Page 3 of The Blood Crown

Aurelia glanced toward Ven, his dark hair damp with rain, running in rivulets down the side of his face and falling off the sharp line of his jaw. His eyes searched the deep black of the pines for whatever moved toward them.

He met Karro’s eyes over her head and uttered a single word.

“Maloch.”

A tall figure emerged, slicing a path through the horde of demons. The green glow illuminating the darkened forest seemed to radiate from his eyes, the sliver of iris nearlyswallowed whole by his black pupils. The male glistened like onyx in the rain, every drop hissing as it evaporated against his dark skin.

A demon prince.

Her blood froze as her gaze fell to the lower half of his face.

Where his mouth had once been, vulgar stitches sewed it shut into a severe slash across his otherwise flawless face. There was nothing but cold determination lining his dark brow. Muscles rippled across his bare chest, looking like they’d been carved from granite as the rain seemed to flinch from him. And dragging through the ground in his left hand was a massive scythe, the heavy blade cutting into the frozen dirt as his slow, methodical steps shook the mountainside.

“Do you still have your coin?” Ven asked, casting a glance toward Karro.

Karro brandished the heavy iron disk between his fingers, his mouth a grim line.

If even Karro couldn’t crack a joke, she knew this was bad.

Give her up, and I will spare your meaningless lives this night.

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, reverberating between the pines and rattling through her chest. She hadn’t realized when she walked back through the mirror tonight that she’d be walking into death’s embrace. But even if she’d known, it wouldn’t have changed anything. She would die beside them. Her friends. Her family.

They should have left when the others did—they shouldn’t have been here at all.

A single caw broke the deathly silence enveloping the forest, and Aurelia risked glancing above their heads. The moonlight that had been trickling through the canopy of branches above them was blotted out entirely by a swirling black mass.

Wings.

The gleam of onyx talons descended suddenly on the demons around them, blocking them from the depthless eyes of the demon prince.

Ven wrapped his arm around Aurelia’s waist, throwing her down onto the surface of the rock as Karro crouched beside them. The rising cacophony of shrieks and guttural howls became deafening.

“Now!” Ven shouted, dragging her off the boulder as they jumped down onto the brittle pine needles littering the forest floor. The pain in her calf was so jarring that it knocked the breath from her, but Ven’s arm was a vice around her ribs as he hauled her through the forest, her feet barely finding purchase on the ground.

The ravens battled the creatures around them, splattering black blood across the Grey Wood as their sharp beaks ripped out eyes and throats, their dagger-like talons making a ruin of the already grotesque demons.

Aurelia choked on the putrid stench of demon blood as they kept low to the ground, searching for small openings between the writhing bodies.

The blade in Karro’s hand seemed to thrum with a current of power she’d never noticed before. The ravenstone rippled with threads of scarlet and amber light as he cut a path before them. “Maloch will have brought worse things than drugar with him,” he grunted, his sword slicing through a demon and turning it into ash.

“We should make for the river,” Ven called back as they forged their way through the pines.

Ven bore most of her weight as they sprinted from tree to tree, catching their breath for only moments at a time before moving onto the next cover. The mass of bodies around them began to thin out, the shrieks less jarring now that they were on the fringes of the melee, but still too close for comfort.

The signs of exhaustion were creeping in, kept at bay by sheer will. And Aurelia was reminded that Ven and Karro had spent many nights like this over the long centuries, dredging strength from empty reserves. Adrenaline kept her reflexes quick—maybe it was the stifled magick prowling under her skin looking for any outlet, but it was only a matter of time before that gave out, too.

She glanced to where Ven crouched next to her behind the husk of a fallen pine, Karro beside him. She’d never meant for either of them to be caught in the middle of this with her.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she uttered, trying to keep the grief from her voice.

The King of the Void wantedher—the truth that the First Brother had revealed to her shortly before she’d killed him. He’d been tracking her for months now, though she hadn’t realized it. Sending his death hounds into the Capitol to find her—and her father had paid the price. And now Asher, too . . . Wherever she went, she would bring destruction with her.

Gripping Ven’s sleeve, she forced him to meet her eyes. “Leave me.” Ignoring the incensed look that flared across his stare, she plowed on. “He’s trackingme—I can draw the demons and the prince far enough away from this place that you and Karro can escape.”

She was slowing them down. But with her as a distraction, they might escape back to Ravenstone and take the ring where it would remain safely out of the King’s reach.

Ven shouldn’t have been here.He was supposed to tell Lanthius to seal the wards andleave. Leave all of it behind—her included.

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