Page 11 of The Sacrifice

Shaking my head, I shove away the thoughts and the story my parents shared on a daily basis. A reminder of why they never bought me dresses, gifted me with my mother’s jewels, or braided my hair like my mother’s done for Darya and Rylinne. Or why she never stopped Pater from hurling me into darkness for days or weeks at times as punishment.

I am the mistake who never should have been born.

Wrapping my arms around myself, I chip away at the hollow in my chest. Although I embraced my anomalousness at a young age, preferring the company of ghosts and Borderlands outcasts more than my family, something has always felt missing.

But stabbing that dragon felt like I’d found something.

For hours, I walk. Making my way through the Wailing Woods until my limbs ache, my breath wheezes, and my naked feet have turned red and puffy from the frost. All this time, Qora has protected me, along with the banshees, of course. My heart has plunged to my stomach a few times at finding more dragon blood. How much can he lose? Did I—did I actually kill the monster? Is it possible to kill a god?

I suppose I’ll find out sooner or later. At least, I hope I will. Because the Wailing Woods have thinned, sliced off mid-trunk with the miles-long, swirling haze of the Veil sweeping the landscape before me. Thin, ribbon-like wisps undulate throughout the Veil.

The closer I get, the more my chest vibrates with a strange sense of energy prickling my hair to static. A tiny fraction of that energy exists in the Borderlands, the mortal world of my home, known to a rare few like me. With the humming in my chest growing, I understand what forms the Veil. The undulating wisps are no mere echoes of magic. Horror creeps into my being like needle ice to grow crystals beneath my skin.

They are ghosts. The entire Veil is made of slaughtered souls.

7

A firestorm of vengeance.

DRAGO

My fire shatters to nothing but cinders burning the ruined portion of my lower throat. Pain sears my flesh from the inside, and I roar—choking and clawing at the air again.

“Bloody boulders, brother!” Mayce’s voice cuts through the pounding in my head. “You ripped through the seal again. Merikh, Kyan!” he yells for the others.

“Blow-hard can just fuck off,” I growl at Kyan, then snarl at Mayce as he narrows his eyes in concentration and reinforces the bindings on my wrists, transforming the oak roots to hard steel that fuses into the iron headboard. “Shit a brick, Mayce.”

He rolls his eyes. “Come up with some new lines. You’re really burning me up here.”

“I’ll scorch all the hairs off your pretty head when this is over,” I rasp, blowing smoke and embers from my throat while Merikh leers down at me and commands my essence to swell. With his power to multiply my blood cells and increase my life force, the vampire is our most powerful asset. Except for how the Waste weakens our powers.

“Sticks and stones, Drago,” responds Mayce, gesturing to Kyan, who’s kept his distance in the doorway. “Ky, put him to sleep.”

“Wait...” Merikh’s deep voice echoes in the tower, his milky orbs surveying the wound. “The blood does not listen to my command. It slows. It hides in shadow.”

“What are you blathering about?” I rage at the vampire. When he’s not giving in to his madness, he speaks in cryptic riddles and images. The contrast to Mayce and his exasperating, logical monologues. Or like Kyan who’s either quiet as a monk on a vow of silence or a raging storm.

Merikh’s eyes gouge mine, sending my breath fuming from my lungs. “The shadow strangles your blood, brother. I cannot create new blood, nor cleanse the shadowed blood.”

“Stop speaking in damned riddles, Merikh, and tell me what the bloody fuck you mean!” I demand, my alpha voice thundering off the walls as my fire lashes my lungs, aching to get out.

First, the vampire surveys Kyan, who glides forward from the doorway, before his eyes meet Mayce’s. An abyss of concern etches in the Fae’s orbs.

Baring his long fangs, whole body shuddering, Merikh releases a predatory hiss and lowers his voice to an unfathomably deep octave to reveal, “If his blood continues to slow, Drago will be dead by morning.”

Mayce gazes down at me, his brow furrowed in fear. Then, my partner shifts his head to Merikh and snarls, "I don't give a fuck if we have to circumnavigate the Waste. We must find a healer."

Merikh lowers his voice, "No healers exist in the Waste, Fae. You know this. No folk here but rot and ruin."

The arguing voices of my brothers begin to fade as darkness closes in. That darkness tows me into the spirit world where the dead chant all my sins of the past thousands of years. Of course, I’ve been injured during the damned Sacrifice. Extremely rare, but it’s happened a few times over the past few centuries. No wound has ever been fatal. Nothing my alpha dragon blood couldn’t heal.

I remember the girl who plunged her blade into me. It wasn't how slight and thin she was. And her breasts were high. I could see the rosy nipples pebbling through her white shift. I'd taken girls slighter than her, or plumper. All died singing my praises as I fucked them and set them on fire.

But her eyes haunt me, pale as cold silver, so icy and iridescent, they remind me of the spirits of my homeland. Ones rumored to entrap and lead grown men astray until they meet their deaths. So, it seems I have fallen into her web. The sheer audacity that a girl as tiny as this one would be my undoing. In ten thousand years, not one has ever bested me.

Now, the god-eater will finally get his ultimate wish. With my death, my brothers will be lost from their realms for all time, bound forever to the Waste as Merikh predicted.

In that moment, I vow a firestorm of vengeance upon the gray slip of a girl who thrust that damned blade in my throat.

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