Astraea’s spine stiffened. Though Nyte’s father was the leader of the vampire uprising, Auster and his brothers knew it was another that kept the enemy armies in line.
“Nightsdeath has to be killed.”
She’d heard it a hundred times. Shit, she’d harbored that prime goal herself for a long time. But now they were bonded… and everything had changed.
She cried in her soul at imagining him dead, but she remembered one crucial thing.
“He can’t be killed,” Astraea mumbled.
The intense impression of Auster’s eyes broke a shiver over her skin while her attention bored into the pools of blood soaking into the wood around the quaint cottage home.
“Of course he can,” Auster said.
“He’s… a god, technically. He can only be killed by something he’s made of.”
Acid burned in her throat to expose Nyte’s weakness to Auster. Her heart was soothed over the fact that Nyte wasn’t from this realm, and so nothing could kill him, even if Auster had this information.
“How do you know this?” he inquired.
“I’ve been hunting him, I told you. I figured it out.”
Astraea’s skin flushed with her white lies. Auster assessed her, and she couldn’t get rid of the itching guilt over her body that if he stared long enough he would see the bond she’d forged with the realm’s villain. Would he brand her a traitor? She liked to believe Auster would let her explain. After all they’d been through together, he would consider her heart, regardless of its dark choices.
Auster sighed. “Let’s go; there’s nothing to save here.”
They spent the day cleaning up the savagery, rescuing the survivors, and implementing stricter measures of protection around Vesitire. The longer Astraea was left to ponder her own conclusions about the attack and watch them wash the blood of innocents off her streets, the uglier her resentment grew.
It didn’t help that she hadn’t a moment away from the High Celestials and their ramblings of disgust for the vampires and Nyte. Always him in particular. Her fists flexed each time they assumed every barbaric act had been perpetrated by him.
“You seem tense,” Zephyr observed, creeping closer to her side. The others were talking among themselves in the castle’s throne room.
“It’s been a long day,” she said.
Zephyr turned, blocking her view of his brothers like a shield for privacy.
“What do you know?” he edged carefully.
“What about?”
“The attack.”
“No more than any of you.”
That was the truth, but Zephyr was aware of her moreillicitactivities when she slipped out of these walls. She trusted him. When Astraea had found out Auster and the others were casting out their own people for having their wings poached, she’d made quite a protest. But though she might be the star-maiden, she was overruled where the celestials were concerned as the four brothers were god-blessed to preside over them. Brothers not by blood, but duty.
“You’ve been absent recently. Auster is beginning to grow suspicious,” he warned.
“I don’t need to be watched,” she groused.
Zephyr winced, his face creased in apology.
“You have to reject the bond with him,” he said, barely a whisper.
She knew this. When she’d first faced Auster after bonding with Nyte, she’d never felt foreboding fear like that, but to her relief Auster didn’t sense her mating tie to Nyte.
“I know. I just don’t want to hurt him.”
“You’re hurting him more the longer he thinks there’s a chance.”
