Page 61 of Blood On His Lips

I wrench away from him.Your sorry means nothing. You’re just like everyone says you are. Old Ones don’t love, they only kill, they only destroy.I’mgoing to be strong enough todestroyyou one day.

For the first time, I begin fighting the grayness enveloping me. He’d placed it to keep me from ever telling anyone about my growing avatar, or about him. That knowledge is dangerous. It will make me enemies I am not ready to deal with on my own, and while he is sleeping, he cannot protect me. I hadn’t wanted to tell my mother, because I knew she’d be furious and try to keep me away from Raniel when he finally woke. Nothing will keep me from him. When I am of age, he will be mine. I know that within the depths of my soul.

But that was before he killed mymother.

I scream again.

This is my fault. If I hadn’t kept this secret, Maman would not have gone to try and wake the Prince. Not if waking meant he would take me from her. She would have left him alone, feud or no.

Ikilled my mother.

A sensation of strong arms enveloping me, and suddenly my grief and anger is muted, and suddenly. . .

Forgive me, my halfling. I will allow no one to take you from me, not even yourself. When you are strong enough, I will wake, and I will come for you.

* * *

In my mind’s eye, I beheld a snarl of shining, tangled threads stretching between Renaud and I. The threads were thin in some places, knotted in others. Unhealthy, despite the pulsing strength of it. Old, unbreakable, a conduit of thought and emotion and even power. A conduit whose first thread had been forged when I was a child.

A soulbond. . .but. . .was it supposed to look so gnarled?

“Raniel,” I whispered, and looked up at him with old, new eyes.

He flinched, just barely, but Iknewhim. Years and years of memories of my childhood playing with him in that island castle crashed through my mind in a tsunami, drowning me. Drowning me in his eyes, deep blue, as blue as the night sky and as endless.

I remembered the day my mother died, the day Raniel took everything from me.

Everything.

My mother, my best friend, and my. . .my bonded. . .in the same day.

Taken Raniel away and replaced him with Darkan.

Darkan.

Someone moaned, a long, low sound of pain.

My gaze traveled the known and yet strange lines of his face, the subtle flicker of emotion so familiar and yet so foreign to me.

“You bastard,” I rasped.

His expression iced.

“For over a decade you’ve been in my mind, and you let me think that you were nothing, just a wisp or an imaginary friend.”

“Aerinne, this is not the time for this conversation.” A warning in his voice, but I didn’t care.

The dense fog around us began to dissipate, and I recalled who was standing next to us, silently observing. I looked at his mother, Nayya.

“Get up, child,” she said quietly, a strange empathy in her gaze, the echo of an ancient feminine pain. “You must tend to your House now. You can deal with my son after.”

She gave Raniel a long, oblique look. He refused to return it, his gaze focused on me, but his anger beat in my chest. His anger at his mother, his frustration, his bitterness and his pain.

I laughed. “You thinkyouhave pain?”

The fog swept away and Numair surged forward. “Aerinne!”

Raniel’s—no, Darkan’s—head snapped up, and he looked at Numair. I clutched my head, sorting through my thoughts. No. Not Darkan.

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