Page 38 of Of Fate So Dark

I whirled back to face the village, but he wasn’t there.

“What are you doing to me?” I shouted.

Alaric made an amused noise. He sounded like he was standing right beside me, and when he spoke, I could feel his breath on my skin as if he was whispering right into my ear. “You’ll see.”

12

ROAN

I’d lost any chance at the princess’s heart by pushing her away.

Now I’d lost the princess herself.

And the demon was going to burn everything in sight if I didn’t find her soon.

In the distance, I could hear my friends struggling to keep up, their voices calling out every so often to tell me to slow down. Be careful. To caution me that those Voidborn bastards could still be out here, and that I couldn’t possibly know if I was heading the right way.

But the demon had no doubts, and its strength fueled my speed. No, I couldn’t feel her. Hear her. Smell her. I couldn’t do a damn thing except stride through this gods-forsaken forest, heading back toward the cursed terrain that was the Wild Lands and praying she hadn’t made the mistake of returning there.

The demon had vanquished that foe once. It would scorch the earth itself to ash if that place tried to take her from us again.

If anything tried…

I shuddered. My eyes were burning. Patches of my skin might have been shifting toward gray, or maybe that was just fear making me jump at shadows. But I’d nearly lost control of this monster back at Casimir’s castle, and I knew I’d been fooling myself to believe it had returned to sleep since then.

No, with every step, the demon fought harder to take control and break free of the chains I’d wrapped it in long ago. Once upon a time, it’d agreed to them. Even believed it deserved them for all the horrors we’d committed and the lives we’d taken.

But that was then. Before the Wild Lands. Before that arrogant bastard of a vampire king had stolen the only woman we ever wanted, no matter what his reasons for that had turned out to be in the end.

Before that strange winter’s day, weeks before, when our treluria had first stumbled in barefoot from the bitter cold to curl up in my armchair like she was seeking the protection of us and us alone.

“Roan!” Dex shouted far in the distance behind me.

Branches slashed at me as I shoved past. Roots tried to trip my feet. But I needed to go faster. Stay ahead. Not slow down, not even for a moment.

A groan escaped my lips. The urge to shift rolled through my body, making every tendon and bone ache like they were being pulled apart. The demon was thrashing within me, determined to break free and bring an end to this pursuit. Gwyneira was ahead of us, it was sure. Thus we only had to find her, claim her as we should have on the very first day we laid eyes on her, and then everything would be all right.

And I knew without question that meant the demon was insane. None of that would happen.

Instead, she’d just die.

“Dammit, where the hell are you, man?”

Clay honestly expected me to slow down enough to answer?

I ripped past a tangle of vines, my nails too sharp, too long, and well on their way to claws that would tear flesh from bone. A patch of skin on my hand was definitely gray now, and if the others saw?—

The demon didn’t care about those men. Let them see us. Let them stare. It loathed the thought of hiding any longer. It was tired of staying bound inside me, locked down in the dark where I—like a fool—still believed it belonged. No, all those horrors we’d committed were then. This was now. Now was not then, and in this infuriating now, our mate was in danger.

Nothing else mattered.

Shudders rolled through me. Gods, I’d forgotten how alien that side of me truly was—and that was before this moment when I started to suspect it’d truly lost its mind. I’d buried the demon for so many years, there’d been times at the cabin when I could almost let myself pretend it no longer existed, this monster who both was and wasn’t me. This thing that made me unlike any other living being in the world. I could pretend I wasn’t a selfish bastard risking the lives of everyone around me, just so I could play at having some kind of family again. No, I was an ordinary man. A giant, not a monster, just like my friends.

I’d been a fool.

Irritation surged up from the demon. It was sick of how I fought it, of what I believed. Everything was simple in its mind. There were no shades of gray nor any question of what we should do now. We would find Gwyneira. We would mate her. And if that meant the death of everything in our path, then everything would simply have to die.

The end.

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