Page 72 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
Foretell the end of Paradise
A diamond Queen, aspect of white
Her two young babes, bereft of light
Augur nigh a time of strife
A battle lost to lower life
A comet red, a moon of blue
A sum of five reduced to two
An evil trickster, wishing well
Looses all the dogs of Hell
These things in all will come to pass
The sand runs out the hourglass
Harken and be not headstrong
To Death’s cold arms we soon belong.
Kalum finished reading. He rolled up the scroll, placed it back in the chest atop the stack of others, and closed the lid. He said a prayer to Ama-gi in the Old Language, rose from his knees, and went to stare out the mouth of the cave into the vast, green beyond.
He’d known this day would come.
As soon as the new Queen had been crowned—the Diamond Queen they called her, just as beautiful, just as rare—he knew it would be within his lifetime. She had twins on a night a red comet scored the sky, and he knew the time crept clo
ser. Then the four confederate colonies had merged, leaving only the Roman colony outside the arms of the rainforest. “A sum of five reduced to two.”
And now the red-haired human, who’d arrived just last night.
Kalum had never seen a redhead before. Actually, the only humans he’d ever seen had been the indigenous tribes of the forest, glimpsed from afar, but the moment he saw her, he knew she was the “daughter of Fire” of the poem. His father had called redheads Gibil, “One of Fire.”
Hawk, son of an Alpha, born to the House of Air, was the prince in the poem. It was his cold heart that had been awakened—blooded—by the human, her sacrifice at the punishment tree.
A sacrifice that took place on a full moon. The second full moon in a single month.
A blue moon.
As for the rest of it—the funeral pyre, the trickster, the battle—he knew those would come, too. Soon.
“And so begins our end,” the old priest murmured, watching a flock of parrots burst from the tree line in a tangle of yellow and blue. They vanished with a quicksilver flash into the misted sky, and kalum turned back to the cave and went inside to prepare.
Edward, Viscount Weymouth, was mad.
Furious was a word more apropos for the emotion scraping his guts like a bowl being hollowed out by a whittler’s knife. Since he’d discovered the Queen wouldn’t be accompanying him and the rest of the final families of Sommerley on their journey to the rainforest, he’d been so angry he’d given himself a headache from his constant teeth-gnashing.
“Something she has do first,” Leander had explained in his oblique, maddening way the day they’d left, and wouldn’t be convinced to speak further about it.
Edward had the sneaking suspicion that the “something” Jenna had to do was related to Caesar and Morocco. But he couldn’t do anything about it . . . for the time being.
For the time being, the Plan was put on hold.
Leander had kept him close during the flight to Manaus on his private jet, even closer during the boat and canoe rides up the rivers that snaked deeper and deeper into the jungle. There was no opportunity for him to sneak away and make a warning phone call during all the time of their journey, and now they stood in a quiet group of fifteen on the banks of a silty river, staring into the dense jungle undergrowth from which a greeting party of six large black panthers had just emerged.
