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Gone.
Empty.
Dry.
She had no idea what had happened. Her last sane thought was when she followed Alfie down the ladder. She wanted to help her friends forge a way to safety—toward her family howling in the distance like a beacon of hope. But then her feet hit the ground, and her keen shifter nose scented competition—a rival.
Across the battlefield, a queen wanted Willow dead.
The hand of fate reached into her soul and pulled out an insatiable urge to dominate. Her wolfish fangs elongated. Ears flattened. Hackles raised. Her fist plunged into soil soaked with blood. She clawed at the essence of creation and then did what Nero trained her to do, what she vowed never to do.
She violated nature.
And it felt good.
Freeing. Cathartic. A rite of passage. What she was born to do.
Willow became a slave to her instincts. She pumped the world’s veins with her almighty, churning soul.
Rise.
Wake.
Like the birds she’d summoned from the other side of death, fae corpses twitched with life, rising stiffly with jilted movements.
Kill the queen, she decreed.
Each dead thing on the ground, even those buried beneath, awaited her bidding. They hunted. They ripped and shredded. But then her rival queen fought back… or someone by her side. A new power answered Willow’s. It carved a path from her enemy, digging a groove in the ground. Bright and clean, it made hers feel murky and wrong. Her gaze found the source through dust—a male elf with hard blue eyes and long blond hair.
Familiar. Perhaps…
Willow’s gaze tugged to the right, to the queen she must destroy. She snarled again. The need was in every fiber of her being, ripping apart her will. The murderous compulsion teased her parched bones, making her thirst for something she didn’t understand.
But then her gaze pulled again, toward a group of hauntingly beautiful men. Her need shifted in tempo and became hot, pulsing, demanding. It felt like those times when she had to numb her “beastly needs” with iced water at the Tower, hiding in the bathroom. She locked eyes with one of them and fell into the fathomless night. The impact of his presence stole her breath. Dark, sculpted brows. High cheekbones. A sharp, masculine jaw but soft, sensuous lips. Porcelain skin. Long, silken black hair cascading from a widow’s peak. He was a being made for seduction, but there was sadness in his eyes. He tried to hide it behind a hotter, darker emotion.
Others beside him stole her attention: fallen angels, each as hauntingly beautiful as the first but different in their own way. Unique. Precious. Caught in the between, like her. Belonging to neither place but forged from both.
Not enough,her dark friends whispered in her mind, urging her onward.She must die for you to live.
“Not enough,” she replied, agreeing.
And so she reached into that other place beneath the first, the midnight behind the ink. The place she feared to touch. But somehow, with them so near, she felt safe. Home.
More, they whispered in her mind.Close the gap between life and death. Tear a hole in the veil.
The gap.
Buzzing. Humming. Souls swarming and begging, waiting in the wings.
The gap.
The space between. This dragon, these six beautiful nightmares, they were just like her. Different, never quite fitting in. Even Willow’s parents sometimes looked at her strangely. Oh, how they’d loved her. But they’d misunderstood her. Even as a small child, she’d felt different. So when Rory stole her away, and the voices told her it was okay, she believed them.
But as she grew, so did the taunts.
Halfing freak. Tainted One. Ugly. Weird. Beastly. Bitch. Nothing.You don’t belong here. They don’t want you.
At first, Nero had made her hide her fae side. She was happy pretending for a while. Eventually, they started asking questions about her gold eyes, her strange biology, and her purpose for being there. Willow learned Nero brainwashed them all using stolen mana from his daughter. But when the taint worsened, he conserved his resources. Forced to find alternatives to control his people, he turned her into a halfling savior so they had a distraction.
