Page 42 of A Kingdom of Death & Darkness
Thorn’s long tangled hair shifts as he, too, waits for his brother’s reply.
“When I was little, for years, she’d come to my bedroom window at night. She’d watch me with glowing red eyes and bloody lips. They call her the Queen of the Dead.”
“What?!” Thorn blinks hard at this creepy little fairy tale, and I, too, am starting to understand why the Prince of the Fae is a fucking morbid oddity in their hierarchy of chaos.
“She was nice,” he argues. “She’d leave me fun little bones on my windowsill from the Burned Border. I liked her.” His manic smile and hundred-yard stare are immensely unsettling, and yet still, Crymson reaches her tiny hand across the table and slips her fingers over his.
“That sounds nice,” she murmurs with a small encouraging smile, and every male at this table is sending her SOS signals with their eyes right now.
“Right. Anyway,” I utter swiftly to get on with the rest of our business before Thorn shoves us out the front door on our asses. “I’ve lost men to thethingsin the Dark Lands. One bite from their fangs is a death sentence.” I pause and look to the man at my side. Seven’s eyes are bright and watchful. His body is bigger, bulkier than I’ve ever seen from him. He isn’t dying. He’s thriving. “How did you do it?” I ask flatly.
Thorn’s lips twitch with a pleased arrogance. There’s that righteousness.
“Your men–rest their heartless souls–abused my mother before taking her to the Blood Lands. They fed from her. They turned her. She was a Fae Queen, and they made her their halfling. It had...side effectson the baby she was carrying.” Thorn’s gaze remains hard on the center of the table like he could cut through the etched blade there with a single striking look. “Our healers took my blood to heal my brother. They were too scared to test their magic on him. We, too, have lost men. When the simple blood transfer didn’t work, they passed something else, something stronger, into me. I don’t know what that magic was that night, but I thought they were killing me to save him. Pain like I’ll never forget ripped through my veins. It didn't kill me. But it made me stronger.” His gaze slips to Carver’s for a moment, and their silence screams loudly through the room for several passing seconds. “The new blood transfusion the next morning saved Carver’s life.”
“And that’s what you gave Seven? Your... mutated blood?” The energy inside of me hums restlessly to get to the part they’re clearly leaving out.
“A variant of it, yes.”
“Varian’?” Rorrick echoes with a curl of his lips.
Thorn nods.
“It isn’t just my blood,” Thorn says casually, and alarm bells are fucking blaring through my messy mind now. “A concoction of old magic, the venom of the dead, and yes, my mutated blood gives the results you’re seeing in your friend.”
The venom of the dead.
What the unholy fuck.
Christian, calm down,Crymson says in a gentle voice that tip toes through the cracks of my crumbling mind.He saved Seven’s life. He almost died.
My fingers drum an erratic tempo across the wooden table as I take a few steady breaths and appraise Seven at my side. That easy intelligence still shines in his gaze. I feel his calming energy washing all through the room like damage control. He’s the same. But not. His eyes are ringed with red, but the crawling lines around his throat are what really itch beneath my skin.
Because he looks like me.
“You made him–” I swallow hard, and still my fingers tap, tap, tap away against the table before I completely fucking explode with rage. “You fucking made him like me!”
“Christian,” Crymson says softly, and I can’t fucking look at her.
Thorn glances from me to Seven and then back again.
“Like you?” the Fae King asks stupidly.
Fuck! He took something good and pure and...
I shove back from the war room table, and with rumbling dark magic, I burst from the inside out in a rush of bats to the door at the back of the room. Chaotic flapping wings settle back into place, pulling me back together in the blink of an eye. When my palm catches the smooth wooden knob, the warmth of her hand settles over mine.
She’s faster now.
Christian, look at me,she pleads, and her voice is a soothing balm across my broken, bloody thoughts.
The energy beneath my flesh crawls with discomfort. When her palm slides over the wrinkled fabric across my bicep... I don’t pull away from her. I peer down at big green eyes that I want to lose myself in. I want–I want her words and her touch and her comfort to make it all better.
But she can’t.
In a flash of movement, I snatch her wrist up, and the breathy gasp along her lips is a delicious distracting sound. I turn her palm in my hand, bring her knuckles to my lips, and kiss ever so softly along her warm flesh.
“They made him like me,” I say in a broken whisper once more across the back of her hand with a tired closing of my heavy eyelids.
