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stroked her exposed thighs, growling in approval when I found that she had my dagger strapped to her thigh again. “Good girl, Saeris.”
I was going to do more than make her shake. I was going to make her fucking tremble. I was going to make her weak for me.
Fuck. I needed another hand… Magic would do.
I would use my gifts for far more scandalous things over the course of the life I shared with Saeris, and if that meant languishing in the fires of damnation when I died, then that was a price I would just have to pay.
And I want you just as badly as you want me. Always. I walk around this hellhole with the head of my cock tucked into my waistband so that these leeches don’t get the wrong idea.”
“Your body is mine for the next three minutes. Surrender.”
Yes, it was primal. Yes, it was petty. No, it was not very progressive of me to want to mark her in this way. I didn’t fucking care.
“Whoa.” She blinked quickly, as if she was having trouble seeing properly. “Those are… huge,” she gasped, eyeing the inkwork over the tops of her legs. “But… beautiful.” Grinning wickedly over her shoulder, I slowly slid my fingers into my mouth. I sucked them clean, winking at her in the mirror. “Don’t say I never give you flowers, Osha.”
I’m pretty sure you just shattered her jaw, I said into Saeris’s head. She’ll recover,
What was she doing, though? And why was it making me so fucking hot under the collar?
Even I wouldn’t have fucked with her in this moment, resting her feet on the back of a female whom most of this court was afraid of. I would have fucked her, though. I desperately, desperately wanted to do that.
“My name is Foley Briarstone, and I have come to be of service to my queen.” But his dubious expression said something else entirely. I hope you know what you’re doing, half-breed.
“I was reminded recently that I was a wolf,” he said, smiling softly. “And wolves do not cower in dusty libraries, afraid of their own shadows. I swear myself to you, Saeris Fane. I will carry out your bidding so long as there is breath left in me. And when I pass from this place and move on to the next, I will carry your banners there and storm the gates of heaven in your name if you wish it.”
“Dancing is like fighting, Osha. It’s also like fucking. And I pride myself on my skills in both of those arenas.”
“I don’t want you to be anything other than what you already are, Saeris.
But you don’t have to be one thing here, Saeris. You can be many things.
You’re allowed to stop baring your teeth at the world and take a breath. Because I’ve got you.”
I came to show you that sometimes, it’s the most beautiful things that are deadliest. A dress can’t make you weak. It won’t make you vulnera—”
“It’s all linked. The blood, I mean. Malcolm’s blood turned these high bloods. It must be some kind of magic.” “Not magic. A spell,” Fisher said. “Something to affect Malcolm’s line. He severed you from his blood so that it wouldn’t affect you. He’d already done the same with you a long time ago, Foley.”
Fisher had acted as my proxy. He had given consent on my behalf. Here we were, forcing an outcome onto the silver-haired male at my feet explicitly against his will. I didn’t care.
“You’ll forgive yourself,” Foley insisted. “You will. And in the meantime, you can take that misplaced sense of guilt and use it to make amends. Help fix what Malcolm used you to break, Tal. There is still hope.”
“Which means she probably drank from a vial and isn’t a high blood anymore,” Fisher said. “And trust me, if you thought she was bad as a vampire, you definitely do not want to run into her as a witch.”
We’d survived the fall of the Blood Court and so many other impossible situations, only to fall afoul of the witch mark to end all witch marks. What a fucking joke.
hand was lit up and blazing like an angry star. “A gateway to where?” Her voice was quiet, but all heard it. “To the realm from where all dark magic hails,” Te Léna answered. “The demon realm.
Hell was coming. Hell was here.
“Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged, looking off toward the river. “My mate’s ass is rubbing up against my cock, and she’s stretched out in front of me, her hip bones showing—” “You like my hip bones?”
“I love your hip bones,” he corrected. “I love the way your breasts look right now, straining against your shirt like that. If there’s a look, it’s because I’m horribly distracted by you, and I’m trying to talk about very serious things.”
“And what would happen when I get old and die?” He shrugged. “Then you get old, and you die.”
“I would go with you, Osha.”
there are plenty of things I still want to see and experience in this realm. But I wouldn’t want to see any of it without you.”
“Then let my love be equal to yours.”
“But what if there is no afterlife?” He smiled sadly, letting his head hang for a second. When he looked back at me, his expression was all affectionate frustration. “Then there isn’t,” he answered. “There is only nothing. And that will still be better than being here without you.”
“This plant isn’t even supposed to flower,” he said. “It releases spores once every ten years instead. But those… those are flowers, right? And they keep blooming every time I speak, don’t they? I’m not losing my mind?”
I saw that it wasn’t an army of feeders. It was the warriors from Irrín. They had abandoned their temporary camp and marched on Cahlish, ten thousand strong, and Lorreth of the Broken Spire rode at their head.
“We need brimstone.” The room went deathly silent for a moment. Danya’s chest heaved when she continued.
But if Danya spoke to Fisher one more time like that, I was going to fucking spear her to the fucking wall.
“So help me, Danya, I will kill you my fucking self if you touch a single one of those sprites.”
You will have to work for most of your runes, but some of them may come as gifts.
It is blasphemy to record such things on paper, King Killer. The rune is my name. It does not grant you magic, the same way other runes do. The ability my rune grants you is complicated. It allows you to… undo. Or maybe…” It pulled a strange face that I could not decipher. “Break?” it offered.
“You would return a gift? And such a powerful one, too? You’ll be grateful for it soon enough, believe me. You should already be grateful for it. It saved your friend’s life last night.”
It is a silent rune, already sealed to your soul. It will act as a grounding rod for the runes you already have, and the ones that are yet to come, too. For a while, anyway. It will buy you some time while you work on sealing that brimstone mark.”
The Hazrax drifted forward, extending its hand to me. Gold glinted in its waxy palm. When it flipped its hand over, a ring dropped at my feet: the ring of office that marked it as a Lord of Midnight. A large polished ruby flashed at the ring’s center, winking in the fading light. “Give it to the apostate with the golden smile,” the Hazrax ordered. “He will need it.”
“People call you the Hazrax. But that’s not the name inked into my skin now, is it?” “Clever child. It is not.” “You’re never going to tell me what you are, are you?” The Hazrax smiled its needle smile. “Why would I when you’re so close to piecing it all together, King Killer? You’ve almost figured it out.”
“It’s all right,” Iseabail croaked. “Lorreth wasn’t going to hurt me.” “I fucking was,” the warrior argued.
Renfis was their leader now. Ren should have been the one urging them through the shadow gate toward safety, but he was missing, and I was an unreliable substitute.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, since you seem blissfully unaware of the power you hold over me, but… I will give you whatever you want, Saeris Fane. Always. No matter what it costs me.”
Perhaps the way she clung to hope made her a fool in some people’s eyes, but it was just one of the things that made her extraordinary in mine.
“Because I always end up sitting in a snowbank, waiting around for hours while everyone else disappears off to do something dangerous. I don’t love being cold, Saeris.”
“You think we’ll succeed, then? Find a way through all of this?” I faced the shadow gate again, steeling myself. “I do. I have to believe it.” “For her?” he finished.
The whole thing…” My head was spinning. “It’s a sigil. This entire time, Madra has been using the city itself to siphon the magic of its inhabitants. Zilvaren is the biggest piece of spellwork ever created.”
