The humans wandered around them, all dressed in threadbare, or pieced-together, odd collections of clothing. Raziel noticed how they all gave him a wide berth. Some stared openly, hostility clear in their faces.
Many of them were hunkered around the fires, slumped over in a manner Raziel recognized on sight. There was a smell in the air he also knew quite well—the chemical tinge of powdereddrugs being warmed over a fire before they were injected into a vein.
Mushrooms.
It seemed the fae were not just growing it to sell to the surface. It seemed they had fallen prey to it as well.
Others whispered behind their hands, no doubt spreading word of what he was. A vampire in the Wild, in chains, following a fae woman like a trained dog.
He kept the rage that bristled in him from his features.
“Vampire scum,” someone muttered in a thick accent as he passed.
“Should have let him die,” another agreed.
“The laws are the laws,” a third voice said, though they sounded unhappy about it.
Nadi led him to the largest wagon at the far end of the circle. This one was more elaborate in its organic architecture, with vines growing through its walls in deliberate patterns, flowering with blooms that glowed softly even in daylight.
Reclining there on its stairs was a man who instantly made Raziel’s fangs fight to extend. It took everything in him to restrain his desire tokill on sight.To fly into a murderous rage and tear the thing in front of him limb from limb.
A predator knew a predator.
A killer knew a killer.
And the fae sitting there, one foot on the stairs, knee bent, the other leg stretched out in front of him, twisting a knife between his fingers in a lazy show of seeming indifference, was far more deadly than the multi-leggedhebekthat had nearly taken Raziel’s life.
There was too much intelligence in the fae’s eyes, for one.
His skin was a pale, almost blueish hue that grew more saturated around his wrists and closer to his pointed ears. His hair was a deep shade of ocean cerulean. Woven into the braidsof his hair were silver beads and the teeth of creatures that Raziel would never hope to be able to name.
And down his bare arms, exposed by the vest he wore that was stitched with elaborate patterns of thread in various metallic colors, was strange writing tattooed onto his skin like the stripes of an animal. Marring them were scars that showed him that Kalo had been in far more than a few fights for his life and won.
His eyes were a glinting silver tone that made them look nearly white in the shadowed light of the wagon.
“So.” Kalo tilted his head back slightly, regarding Raziel with the same carefully calm gaze that Raziel was struggling to keep etched on his own features. “The vampire lives.”
“I am certain you are disappointed.” Raziel kept his tone neutral.
“I didn’t go through all the trouble of saving you on a whim.” Kalo snorted. “I wasn’t certain the cure would work on your putrid blood,vuampi.If I wanted you dead, you’dbedead.”
“Ensuring I lived gains you favor with Nadi.”
“I could have waited thirty more minutes if I wanted that.” He grinned, revealing his pointed, bestial canines. “You would be dead, and I could have ‘found her’ innocently enough. No, bloodsucker, I saved you because you are useful to me. And now you owe me a favor. And that is the simple fact of it. Do you accept it?”
Fuck.Raziel tried to keep the disgust off his face. He tried. And likely failed.
Kalo Lohti howled in laughter, as though Raziel had just told him the most amazing joke. “And this is why you are chained! Because the moment I take those off you, you will go about slaughtering us all! Because you have no honor,vuampi.I saved your life. And it means nothing to you.”
Nadi’s jaw ticked. And she said nothing.
Likely because Kalo was right.
Raziel was thinking precisely the same thing. What was to stop him from simply murdering them all? He had no interest in owing Kalo Lohti a blood debt. He had come here to raise an army to overthrow his family and take over Runne, not to be trapped with a band of savages, recovering from nearly being poisoned to death, owingfavors.
Everything was going just.
Fucking.
