Page 74 of A Dawn Of Blood

To my surprise, his lips curls into a smirk. Before I can properly register anything, he’s whizzing past me and I’m spinning around only to see him grab Nuala by the throat, lift her up, and take her wrist in his hand.

The next second, there’s yelling all around me, people are shooting magic at him to let her go and she’s thrashing in his grip, while I find myself frozen in place.

Completely unfazed, Cain locks eyes with me. Seemingly reveling in my shock, he gives me a vicious smile and drawls, “On second thought, dinner sounds nice.”

I see a flash of fangs just before they sink into her flesh.

The act makes me snap out of it. “Stop it, Cain,” I yell out as soon as I feel pain from the collar again.

Doing my best to block the pain, I move to shoot a thunder whip at him, but before I do it, the collar does its magic, he grits his teeth and he drops Nuala to the floor.

“Nuala,” I yell out as I rush over to her along with everyone else.

“I’m fine,” she spits out, angrily waving us all away as she pushes herself into a seated position.

Still, she lets me heal her.

Trying to suppress shock, anger and concern over all the Embers looking at Cain as if they want to kill him in the slowest way possible, I get to my feet and turn back to him.

He’s watching us all intently, his jaw working.

It’s in a voice that’s no longer gentle that I say, “I’m afraid that hurting people counts as causing me pain as well.”

He doesn’t say anything.

This is not the real him, I tell myself. It can’t be. I take a deep breath and soften my voice again. “As long as you’re… good, you’ll avoid pain yourself, I promise,” I tell him as I start walking over to him.

“I don’t care about the fucking pain,” he grits out as he takes a couple of long strides back, “I want you to stay the hell away from me.”

I stop walking, desperation starting to flood me.

“Anna,” I hear Nuala call out, reminding me of the mission.

“Alright, I’ll stay away,” I tell Cain. “But you’ll need to come with us now.”

He throws daggers at me.

But when I give the signal and we get going, he does follow, however reluctantly.

I remain tense the entire way to the Pull. But once we land in Uppsala, Sweden, and find ourselves right before Odin’s temple, I manage to force myself to shake it off, to start ignoring his presence and all the anger radiating off him.

This temple was my first choice for a reason. If there’s any place on Earth where his bones could be found, it’s this one.

Exchanging a glance, we first let Dryden check the perimeter.

Once he signals to us that it’s safe, we all get going, entering the temple and searching it from top to bottom.

We find nothing, but that’s okay. I wasn’t expecting to find anythingindoors anyway.

The next step is to check the graveyard to the back, where, as expected, we find runestones shooting up from the cold, hard ground.

I take the paper with all the runes related to Baldur, Odin and Frigg out of my pocket and unfold it for everyone to see.

Then we start the search, but find nothing. Not a single rune that would imply the bones of either Baldur’s mother or his father could be buried there.

Desolate, I stop the search and just stand there, looking around.

“It’s alright,” Dryden comes to tell me. “We have plenty more of these to check, right?”

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