of them to have crossed a makeshift bridge thrown across the ravine or river in the dead of night.
I stumbled back on my webbed feet.
Fang.
Me.
My fault.
A wolf, larger than any I’d ever seen before, crashed through the air and into the middle of the clearing, his maw stretching open with a roar so ferocious it shook my feathers and every blood-soaked blade of grass.
Cream furred wings, blackened with blood and gore, fanned and then tucked into either side of the horned beast’s torso as it prowled through the throng.
The blood king.
The fighting didn’t cease—but it wasn’t fighting. My father’s soldiers, Fae who’d been trained since their bodies had matured, fell like insects swatted beneath giant paws.
It was a massacre.
Move. I had to move, but to join the battle would guarantee my death, and the repercussions of that would spread far and wide.
I was the last living heir. An heir to provide my family with another.
But my father, bellowing with fury as he fended off three attackers, took a hit to his side. His white-gold hair was coated in blood, his face nearly unrecognizable… I couldn’t just leave him.
I couldn’t leave any of them.
If I shifted back, I’d hopefully still find that dagger strapped to my thigh, though I knew it’d do little good with beasts that quadrupled the size of my shifted form.
The largest beast—the king—advanced through the fallen, crushing them beneath his giant paws as though they were already soil that belonged to the land and nothing else.
My father, fending off attacker after attacker, weakening more by the moment, didn’t see it coming.
I screamed, the sound little more than a honking call to the wild birds who’d long scattered—useless and pointless.
But he heard.
My father looked my way with wide eyes, no longer soaked with rage but with bright fear. Fear for me. His eyes darted to the trees, indicating, pleading for me to go.
I should’ve listened, but he couldn’t expect I’d be able to move an inch as the wolf rose onto his hind legs and wrenched my father off the ground by his neck.
Then shifted as his paw struck, claws and fur punching deep within my father’s chest.
The beast, now a male in a familiar black cloak, lowered to the dirt with my father’s neck still in his fist, his other inside his chest, twisting, pulling, as my father released a silent scream and turned his eyes skyward.
Fang.
My stomach dropped, and my vision blackened as my father’s lifeless form fell to the dirt, his glimmering heart in the crimson guard’s—in the blood king’s—hand.
Cheers and howls sliced through the clearing, through my airless chest, as the king, Fang, lifted my father’s heart to his mouth and tore into it with his teeth.
Teeth that, just hours ago, had scraped over my lips.