Page 31 of The Blood Queen

My chest burned from the exertion. With each footfall against the uneven pavers, fiery pain shot up my legs. Everything hurt. I wasn’t even sure where I was, somewhere beyond the Docks with their bright lights and wafting food scents because each time I inhaled, I choked on the thick, cold humidity that tasted of fish and vegetative things. On my tears, that kept flowing.

Frost skipped across my skin and left goose bumps behind. Distantly placed lights lined the pathway, but nothing to ease the shadows.

On the Claw, moonlight was a murky smear against the dark water. My pulse throbbed with each hard breath I pulled in, a torture, but I couldn’t catch my breath. Puddled water spread in front of me, still rippling as if someone had run through it. In the distance, I heard a splash—a fish leaping after a passing insect or something more sinister.

I’d been told nymphs lived in the Claw, although they rarely interacted with wolves, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop thinking about the black-haired river nymph, Lorriel, and her swarming leeches. Leeches no one had ever seen before.

I stepped back as Angel appeared. She wasn’t even winded. We stood on a long woody point, where the dock was slowly rotting away, leaving stumps in the river.

“What did you see?” she demanded.

“Julien.”

“Noa.” She gripped my arms. “You have the gift of sight, don’t you? Maybe what you saw was an old image of him. Believe me.” She swallowed once. “I know what emotional trauma does. Violence. Your mind doesn’t feel like your own. You see, hear, think it’s real, want it to be real with that leap in your heart.”

I shuddered.

“You didn’t kill him,” she hissed.

“He wouldn’t have been there if not for me.”

“And you were fighting for your life,” the merc said, shaking me as if she knew I’d drifted into the memories of the things I did, what I had to do to survive. The choices I’d made—to attack Ago, make him a greater enemy than he’d been. To join the fight on that blackened hill to prove I was right, and a prophecy was wrong.

“If you didn’t do what you did,” she said, “you’d be dead. And nothing would have changed, Noa. The threat would still exist. People would still die, only he wouldn’t have you to fight for—your dread lord. He hates that name, you know.” Her laugh was soft. “All honorable men hate stepping into greatness. That isn’t why they fight. Not for the glory. For something more. My brother was like that.”

Her breathing tightened, a harsh sound.

“He refused to back down,” she said. “No matter the cost. And you’re like him. His damned stubborn will, heroic and foolish at the same time.”

“This is my fight,” I argued.

“And it makes no sense to you that you’re left out. Stuck here trying to get better when part of you wants desperately to leave. You want to help when everyone tells you no.”

What Angel endured as a child was beyond my imagination—but she identified with the same cruel emotions that plagued me. Didn’t hold back.

“Then Set tells you vampires burn with red smoke when you remember it was black, and all you want now is to prove Julien’s not gone. Put things back together. But they searched, Noa. Men from Carmag and Sentinel Falls. They found nothing. And what you experienced just now… I saw my brother every day for months. I smiled at him, reached for him, tried to touch him, find him for more than a year before I accepted the truth. It was a mind trick. Grief refusing to let go.”

“I can’t.”

“Noa!” Fallon shouted, her grimace pain-filled, her weight braced on the cane with each determined, laborious step she took to reach us. “What the hell?”

I had no answer. Only tears, running down my face.

CHAPTER 8

Grayson

An icy, yellowed sun cast plum-colored shadows over the wintry ground. In front of me, the cabin was dull and silent. Inside, the hybrids were sated, numbed by their madness. Months of near starvation turned them into emaciated horrors. Three of them, corruptions created by Barend. His hybrids were less refined than Amal’s, but they were as monstrous.

A deadening pressure filled my mind. Hybrids—those wolves turned by a vampire—were unique. While in their human bodies, they possessed a vampire’s strength, along with his fangs and insatiable needs.

In wolf form, they were voracious killers. Power was intoxicating, and once the hybrid turned feral, he refused to shift back into the vampiric body. And because, as wolves, they had canines instead of fangs, they could no longer drink blood efficiently. Consequently, they ripped apart their prey, unable to consume sustenance in any other way. But it was never enough blood, so they killed, ravaged. And still slowly starved to death.

Killing them swiftly was a mercy.

But mercy was not what I would deliver this night.

When I shifted into the wolf, his snarl was mine, low in his throat and vibrating with the useless anger. This responsibility was ours. He’d accepted the alpha tattoo as I had, knowing full well it bound us for a lifetime. He’d listened to the warnings, as I had, that such revulsions would become our obligation. I would find the elder who trafficked teenagers to Barend. But first, I would clean up his mess.

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