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“Looks like I trust you now, sanguis frater,” he said, offering me a dark smile which made my fangs prickle. “Seems so,” I said, returning his smile as we both raised our hands and used our combined magic to blast the roof from the temple with an explosion so immense, I swear the entire forest trembled beneath the force of it.
I looked over to Tory, finding her finishing off one of our enemies with a blast of Phoenix fire that turned them to ash, looking like a warrior princess as fire roared around her and glinted off of her armour.
It frightened me how savage I felt today, like a beast had awoken in me and was determined to make every one of these monsters suffer for all the Fae they’d killed.
“Those were my kills, Professor,” I growled in mock anger, dropping down to land lightly in front of him. “Then why did they die by my sword, Miss Vega?” he teased.
The wings of a beautiful red and blue bird rushed out from us, plummeting through the sky in a blaze of unbelievable power before it collided with the top of the temple. The Nymphs shrieked because it didn’t just consume the altar, it consumed the entire temple, the fire rippling down it like high speed lava and devouring everything in its wake and I gasped at the immensity of our Order gifts.
it. I was blacking out and the trees were rushing up towards me above the sharp rocks of the ground, and all I could think of was my sister, of Lance, of my brother. Because there was nothing I could do to save myself and I wasn’t even going to get to say goodbye. The darkness claimed me fully and fear surrounded my heart. I was only half aware of the scream still tearing from my throat.
A force collided with me and suddenly I was rolling, held by strong arms against a hard chest, Orion’s body caging me so I didn’t feel the impact of the ground as we tumbled across it and he saved me from my end. But even stronger than the arms which held me, was the monstrous thing keeping me in its grasp within my body, so fiercely that I couldn’t escape it.
“I’ve got you, Blue,” Orion growled, his voice laced with fear, and I tried to claw my way up out of the darkness to get to him, but I couldn’t find my way back.
“Open your eyes, Blue,” Orion commanded and I held on to him as I lay on my back, recognising him again as I felt the warmth of his body pressing down on mine. Seth whined close by and Geraldine wailed in terror. “My queen!” she cried. “Please look upon the face of your lover! Come back to us!” Somehow, impossibly, I managed to do as Orion asked, my eyes cracking open and two achingly familiar dark eyes staring back at me.
Gabriel shoved Seth back with a blast of water, standing his ground in front of Darius’s prone body as we all stared at him in shock. “What are you doing?” I gasped. “He was going to go back for Tory,” he said gravely, his eyes rippling with regret. “But he’ll die if he goes. I’ve seen it.”
I was alone, vulnerable and dressed in an agony that burned brighter than the fire of my Phoenix.
I walked closer to one of them, spotting an image of a woman who looked a whole lot like Lionel’s Shadow freak as she cut her own flesh open with a sharp blade.
But before I could go all Phoenix on this place and just blast everything around me to shit in hopes of striking the invisible entity in the room too,
Hail dropped his mouth to claim a kiss from the woman he had fallen so irrevocably in love with and I drank in the sight of them together, happiness clinging to every inch of them as she drew him closer for several lingering moments before pulling back.
“They’ll come looking for us if we don’t approach them ourselves,” she sighed and he growled in frustration. “Heavens save me from the inconvenience of politics. Let’s get the rest of this over with then, so I can have you to myself,” he rumbled,
“And do they?” Merissa teased, a knowing glint in her eyes. “There isn’t one among them who can even sit in the Royal Seer’s chair,” he muttered irritably. “Though perhaps that was because it had been waiting for you, just as I was.”
“I aimed the fruit at you while she was distracted and yet she still saw it coming! She is a true Seer indeed and her love for you must be fierce for her to sense threats against you so easily.” People around the room broke into applause at Lionel’s lead and Hail grinned as he tugged his new bride closer, lifting her chin with his fingertips and looking deep into her eyes.
My mom giggled as he closed in on her, hitching her skirt up while leaning forward to kiss her neck and I wrinkled my nose, wondering why the fuck I was being gifted a vision of my parents getting it on and feeling a little sorry for Gabriel as I failed to find a way out of it.
They balanced each other, but only when they worked for that unity as they were clearly trying to do now.
she shifted into her Harpy form, her wings beating hard as she flew straight to the amphitheatre where Darcy and Orion had been forced to fight the Nymphs at Christmas.
“I’ve come to beg mercy of the Shadow Princess,” he called loudly. “I’ve felt her presence in my work with this blade and I wish to offer myself up as her humble servant. I have the gift of The Sight and was a member of the Savage King’s court until he did this to me.”
There was a lot of her in the two of us, and my heart pounded at each small similarity I found between her face and ours or Gabriel’s. She was a memory of a life we should have been gifted the chance to live, but it had been stolen from us and the hurt I felt over that would never truly go away.
Merissa’s gaze shifted suddenly and I found her eyes on mine, a gasp escaping her as she looked at me and a soft ‘oh,’ leaving her lips as she reached out as if to touch my cheek. “Can you see me?” I asked shakily as the ghost of her hand skimmed the line of my jaw and I felt the faintest echo of that touch. “You need to see this, don’t you?” she asked and I wasn’t certain she could hear me or even that she was really talking to me, but as my brow pinched she took off, passing straight through me as if I wasn’t there at all and making the fragile pieces of my heart shatter with the love I
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“I saw Hail’s death if I ever took him to that place.” Her voice echoed around me as I came back to myself and I shuddered at the thought of that.
He had a fucking Nymph’s eye in his face and no one had ever questioned it. Or maybe they had, and I was just late to the party. Lionel almost certainly knew and he had clearly been trading for power from Lavinia since he’d been gifted that thing. Was it the reason they’d managed to work around my mom’s visions? Had this moment been the deciding factor in their fate? One scorned asshole throwing a bitch fit because someone came along and did his job better than him?
I gave myself over to thoughts of all the ways I dreamed of making Lionel, Lavinia and Vard pay for what they’d done to me and countless others besides.
“I’ve seen enough of the future to know they could cause all kinds of problems for our kind if nothing is done to stop them,” she replied. “Perhaps we are looking at this the wrong way,” Lionel murmured, stepping into the stone circle alongside the king and reaching his hand out towards the rift, causing shadows to coil out and brush against his fingers. “If we could figure out a way to harness them then imagine the power they could provide.”
He had dark, messy hair and a pale complexion, his clothes expensive but worn without much care like he only dressed so well to suit appearances. He seemed slightly irritated to have been drawn away from whatever he’d been studying, and I couldn’t help but feel a little amused as I noted that similarity to his son.
“The shadows aren’t a toy to play with or lay claim to,” he said, taking his glasses off and tucking them into his breast pocket. “They are a living, feeling embodiment of their realm. You could never hope to wield them the way you wield Elemental magic no matter how much effort you went to to contain them. Their power is corruptive, mighty and endless. Each shadow is connected to the next no matter how you may try to divide them, and only death would lay in the fate of anyone fool enough to try and take ownership of them for themselves.”
“Knowledge is power, so I can admit I agree with that,” Azriel replied and Lionel gave him an assessing look but said nothing further.
The rifts may have been a problem, but at least now I knew more about them. So we were just going to have to figure out how to track them down and close them too because I had the feeling that if we managed that, we’d soon find ourselves on a level playing field with the so-called Shadow Princess. And once that was the case, all bets were going to be well and truly off.
“Please,” I begged. “Please let me go to her.” “You need to rest,” Orion growled like a bossy asshole. “What I need is my sister,” I snarled. “Are you feeling okay?” Lance asked like I hadn’t just snapped at him. “I’m fine,” I ground out. “She collapsed again,” Darius said and I shot him a glare that marked him as a traitor.
“You and your sister are violent women,” he muttered, though not like he had an issue with it. I turned back to the door, anger swirling in me like a raging vortex. “You have no right to hold us here!” “Trust Gabriel,” Orion urged. “No,” I hissed,
“I’ve got you, little shrew,” he murmured reassuringly, a soft, teddy bear of a Dragon peering down at me instead of a raging animal as I felt the truth of that statement.
“What is it?” he asked, clearly seeing something in my expression that gave my fears away. “No bullshit, shrew.” I swallowed thickly, dragging the words up from the depths of my chest and letting them out. “Lavinia’s curse.” The door opened and Orion shot into the room, passing through the forcefield as if it was nothing as he sped to my side.
“What of Blue’s fate?” Orion growled, gripping his friend’s arm tight as he forced Gabriel to look at him. “You must be able to see if she lives through this. What do you see, brother?” he begged. Gabriel swallowed, pain crossing his eyes. “Orio, you have to understand, we’re in a war. I see all of you die so regularly that I can hardly stand it.
“You’re sure?” Darius asked, a crease of anxiety between his eyes. “Yes,” Gabriel promised. “The fate is set.” “Thank fuck for that.” Orion swiped a hand down his face then dropped onto the bed beside me with his jaw ticking. “Tell me everything you can about how you feel, Blue. I need to know as much as possible so I can help search for the right books in that library.”
“And out of it spills rage and anger and hate. But it takes from me too. It sucks away my magic, feeding on it like some hungry animal, and…” I choked on my next words, the fear they caused swallowing me into a void. “It wants to take my Phoenix too. When I power shared with Tory, it was like that rage took over and power exploded from me as I tried to fight back. But then as I was falling, I couldn’t sense any of my magic at all. I felt…” Tears burned my eyes, but I didn’t let them spill over as dread burst through my chest. “What, Blue?” Orion asked, my own fear mirrored back to me in his
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couldn’t become mortal, I couldn’t go back to the life I’d come from. The fear crept up on me so fast, I could hardly stand it. A tide of memories drowned me as I recalled living in poverty in a world I’d never once felt I belonged in. Of nights wrapped around my sister, my twin the only comfort in a world so dark it had always been so hard to find the light.
I was Darcy Vega. I didn’t worry about the bad, I always focused on the good. And I had to do that now, because if I didn’t, I’d be engulfed by this terror and it would never let me go.
“What happened?” “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she said firmly, looking to me in concern as Gabriel moved to hug her too. “What’s going on? Why is everyone looking so anxious?” I took a breath and told her the truth but raised my chin in defiance of it. “I’m cursed,” I said,
I looked up at Orion and a frown pinched my brow as I spotted two silvery pin prick marks on his neck. “What’s that?” I reached up, tracing my fingers over them. “Caleb and I…” He cleared his throat, looking to Gabriel who gave him a knowing look. “We drank from each other back at the altar, and accidentally formed a sort of…Vampire Coven. It’s something which is against the Vampire Code because it drives our instinct to hunt. He’s my blood brother now, my sanguis frater. It’s a bond that has made us form an alliance and ended our rivalry.”
“Bond?” I growled the word, thinking of the Guardian bond which had caused him such suffering, but he shook his head. “This bond requires nothing of me, it only provides me a sort of kinship with Caleb,” he explained. “It’s more than that,” Darius said, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “You’ll be worse with him than you are with your precious Noxy.” “Fuck off, he’s not worse with anyone than me,” Gabriel growled,
“I’m gonna go tell the others about all this, little shrew. I want you to know you have a weight of Dragon gold to buy any cure in this world that you need, and the full wrath of my Order to help you find an answer to this curse.” He released me and I looked up at him with my heart bunching up in my throat. “Thank you, Darius.”
“At least I don’t have to be there when Geraldine finds out,” I said to Tory, releasing a little laugh but Tory didn’t smile. “You always smile even when it’s raining,” she said, her eyes glittering with tears.
“I like the rain,” I pointed out, but when she looked at me like her heart was breaking, I hugged her tight. “I swear this will pass, just like every other rainstorm, we’ll find a way through it together.” She nodded against my shoulder. “I’ll fight every single rain drop if I have to. One by one, I’ll cut them out of the air.” “I know you will,” I said, loving how much my sister loved me.
“Look after her, Orio,” he warned. “Always, Noxy,” Orion growled.
“You find an answer, Lance Orion, or I’ll make you regret it. Do your nerd thing and find a way to fix this,” she commanded and Orion held out his hand to her. “I swear I’ll do everything within my power to break the curse,” he promised and Tory slapped her palm into his before I could stop her, a flare of magic igniting between them as the deal was struck. “You don’t need to make deals on the stars,” I said anxiously.
“Oh, I’m not disgusted by you. I mean, the shaming does make my stomach turn a bit, but I can push through it,” she said brightly. “A few of us are quite in awe of you here actually.” “What? Why?” he balked and I smiled in surprise. “Me and my friends figured it out,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice. “For starters, I don’t believe a single word of the drivel printed in The Celestial Times. So I did my own digging, I read every article about the court case and have spoken with Gabriel and his wife too. I know what you did for one of the Vega Princesses.” She pointed to me. “She
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“It gets better,” Laini said excitedly. “Just you wait.”
