More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Where are you taking me?” “Home.” “And where is home?” I pressed, my frustration levels rising. He took a deep pull from his beer, the muscles beneath the tattooed skin of his neck working. “The place where I was born.” “Urgh! Do you have to be so difficult?”
“So you make a big speech about keeping me safe in order to save your friends,” I said slowly, “and then you tell me you're dragging me right into the middle of an open conflict?” “Sound like fun?”
When the general let him go, holding him at arm's length, he huffed sharply down his nose and patted Fisher's cheek. “You, my friend, are officially fucked.”
“It'd be a real shame to have to pinch you, but I'm getting bored, and this rabid animal keeps showing me its teeth.”
“And what about me?” Carrion demanded. “You're just going to keep me locked away in here forever?” Fisher snorted. “You haven't been locked in here at all.” I glared at him over my shoulder. “You didn't check the door?” “I just assumed...”
As he spoke, we passed a nook in the wall, where seven marble busts were mounted on stands, one of which was facing the wall. Kingfisher flipped off the gods as he passed them, not even breaking his stride.
“Mm, of course. You're so eager to get back to that awful city.” Kingfisher turned a corner and then halted abruptly, opening a door to his left. “Back to all that oppression and starvation. I can really see the appeal.”
Carrion held up a hand. “I'd prefer not to be here, actually.” “Sit the fuck down,” I hissed. “All right. Gods.”
Renfis had been in the process of sipping from his glass, but the second he realized that I'd sat opposite him, next to Fisher, the alcohol sprayed out of his mouth in an arc that nearly crossed the width of the table. Luckily no food had been placed on it yet. “Saints.” He pounded on his chest, wheezing. “What the fuck?”
“I can sit there instead?” Carrion offered. “Absolutely not,” Kingfisher barked. “Try it and die.”
“We don't,” Fisher fired back at him. “And even if we did, I'd ask someone far more likable than you. No!” He held up a finger, stabbing it at Carrion. “Do not tell me how likable you are back in Zilvaren. I don't want to hear it.”
“You're on the verge of embarrassing yourself,” Fisher murmured. “Better stop talking before you put Renfis here in an early grave.” “Oh, fuck you, Fisher.” He bit down on his bottom lip, eyes alive, flickering vivid green and silver. I knew what his amusement looked like now, and I didn't like it one bit.
For the second time since we sat down to dinner, Renfis nearly choked on his drink. He spun in his seat, giving Fisher a scandalized look that said, really? I'm sitting right fucking here, but Fisher paid him no heed.
“What are you doing right now?” I asked him. “Aside from prodding this fire with a stick and reading this?” he asked, holding the book up again. “Nothing much. Why do you ask?” “Want to come and set fire to some far more exciting things?” He snapped his book closed with a flourish. “Absolutely, yes.”
“Because she is moonlight. The mist that shrouds the mountains. The bite of electricity in the air before a storm. The smoke that rolls across a battlefield before the killing starts. You have no idea what she is. What she could be. You should call her Majesty.”
“Unbelievable. Are you seriously going to let her speak to a High-Born Fae like that?” she said, eyes on Fisher. “What do you want me to do about it?” he replied. “She has a mind and a mouth of her own. I am the keeper of neither.”
We were all so ridiculously fucked. “You do get used to it, y'know,” Lorreth said conversationally. “That overwhelming sense of impending doom. Eventually, it becomes background noise. You don't even notice it at all.”
“Fuck. I need way more alcohol for this conversation. Hold on.”
I was a burning, drowning wreck of a girl, and I didn't even know what to do to save myself.
“Yes, of course you'll be coming back. Bring the fox if it'll make you feel better.” Since when did Fisher care about what I was feeling? And he was letting me bring Onyx? “Stop looking at me like that,” he said. “Why?” I asked suspiciously. “Gods and fucking sinners, never mind. Let's just go.”
“They mean all kinds of things.” “Could you be any vaguer?” “I mean, probably...”
“Can I join in?” I rolled my eyes. “Great.” Gripping his cigarillo between his teeth, Carrion chose a fat, round-bottomed flask from the crate I'd dragged out here. He hurled the thing with all his might, and it arced pretty well before sailing down and exploding against the rocks. The resulting crash was one of the best ones yet. “Well, that felt pretty good,” he said, blowing out a thick cloud of smoke.
“That looked painful,” Carrion said conversationally.
“Though, if it seems like your mind’s being sucked out of your body, or you're in excruciating pain and can't let go of the quicksilver sword murder spikes, do I have your permission to tackle you to the ground?” That actually seemed like a prudent plan. “You do.” “Excellent.”
“You’re making a weird face,” Carrion whispered loudly. “Are you talking to it?” “Yes, I'm talking to it. What do you think I'm doing?” “I don't know. You look constipated.”
Not Danya's sword, the quicksilver hissed. We are reforged. New unto this place. You do not claim us, Lorreth of the Broken Spires. We claim you. “This is going to be hilarious,”
Blinding and powerful, it shot straight up into the air—a pillar of energy that transformed night into day. The very ground beneath our feet quaked. Fisher let out a surprising whoop, joy shining from his face as he followed the column of energy upward into the heavens. “Angel's breath, brother!” he hollered. “Fucking angel's breath!”
Fisher straightened and took me in. “Okay. Are you ready?” “Yes.” My heart kicked like a mule against my ribs, and yet I felt steady with the weight of the sword at my hip. “Be unrelenting and unmerciful in the face of the wicked dead,” Fisher said. Ren laid a steadying hand on my shoulder. “And if you should find soul sundered from flesh, order a drink for us at the first tavern you come across in the afterlife. We’ll settle the tab when we get there.”
“Stubborn girl,” he growled. “Don't you dare die on my watch, Saeris Fane! Fisher will never forgive me if his sole reason for living is torn to pieces on her first fucking battlefield.”
“She's been kicking ass, brother. She wields Solace almost as well as your father did.”
“I just love it when you disappear into tense conversations with creepy portal metal,” Carrion quipped, hoisting himself up to sit on the bench. “It's fascinating watching you do all of those facial gymnastics.”
“If it were up to me, we wouldn't spend another night without each other again.”
“More jokes. Give us more jokes…” I glowered at the sword, unable to comprehend its bad taste. If ever there was a weapon so perfectly suited to its owner, it was this one. Carrion delighted in telling it the filthiest jokes imaginable.
“Good.” I flipped the sword and handed it to him. “Then give it a name and let's go.” The evening was almost here, and the others were waiting for us. Carrion held the sword, turning it this way and that. After much consideration, he said, “It looks like a Simon.” “Simon?”
“Carrion Swift, if you don't wake up right now, I'm going to tell all of your asshole friends back in the Third that you were a shitty lay.”
When he was done puking, Carrion flopped onto his back and fixed me with narrowed eyes. “You wouldn't...fucking...dare.”
“Chew them a bit and then put them under your tongues,” he advised. “Whatever you do, don't fucking swallow them, though. You'll be shitting yourselves within five minutes.”
“Because they're highly addictive and make you feel like you can take on an army of feeders. Plenty of warriors take them once to dull the pain of an injury. But then they keep on taking them. And then they die.” “Ahh. Good to know.”
He was the first thing I saw. Always. My heart and my soul knew exactly where to find him.
“I play back,” Fisher spat. “It might not be today, but oh, I am coming to find you, Madra. Fear the shadows, bitch. I'm made of them. One night soon, I'll climb out of one and slit your fucking throat.
“You spayed my mate when she was a fucking child,” he seethed. “For that alone, I’ll make your undying existence an unending agony. An eternity of suffering the likes of which even your evil mind cannot comprehend. You’ll know no peace at my hands. I will destroy your empire and erase your name from the annals of time. When I am done with your legacy, Madra the Undying will never have existed. And you’ll live on at my behest, suffering for all of eternity. And no one will know. And no one will care.”
Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate was on his knees in the dirt. He was broken and bleeding, but his promise of retribution was still terrifying enough to make a queen tremble.
“Do you mind? You’re ruining my story,” Malcolm huffed.
“I've been dying to know. After a hundred and ten years in that labyrinth, what made you finally leave?” “You bored him to fucking tears and he couldn't take it anymore,” Carrion sniped. Up until now, he'd held his tongue, but it was a miracle that he'd lasted this long.
Amazingly, it was Carrion who stepped forward first, Simon held aloft. “We might think Fisher's an arrogant ass, but we're not just going to let you kill him.”
“You were supposed to have been born Fae, in the same realm as your Kingfisher. So I separated you. Hundreds of years before you were born, I shifted the events around your birth. Moved the pieces on the board and placed you far away, in a realm that should never have come into contact with his. But I watched as the boughs of the universe grew against their nature and aligned in such a way that you would still meet. I foresaw then that no matter how the boughs and branches of this tree were manipulated, you and he would always collide. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”
Fisher had said his mother was wrong sometimes, about small things that had big consequences. When she had predicted me rushing into her son’s life, she had seen me with sloped ears and canines like her son. It turned out she hadn’t been wrong after all. I should have been born Fae. The God of Chaos had simply interfered.
He pointed to the script writing that wrapped around my wrists. “These oaths mark you as my ward. They protect both you and Fisher from the unwanted attentions of my brothers and my sister.”
The God Bindings at my wrists flared out of nowhere, biting into my skin like burning ropes. “The best of luck to you, then, Saeris. Give Kingfisher my best.” And then he shoved me into the quicksilver.
“As far as we can tell, you’re a half-vampire, half-Fae. Something none of us have ever seen before. As of now, we’re not sure which traits you’ve adopted from the Fae and which you’ve adopted from the vampires. All our healers are sure of is that you’re no longer human.”
