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“Who are you? The Scribe Virgin?”
The entity laughed, and as she did, her silver hair seemed to move around on its own, an extension of her mirth. “No, I am not her. She is… let us say, we are of relation.”
“I do not understand any of this.”
“Your understanding is not required.” That face, so beautiful even with its lines, grew serious. “Thewolven has been shown that you are her future. Give her that. In your heart, it is what you know is right—and the answer to the question you have been asking yourself is yes, there is.”
“I have no question,” he said in a voice that broke.
She regarded him with the telltale sadness that came with pitying a stranger. “Yes, there will be a compensation for your altruism. You will get what you have sought for all your nights.”
“I do not know what you are—”
Now there was laughter. “You asked for me. You prayed for guidance. Did you think someone was not listening? You came up here to my summit, and you stared into my valley, and your heart called out in your torment. So I am here.” That smile returned once again. “I wish you the very best—and remember, you have everything you need with you. Even if you lied to yourself about why you brought it.”
In between one blink and the next, the old woman was gone, and the instant she disappeared, the howling cut off in midstream, as a door would shut on a sound.
Heart pounding, mind swimming, Blade let his head fall back and just tried to breathe. Up above, the clouds had parted in a perfect circle, an oculus created directly over him, certainly by the entity’s strange energy. And now that she had departed, the weather pattern was reclaiming the aperature, and as he regarded the stars twinkling and winking down athim, he felt like they were mocking him—or perhaps he was making everything personal because he felt like the core of the universe had just done a drive-by on him.
And that did make a male feel of special importance.
Whether one appreciated the effort or not.
And he did not.
When the heavens were once again fully obscured, he turned away and sought the cave’s entrance. Passing through the rough-hewn corridor with its tight angles and tighter squeeze, he orientated by touch and thereafter emerged into the belly of the space. He had lit a candle upon arriving earlier, and paranoia made him search the bedding platform, the trunks of clothes that were not his own, the old dresser… the spring-fed basin in the back.
He was alone, but that was of no reassurance a’tall. If that entity could emerge from out of nowhere outside, there was no reason she could not find him in here, or anywhere. And though she had not been aggressive, he felt as affronted as if she had put a knife to his throat. To hissymphathsensibilities, the amount of information she had on him was alarming—and the kinds of things she knew were utterly devastating.
“And I wasnotpraying.”
On that note, he went across to the table setback upon the rock wall. The candle he had recently lit with his mind was in a holder layered with the melted wax of many previous uses, and he wondered what struggles the rightful owner of the cave had endured…
Next to the fragile source of light, there was a collapsible plastic cage with a screened top. And beside that rested a small container, about the size of a ring box.
Lowering himself down to a wooden chair, he arranged his robing with a precision that was not required. “You are my most precious possession.”
Inside the cage, the albino scorpion showed no reaction. Then again, she was used to him, and had turned to look at him as he had appeared in her window on the world.
She was not the only one of his collection that he had taken with him, but she was the most important—
You are better at caring for others than you wish to acknowledge.
“Shut. Up.”
And yet he could not deny the evidence of that truth. All he had to do was think of those glass cages back in his private quarters and all his careful cultivation of the scorpions therein. For years.
Back when the Princess was alive, she had tasked him with the care and breeding of the arachnids with which she had been obsessed. The post hadbeen titularly a demeaning one, intended to humble him for the disgrace that his bloodline had suffered at his sister Xhex’s behavior.
Indeed, following her forced departure, there had been a campaign against all of them, and there were none who went untainted by the degrading treatment. The immediate family had been most affected, but ultimately any who were related came under the pall—which was why he was so certain of Kurling’s ultimate intent. If the male could prove what Blade had been doing, and then brought back Blade’s head on a stick? Then the male might well rescue himself from the pall—or even be revered.
Rehvenge’s “new era” could only change so much.
“Old habits die hard, my love,” he said as he stroked the glass with his forefinger. “Do they not.”
The scorpion was tiny. Barely bigger than a wasp. And as he considered what was in her stinger, what he had engineered through careful breeding over the previous two decades, he reflected on his uncharacteristic attraction to Lydia.
He may fuck males. But he had always loved deadly females—and like his scorpion, that wolven was a killer.
