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The sky radiated with the panicked cries of our fae foes and their winged beasts.
I grinned until my face hurt.
Perhaps we could do this.
And then I saw him. The commander of this incoming battalion. Mounted on an ashen silver battlecat, a fae rider clad in armor of darkest embers. Spiked pauldrons rose from his shoulders like twisted spires. A helm, adorned with cruel, angular motifs, concealed his visage.
Beneath him, the battlecat he rode moved with a predatory grace towards my mate.
We were too far for me to shout, too far for me to have any hope of catching Draven’s eye.
I touched a hand to Sunstrike, knowing it would be enough, and she sped forward, her wings beating hard against the air.
Even as we moved, I knew we would be too late.
Draven’s back was turned. He was focused, battling another raptor-mounted rider.
The ambush unfolded, and there was nothing I could do.
The fae attacker raised his hands.
A thick coil of darkness snaked through the air, and I gasped at its familiarity.
The coil lashed out, looping around Draven’s neck and pulling tight. I could almost feel the suffocating pressure, the darkness that threatened to unseat my mate and send him hurtling downwards.
With a surge of adrenaline, Sunstrike and I swooped forward to intervene.
The air sizzled with the heat of flames as I threw ball after ball of fire towards the fae who was attacking my mate, desperately trying to draw his attention to me.
What happened next, I had not expected.
I succeeded.
Caught off guard by the unexpected assault, the fae relinquished his hold. The coil around Draven’s neck dissipated, and I watched in relief as he regained control of Nightclaw.
The fae attacker turned towards me, steering his battlecat towards us.
My flames had seared a piece of his armor, but he seemed otherwise unharmed.
Now the attacker raised his hands. Pulling off his helm, he held it beneath one arm as he looked across the skies at me.
I understood I was facing the true leader of this army—of both the foot soldiers below and this second winged wave.
Beneath the intricately crafted helm, the fae man revealed a striking visage. Long hair, so fair it was essentially white, framed a face characterized by sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin. A pair of piercing, sapphire-blue eyes gleamed against skin so ageless and alabaster that it seemed impossible this man had ever been touched by the harshness of battle.
There was a look in the fae’s eyes that sent a jolt of recognition through me I could not place. Perhaps it was the unveiled cruelty, I told myself. I had certainly seen that before in more than one pair of fae eyes.
Then he spoke, his voice pitched to carry above the wind, the fray, and the sound of beating battlecat wings.
“I’ve come to fetch you, Sister.”
I flinched. “Who are you to call me ‘sister?’”
But memory was streaming through my veins. Try as I might to deny it.
The man smiled thinly. “Come now. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your older brother, Daegen. Why, I bounced you on my shoulders when you were a small child.”
The memory coalesced. Bounced? No. He had not bounced me. He had dangled me, screaming, from a balcony until my mother had torn me from his grasp and sank to the ground with me clutched in her arms, sobbing.
