Page 185 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

“It’s been too long.” Andrus rose from the grass; one might think he took the qualities of a stag, but his long, skull-like face had a disquieting seam from forehead to throat, cutting directly down his snout and chin and under his cheekbones to his ears; the tips of his fangs were needle-like, thin. The rest of his body was nearly that of a muscular human, but for the legs that bent backwards, and the feet ending in two sharp claws that resembled cloven hooves. “I regret only that I came in your time of need, and not earlier.”

“I’m grateful you’re here at all,” I said, and Wroth wordlessly clapped a paw to my shoulder.

Of my brothers, I had always been closest to Wroth, just as Voryan and Andrus seemed to be twins from different mothers. But we were all four entwined, from long years in the Below, of fighting in the Forian War before parting to our separate thrones, and I was glad they had answered the call.

The three of us looked down at the golems, slightly less skeletal than they had been at dawn, and Wroth frowned.

“These Fae things are unnatural,” he said, and as though his disapproval had penetrated her dreams, Wyn rolled over, blinking at the pale blue sky.

“Not a single warg?” she asked, frowning even as Visca paused in her incessant strolling to plant a kiss on her forehead. She gripped her wife’s hand hard for a moment.

“Nary a one.” My commander continued on her path, a trail already worn in the grass.

Wyn exhaled, then got to her feet, dusted off her robes, and knelt right back in the dirt by Thorn’s head. “Progress is slower than I’d anticipated. These are not ideal laboratory conditions by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d hoped for a little more vigor.”

“But when will they be able to track?” I interrupted. My skin itched all over, my muscles quivering with the need to move, to run and hunt.

The bloodwitch bared her teeth in a snarl, pulling one of her many blood-letting blades from her sleeve, and exposed a wrist. She spoke as she cut, letting her blood drip into their bodies.

“I’ve given them strict instructions to rise as soon as they’re able, so they’ll get up when they can. We won’t have time for any field tests, but I’m concerned they may develop some of the more common afflictions of Fae constructs. Basically, we’ll have to hope for the best. Give your prayers to the ancestors now.”

Wroth growled low in his throat as he eyed the golems, but Andrus looked them over without any signs of discomfort. “We should have Voryan here to put them down,” he said mildly. “He has the most experience of us with dismantling the Fae’s leftovers.”

Voryan, before enthusiastically flinging himself into my idea of becoming fiends, had spent some two hundred years in the Below, walking alone in those darkened halls and killing anything he came across. I thought that perhaps two centuries of wandering alone in pitch darkness had contributed to his murderous tendencies in the world above, but the fact remained,a serial killer turned monster made a very effective deterrent to anyone who wanted to invade Veladar while it was recovering.

“Speak of the demon…” Wroth had turned his back on the golems, his arms crossed over his chest as he glared at the mountains.

Visca’s legions were just now descending the switchback trails, burdened by horses, supply wagons, and their own hefty armor. The creature that bypassed them moved with supreme surety, climbing over the rock face with all six limbs.

Once he met flat earth, it took Voryan a mere half hour to join us. He rose from the grass, a tall, jackal-headed monstrosity. Four arms, each ending in a human hand covered with gold rings, extended from a lean, muscled torso. He possessed a sheen of short, soft black fur all over his body, carved with shadowy whorls, but the most salient and off-putting aspect of his being was the wide, bloodred eye in the center of his forehead, rolling wildly as it searched for enemies.

“Brothers.” Voryan grinned, exposing shark-like teeth as his lips split to his pointed ears. “Shall we find blood?”

His voice was a howl and a roar mixed into one.

“As soon as the abominations rise.” Wroth glared at the golems, and Voryan hesitated for a split second as his triple-eyes landed on them. For him, it might as well have been an eternity.

“Are they his? Do we kill them?”

“No, they’re mine. They contain my wife’s blood; they’ll lead us to her.”

At the mention of blood, Voryan’s tongue, as black as his fur, slicked over his teeth with anticipation.

“Soon,” Wyn said. She had just awoken, but she looked exhausted, pale; new lines had carved themselves into the corners of her eyes with every drop of blood and iota of energy she expended. From past experience, I knew she would be a crone come nightfall. “I think they’ll rise soon.”

I swallowed my impatience, grateful for the energy, the youth, the vitality of her own she was sinking into my compasses.

Voryan gave the golems another narrow look, then shrugged. “So long as I get to bleed something today.”

Though I was grateful for my brothers’ presence, I wondered if they had come not to give aid, but because they missed the freedom of the fight, the hot pulse of blood, the pure and simple ambition of the battlefield—to kill or be killed.

And I could not fault them if that was the case. I, too, felt constrained by the life I’d taken, the everyday trappings that belonged to a nobleman, a human, not a creature that lived on blood. And they were trapped in far worse situations, pretending to be things they were not, with women who loathed the things they were.

From our fearsome faces to our warped bodies, this is what we were: creatures designed for slaughter, not sitting on thrones. This was their true home, forever and always, where the earth was red and the nights were long, and there were no guarantees of living to see the next dawn.

Let them fight here and die here, if they chose; so long as they helped me fight forher.

Chapter 45

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