Page 1 of Of Nine So Bold

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MELISANDRE

Cries of mourning for the dead and the dying rang through Lumilia as the sun rose. Standing by the window of my castle chambers, I smiled. The dull skyline of this pathetic city was no more. Only rubble remained where countless homes and businesses once stood, the debris spilling out into the roadways like party favors left scattered after the celebration had come to an end. Here and there, bodies lay on the cobblestones like so much left-over garbage—corpses of the poor, the destitute, and the rich alike.

Soon, they would start to stink. That was if the monsters roaming the city didn’t devour them first.

I chuckled as I watched smoke drift like a gray shroud over the morning sky. Wood burned. Stone crumbled. Humans bled and died.

Nothing was permanent… except me.

“You’ve made a mistake.”

A contemptuous sneer tugged my lips at the sound of the hissing-clicking voice. I cast a glance over my shoulder. Though before, I would have seen a muscular man with long brown hair and a strong jaw, now I saw only a shell. The truth hid inside the shifter, invisible to anyone besides me or his own kind. A twistof smoke and darkness lurked under his skin, glaring out at the world with metallic spikes for teeth and burning yellow eyes.

One of the Voidborn.

“I don’t make mistakes.”

My words were met with silence. Those smoke-like creatures hated me, I knew. They resented me for how I’d destroyed Alaric, their insufferable leader who’d crawled inside my head and deluded himself into thinking he could make me hispet.

But they feared me too, for that same reason.

Smirking at them briefly, I turned back to the smoke rising over the city. The Voidborn were such cowards. Born of the empty realms between worlds, they couldn’t survive the sheer force of reality without hiding like frightened children inside creatures like those behind me—formerly extinct monsters they’d resurrected to serve as vessels. Theyhatedreality for that and a thousand more reasons, and so their brilliant solution to that was to consume and destroy it all.

Rather than crush it beneath them and bend it to their will.

And yes, I’d bargained with them once, decades ago. Fate had left me no choice, cursing me to be born as a lowly carbon witch, destined by the hierarchy of the Jeweled Coven to spend my life serving at the feet of those who thought themselves better than me.

So I bent fate to my will as well.

The Voidborn transformed me from a lowly carbon witch into a mistress of magic who surpassed the diamond witches themselves. They’d made me a vampire. And in exchange for giving me the power and might to annihilate the Jeweled Coven, I was meant to sacrifice myself to them… eventually.

As if I would ever keep such a deal.

In the end,Alaricwas the one who’d made a mistake. After my infuriating stepdaughter failed to fulfill her purpose and die in my place, he’d thought to use me as his shell, to hide him inthis reality. He’d thought me hisplaything. Using my magic, mybody,he’d tracked the ley lines of power flowing through this world, following them back to each nexus where they met so he could consume them and destroy all that I intended to rule.

But he’d underestimated me. People often did—until I stood over their broken bodies and watched them die.

The smoke hanging over Lumilia suddenly twisted, forming a face. Alaughingface.

Alaric.

I flinched back with a sharp breath of alarm.

The image disappeared, becoming billowing smoke once more.

A shiver rolled through me. Alaric was gone. Deadgone. I’d taken control of the nexus he thought to destroy and I’d used its magic to consumehispower and essence like he once thought to do to my world. I’d triumphed again,and with that victory, I gained even more strength. I could understand the hiss-click language of the Voidborn. I was even connected to them, just as he had been, allowing me tofeelthem throughout the land.

I was their queen, and nothing of that bastard remained.

“You won’t survive this.”

I whirled to face the Voidborn hiding within the shifter. A twist of my fingers sent the creature and the man writhing. “Ialwayssurvive.”

Quivers of power rushed over me as I pinned him, an obedient surge of magic from the nexus I’d made my own.

Fur sprouted all over the shifter’s body as the animal inside him tried to escape. His muscles and skin rippled, unable to complete the shift. “Reality… will… crumble…”

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