Page 85 of His Darkest Desire

Still, her tone was not lost on him. Compassion, caring, concern.

Darkness swallowed the tower around Vex and closed in on him, robbing him of her voice, her touch. But he would not let it take her. He would not let it take his mate from him.

There was oblivion in the dark. There was pain. There was heat enough to make Vex feel as though he were melting, and cold enough to convince him that his very heart had turned to ice. Time passed, but it held no meaning to him.

Something was roaring nearby, making a steady, hungry sound, and phantom heat stung his skin. Only then did he realize the darkness had taken on a red-orange tint.

A child’s cough echoed in the void, which was slowly filling with hellish light. Not Vex’s cough, but it had been once.

When the child spoke, his voice was innocent and frightened. “Mother? Sire?”

Not Vex’s voice, but it had also belonged to him. Before he’d been Vex, before he’d been the magus. When he’d been called Reed by his clan.

Vex turned his gaze to the drainage ditch in which the child had hidden. With the telltale shimmer of powerful but unrefined magic, Reed flickered into view as though from nothingness, peeking over the edge of the ditch.

The child hadn’t been conscious of the illusion that had rendered him invisible. How could he—so young, so naïve—have understood that his magic was the only thing that had saved him?

He will learn soon enough. Will learn that had he only possessed some control, some discipline, he might’ve saved others.

Might’ve saved them all…

The goblin child’s eyes rounded as he surveyed the devastation. The village he’d called home was ablaze. Flames raged within the stone buildings, turning them into huge furnaces. Ash and ruin covered the ground, and the charred corpses of his kin lay scattered like driftwood washed onto an uncaring strand. Flakes of ash drifted away from the bodies on the wind, breaking them apart bit by bit, erasing them. Golden blades protruded from many of the fallen goblins, the weapons nearly as expendable to those who’d wielded them as the lives they had taken.

Black smoke billowed into the sky, blotting out moon and stars and leaving the fires to stain the world crimson.

The echoes of those fires blazed in Vex’s core.

Arcane residue clung to some of the corpses and detritus, adding splashes of vibrant color to the nightmare. What little magic the clan had been able to muster had not availed them.

Tears welled in the child’s eyes as he called out again. They were tears of loss, disbelief, and terror, tears from a youth who did not yet fully comprehend what had occurred. And their spilling would soon enough make way for fury.

Reed’s eyes snapped toward movement in the distance. Radiant, gold-clad fae astride fierce-eyed steeds galloped around the edge of the village, barely discernable through the haze. Fear radiated from the child, who ducked into the ditch again, struggling to steady his breathing as his little heart did its best to beat right through his chest.

Vex’s heart sped to match the pace of Reed’s, and his breaths grew short. Both sensations remained distant, but they built a pressure in his chest that was more difficult to ignore with each labored inhalation.

Thoughts fluttered through Vex’s head—his own and Reed’s, blended; two voices made one.

Gone. All gone.

They can’t be gone.

Why did this befall us?

Why has this happened?

The roar of the flames became deafening. Reed huddled in the ditch, embers and ash falling upon his soot-stained skin and dirty clothing. Names and faces tumbled through his mind, all of them lost to the world, lost to time, lost to everyone and everything but Vex.

The child’s wail of grief and pain emerged from Vex’s throat, rattling him to his core.

“Shh,” someone soothed, their voice gentle in his ear. The light from the accursed fires faded.

Fingertips trailed across his face, cool against his heated skin, and smoothed damp hair from his forehead.

Kinsley.

Vex tried with all his strength to speak, to say her name; no sound emerged. But he could feel his body, could feel something beneath him, something atop him.

His pallet. His blankets. And that touch on his face, that voice—his Kinsley. His mate.

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