Page 22 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Perhaps if Cirrien stayed near me instead of locking herself in her tower, I would be able to piece together more of her language.

I had accepted that it was impossible to learn any of her signs fluently in one night—there was a limit to what one could learn over the course of eight hours. But now I would have a vantage point from which to begin.

With the sign forangerrunning through my head—a sharp jab with three fingers, palm inward—one of my ears swiveled to the south, the tip quivering.

Distant hoofbeats. Eryan was less than a mile away now with his precious cargo.

I rose to my full height, touching the warg-sign once more. Whoever he was, he had been sacrificed: Thurn Hakkon, the once-defeated commander of the Forian wargs, knew that this boy would not be returning from the Rift.

It was a suicide run. To kill me or the future Lady—whichever one he destroyed, it would be a blow to Veladar.

If I died, the seat would revert to human hands, unless another vampire was willing to make the metamorphosis into a fiend, with all the strictures that entailed… not to mention the horror of the process itself. The Rift would be left weak and undefended by their own monsters.

And if Cirrien died… well. The humans would provide me with another bride, another woman to ensure the Accords remained unbroken.

But I did not want another bride. I wantedher, the woman who stood up straight and dared to look me in the eye.

So the seat would revert to human hands regardless, because I would cross the border into Foria, and slaughter as many of them as I could before they took me down by sheer dint of numbers.

Neither outcome was acceptable. Hakkon had sent the boy to his doom.

The clatter of hooves grew louder, and I twisted my ears back as it came into sight, bursting through the mist on the road. Stepping back into the roils of fog, I allowed myself a glance at the window.

Cirrien. Just visible through the smoked glass, searching the fog.

For a moment I thought she saw me—but in the three seconds it took for the carriage to pass, her gaze focused on the tree marked by the warg.

Eryan still wore his tricorn hat. A sign to me, hiding in the mist, that he had seen and heard no sign of approach.

When they disappeared into the mist, I took another deep breath of the warg-sign, and lowered myself to all fours.

Agony rippled through my bones, spreading outwards like ripples in a pond. My skin shifted and oozed, accommodating the thickening plates of cartilage that would protect my vital organs and weak points. No wings. My business was on the ground.

Moving like a beast, I followed the trail of fresh wolf spoor.

He had moved back and forth, crisscrossing the road, but I picked up a clear trail heading north, so fresh I could almost taste his sweat.

So fresh I knew that he was still in pain from his first shift, frightened but determined, the scent acrid and filling my mind with a red haze.

His target was Cirrien.

He would never achieve his goal. Not while I lived.

Several hundred yards behind the carriage, the trail moved off the road. My tongue flicked out, the sensitive receptors tasting him in the paw prints left behind: distorted prints, somewhere between feet and paws, grooves gouged into the earth where his claws had dug in.

Moving silently over the carpet of dead needles, I ran faster.

Even with sensitive predator eyes, I could only just make out the carriage as I moved over the rocky slope above the road—and there, crouched on an outcropping, the warg.

Tensing, the muscles taut in his legs as he prepared to leap, his scent so powerful it was nauseating. Lips were drawnback over a snout longer and thinner than any natural wolf’s, revealing the double-row of jagged teeth.

The growl in my throat rolled through the air, and the warg’s head whipped around. Narrow eyes gleamed with ill intent, a poisonous, mottled green.

I approached, unafraid of him—he was so young and desperate, no more a threat to me than the buzzing of a fly. “He has sent you here to die.”

The carriage rattled on into the fog, the occupants unaware of how closely death’s fingers had brushed the backs of their necks.

The warg said nothing, his breathing thick but shallow. He stared at me, frozen in place, muscles still bunched for a leap.

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