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Emotions painted the blood. Happiness. Anger. Sorrow. Lust. Each gave off its own energy.
Humans were not good at taming their feelings. They felt everything so rudely, right out in the open, with no awareness of how their reactions might affect those with finer senses.
“They’re going to… destroy her, you know? It has already… been seen. This court will… fall… with her inside it.”
And he could have his reasons, so long as none of them involved him harboring any sort of hope that Saeris was going to confess her undying love for him. That wasn’t happening.
“What do you think I’m doing?” I snarled. “I’m saving the fucking fox!”
He loves Onyx deep down.
“Don’t mind me. I only killed four feeders and saved Fisher’s life.”
“And the day you save me on a battlefield, I’ll put on a dress and dance a fucking jig.”
“A friend once. Still a friend. One of us. We lost him at Ajun.”
Foley
“If you lost him in Ajun, then how…” Carrion’s brow furrowed, realization dawning on him. “Oh. You lost him. But he still lives. Here?”
“Never doubt your powers, sweet one,” she’d told me. “Each one of them is a gift. Each one will prove exactly enough when you have need of it. Have faith in yourself. You will always be enough.”
“Don’t you know? There isn’t much I wouldn’t sacrifice to make you happy, Osha. A little healing magic is the least of it.”
God Bindings marked her hands and her wrists. They were wrapped around my wrists, too. We were of one another, bound to one another, in a way that felt strange and thrilling.
“Well, I suppose if no one else is going to say it, then I will. You look downright fuckable, Saeris Fane.”
... Lol
I could sense his emotions now. I was connected to him in a way that I didn’t enjoy.
They were of a height, the two males. Just as broad. Just as fearsome. They were similar in many ways. But where my mate was all darkness and quiet brooding, Taladaius was light, his mood often easier than it had any reason to be. There were counterweights, perhaps. Different sides to the same coin? But also different currencies. Vampire. Fae. Maker. Mate.
Five vampire lords ruled beneath the vampire monarch—the Lords of Midnight—of which Taladaius was one.
They were bound by the Law of Ascension, though. They had to acknowledge me first before they could try to steal my throne. And if they acknowledged me, they had to obey me. At least for a time.
Solace was an ancient blade—one of the few remaining god swords that had once been imbued with magic millennia ago. It had belonged to Fisher’s father.
It was bonded to me now. The god swords were loyal, territorial things.
We already discovered I was immune to the effects of both silver and iron.
He was stripped of most of his magic here—he couldn’t open a portal, and he certainly couldn’t use it to hurt the denizens of the Blood Court on their own ground—but
The thick band of gold with the purple stone? That marks her as a Lord. All five of them have rings. They’re a source of power, gifted to them by Malcolm. Each supposedly contains the same amount of magic, though it’s rumored that Tal’s is the most powerful.
Zovena was Lìssian once, like Tal. He loved her. For her part, I think she loved him, too. But that was a long, long time ago.
We all know how much you care about your precious Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate, don’t we? So now you bring them both before us, hand in hand, mates, attempting to install not only a half-blood child as queen but a full-blooded Fae male as king consort along with her! And not just any Fae male. One who has plagued and murdered our people for centuries! Have you forgotten that we are at war with him?”
Her cloudy eyes locked with mine, and— I was back in the Third. I was arguing with Hayden. I was back in Madra’s palace, fighting to free my hands as Harron came to kill me. I was in Kingfisher’s bed in Ballard, safe in his arms. He was inside me, and my soul was full of fire, and—
Algat seeping into Saeris's mind.
I’d been staring at the old woman. She had been staring at me. How long had I… An ice-cold sensation flooded my head. It felt as if someone had been rifling through my pockets.
“How can she hope to rule if she is not leashed to the blood?”
“This whole court knows that you haven’t fed since you awoke from the Midnight Kiss, girl. Drink from someone, and all will be well. We’ll place the circlet upon your head and then drown ourselves in wine until sunrise, celebrating you as our new queen if you do.”
“Just do it, Osha.” “What?” “Bite me. Drink. Swallow twice and be done with it. They pursue this to undermine you because they’re sure you won’t do it. But fuck them. This is easy. We take care of this, and we get to leave this room.” In my head, he said, We can go back to Cahlish. Back to Ren, and Lorreth, and Layne.
A slow, intrigued smile kicked up the corner of his mouth. Oh? So you’ve been imagining this, then, have you, Little Osha?
You can own your fantasies with me, Little Osha. There is nothing in this realm or the next that I won’t give to you if you desire it. All you ever need do is ask.
In those long, heady moments, I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t taking anything from him. That I was giving something to him instead.
Dosing Kingfisher.
I blinked as black ink shifted beneath Fisher’s skin, pouring like water down his arm. It banded his wrist and then disappeared, transferring to me. I felt the cool prickle of it settling right in the center of my chest, just below my collarbone,
As soon as his blood touched my tongue, an explosion of color and sound lit up inside my head like a thousand fireworks. Fire chased through my veins.
He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and the primal hunger I saw there landed like a physical blow. He was barely in control of himself. If I touched him—
“Don’t even think about it, or I’ll take you right here,” he panted.
“She is leashed by the blood. Bound to it, as we all are. There can be no question of her commitment to our people now.”
THERE WAS A new tattoo on her chest: a thin black line that marked her skin from one shoulder to the other, right below her collarbone.
Ever since Te Léna had partnered with Iseabail to tease the quicksilver out of me, the whispering in my head had been less frantic. Sharper. Easier to understand.
For the first time since it had infected me as a youth, I had begun to think of the quicksilver as more of a blessing than a curse.
Even before he’d transitioned, Tal had been able to manipulate most liquids. All liquids, in fact, apart from quicksilver. Blood was a liquid… and right now, he was boiling the blood in the high bloods’ veins.
“She is… anathema. Cursed,” he choked out. “The g-gods denounce… her.”
God-Bound unions often ended in death. But Saeris had already died once, and I’d done way more than my fair share of dying back in the maze. As far as I was concerned, Death had taken his due from us. I had to see the marks as a blessing.
Laughter burbled up out of Ereth, the sound a wet rattle. “You f-fool. W-we have different gods.”
selfishness was not my lot in this life. As if reminding me of my path, the tattoo on my inner left forearm tingled, the ink shivering beneath my skin. Sacrifice. It pulsed often, even stung from time to time, as if the ink were still fresh. But it never changed. Never spelled out some other, less painful future.
The plan we had concocted since Saeris’s awakening felt pieced together and liable to fall apart at any second. The consequences, should we fail, had kept me from sleep for days.
Years later, I discovered the truth: that Taladaius had been there that night, overseeing the assault on the mountain. When asked, he’d said that he had done it as a kindness to me. That he had fed Foley his blood and then drained him, if only so that he might have a choice in whether he lived or died.
His horror over what he had become seemed as though it would kill him, though when darkness fell, he left us, fleeing into the night, down the mountain and away. We heard later that he had fled to Ammontraíeth. There had been many instances over the years when we had reached out to him, but our letters had all gone unanswered.
“We have to hope. We need him. His grandfather was one of the last Alchemists. Foley knows more than anyone else about Alchemical magics and practices. Belikon burned all the Alchemists’ texts when he seized the crown. The few books that my father collected back at the library in Cahlish don’t explain much of anything at all. So that leaves the knowledge that exists in Foley’s head. If he won’t share that with her…”
Intriguing.
The runes and script that wound their way up my arms—the God Bindings that matched Saeris’s own—were beautiful and terrifying, even to me.
