Page 24 of Gua rdian of Blood and Shadow

I wailed, feeling like preemptive grief would tear me apart.

“Listen to your spirit, Sophie,” Isador said, pacing around the perimeter of the ritual circle. “He speaks sense.”

“You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for, Soph,” Wes said. “You can do this.”

Isador’s voice cut through the chaos. “If pulling on the bond doesn’t work for you, then you must find another way, Sophie. Your power flows from connection, not dominance. Use that. Use your love for him. For all of them.”

Her words sparked something within me—a deep, instinctive understanding. The way eachcommunionwith my consorts strengthened our bonds through mutual surrender.

Taking another breath, I closed my eyes and reached for the bonds linking me to each of my consorts. Instead of pulling on those ephemeral cords, I imagined wrapping them around my body, visualizing my consorts binding me as I had bound them.

The connections felt wild and primal—like trying to hold lightning in my bare hands. Beneath the chaos, I sensed my consorts’ desperation, their silent pleas echoing through our bonds. Javier wasn’t unaffected after all; rather, his greatest fear was losing me, and if he released Bastian, he believed he would.

“Please,” I whispered, surrendering to those bonds, to those cords now wrapped around my trembling body. I focused on Bastian’s bond first, the cord connecting us bright and golden like captured sunshine. I pictured him as I’d first seen him in the library—quiet and intense with those Clark Kent glasses he’d worn in a vain attempt to blend into the human world.

The crystal moon flared blindingly bright, cutting off my words. Suddenly, I wasn’t just sensing Bastian’s inner torment; I was living it. His memories crashed over me like a violent tide, drowning me in his past.

I saw through his eyes as his mother’s shift went wrong, her form contorting beyond natural limits. Her spine snapped and reformed, her beautiful face stretched into something unrecognizable. I witnessed her humanity being consumed heartbeat by heartbeat, recognition fading from her eyes until she no longer knew her own son. I felt Bastian’s raw grief as his father, King Veris, ordered her tossed through a portal to the drowned city, Atlantis, neither human enough to live among them nor animal enough to be released into the wild. Anabomination. Unfit to live.

In a blink, I was back in the Selenarium. I staggered under this revelation, tears streaming down my face. Bastian knelt nearby, Javier holding him upright, both men panting from exertion.

I didn’t know what had happened to Bastian’s mom, but I could only assume Veris’s sentence had meant death for her. Much as I wanted to ask, needed to know, the unexplored bonds called to me, luring me from my heartache.

I focused on another cord—this one ice blue and shimmering with iridescence. The connection pulled me under like an arctic current, and suddenly I was Ash—mortal, human, kneeling in the shadow of a stone church beside a freshly covered grave marked with a small wooden cross. I felt the weight of the tiny carved shield and spear in my hands, meant for fierce little Freya, who would never grow old enough to hear tales of shield-maidens by the hearth fire. The plague had swept through our village like Odin’s wrath, stealing Ingrid’s and our child’s breath in the same night while I sat helpless beside their bed, first praying to ancient gods, then to the White Christ when the old ones remained silent. The priest had permitted the small wooden offerings despite their pagan origins—a final kindness for a grieving father. At least they had gone together; my sweet Ingrid would never know a world without her baby in it.

The memory shifted, and I was able to pull myself partway out, separating myself from Ash as he watched Thane lunge through the graveyard portal mere days ago, sacrificing himself to save us from the shifter bearing a grenade. I felt the scream building in his chest, the soul-deep desperation as he lunged forward, only to be restrained by Gavin’s iron grip. He couldn’t lose someone again, not after centuries of carefully guarding his heart against precisely this agony.

My breath caught as I understood. Ash didn’t fear physical pain or even death—he feared loving and losing, he feared helplessness, a cycle he had endured first as a mortal and then throughout his immortal existence. Yet still he opened himself, still he loved, still he fought to protect what was his, first Freya and Ingrid, then Thane, and now me.

I met Ash’s tortured gaze, a moment of perfect understanding between us that fed our bond, strengthening it. But still, I wasn’t done.

I focused on another cord—this one a deep, sea green that pulsed like ocean depths. The bond thrummed, and I plunged into darkness. I was Thane, still human, working in the fields under a merciless sun when a pale hand selected me from among the other slaves. “This one,” a woman’s voice said, cultured and cold as winter frost. “Bring him to my chambers.”

Night after night, humiliation and pain. The mistress of the plantation used my body for her pleasure while treating me as less than human. Her nails digging into my flesh, drawing blood like she was marking livestock. Her punishment when I failed to perform to her satisfaction—the lash, the hunger, the isolation. The helpless rage I swallowed until it became a poison in my veins.

The memory twisted, and I clawed away, watching Thane run after killing his mistress in self-defense rather than experiencing it firsthand. I watched as he was caught, tortured, and left standing with a rope around his neck as his attackers were slaughtered. I watched as a dainty woman picked her way through the crimson mud, hulking shadows surrounding her. “You’re very pretty,” she said, her voice like a song. “Do you want to live forever?”

Decades passed in a heartbeat—different queens, different masters, but the same sense of powerlessness, of being valued only for what his body could provide. Until Ash. Until someone looked at Thane and saw a person, not a possession.

Then the Sun Keep—the endless darkness, the hunger, the return of that helpless rage as he was once again reduced to a resource to be drained, a body to be used.

I gasped, my knees buckling as the weight of his trauma crashed through me. “Never again,” I vowed, my voice breaking as I reached toward where Thane knelt. “Never.” The promise vibrated through our bond, strengthening our connection.

I focused on another cord—blood-red and scorched along the edges. This one felt ancient, weathered by decades of pain but somehow unbreakable, like a scar that refused to fade.

Suddenly I was in Javier’s head, but I had a better idea of what to expect, and I was able to keep some distance between myself and his memory, observing his past instead of living it. I watched him, a young boy with skinned knees running through the halls of this very sanctuary, a dark-haired girl laughing beside him. Diana—my mom—radiant even in childhood. I sensed the fierce protectiveness he felt for her, how he loved her, a sister in every way but blood.

The memory shifted to a teenaged Diana weeping in his arms after her mother announced she would need to choose her consorts soon. “I don’t want to,” she whispered, her tears soaking through his shirt. “I don’t want to be bound toanyone. I want to choose my own path.” Javier’s conflicted emotions—the relief that she didn’t want him in that way mixed with fear for her future, his determination to stand beside her, to serve her, regardless of the cost to himself. For service to a High Queen required complete devotion. He couldn’t join another queen’s harem and also serve his dearest friend.

Then Diana, older now and crowned as High Queen, her eyes heavy with knowledge as she told him, “I want you to be Prime Consort to the next High Queen, when the time comes… When I’m gone. Let this be your last act of service to me, my old friend.” The shock, the honor, the confusion. “Why not Gavin?” he had asked. “He’s the stronger guardian. The strongest in centuries.” Diana’s mysterious smile, tinged with sadness. “Because she will need your experience more than she will need his strength.”

Then decades of torture in the Sun Keep, with his only anchor the tenuous connection to me. The overwhelming guilt that he had failed Diana. The bone-deep fear that I would never fulfill the destiny my mother had foreseen for me—a destiny that required sacrifices he now understood too late.

A sob tore from my throat. “She knew,” I whispered, horrified by the confirmation. “She knew what would happen to all of us.” The revelation gutted me, but our bond pulsed with renewed understanding, with shared grief for the woman who had brought us together.

But still, I wasn’t finished. One last cord called to me, shimmering and liquid like pure quicksilver. It sucked me in, tearing me away from reality with such violent urgency that I barely had time or forethought to separate myself from Gavin as I crash landed in his memory.

Dazed, I watched a beautiful vampire queen with deep gray eyes lifting a baby—Gavin—to the moon. “My son will serve the next High Queen,” she proclaimed, her voice ringing with a prophetic power that made the air itself tremble. “The goddess has shown me this truth.”

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