In all the years I’d fought beside him, he’d never missed a target.
“Shit—look!” Nikolai pointed with one dagger. Movement. “Someone’s out there.”
Caspian and I spotted it at the same time.
A figure stumbled ahead, barely more than a dark smudge against the gray and rusted land.
“Caution,” I breathed.
We moved, stealthy, quiet, weapons ready. Three shadows flowed between skeletal ruins.
The figure swayed once. Twice. Arms windmilling.
Then dropped in a heap, like a puppet with its strings slashed.
3
NIKOLAI
All three of us stared at the figure sprawled on the scorched earth, unconscious.
“Is it dead?” Caspian asked.
“Not it,” I corrected him. “A boy.”
It might not be accurate to call him a boy, but anyone younger than us heirs qualified, and we’d all lived long enough that most of the world looked like children now.
“If he’s dead, he’s it.” Caspian shrugged. “A corpse. And he looks dead to me.”
If the boy wasn’t dead, he was close enough.
His lips were cracked, peeling, dried to bleeding. Dark bruises hollowed the spaces under his eyes, like someone had used him for practice. Grime and dirt layered his face, and beneath it, four blue lines were painted down each cheek—war paint or tribal markings; I couldn’t tell. The pigment had faded and smudged, as if he’d worn it for days.
His cropped hair was deepest midnight blue shot through with gold strands. Strange, but not unheard of.
When technology collapsed, latent energy had flooded back into the human world with punishing force. It reactivated dormant magic in the old bloodlines, giving rise to the twelve Zodiac Houses that now dominated the earth. But it also sought new hosts. Created a generation of anomalies.
Humans with abilities that didn’t fit.
People who shouldn’t exist.
But did anyway.
This half-dead boy could be one of them.
Despite his cropped hair, his lashes were ridiculously long and thick. They cast shadows that deepened the hollows under his closed eyes.
He wore something between a shirt and a rug, rough-woven and filthy. Miner’s garb, from the look of it. Blood covered him in layers, dried brown, fresh red, and the acrid green of monster ichor. His own. Someone else’s. Something else’s.
I caught myself sniffing.
Immediately disgusted.
But the damage was done. The boy was filthy, half-dead, but his blood sang to me like a siren’s call.
I’d fed before we headed out, a full meal from a willing donor at the fortress. I always made sure to feed before missions—avoid temptation, avoid complications. Yet his blood called to me anyway, made my mouth water and my fangs ache with a want I hadn’t felt in decades.
I held my breath and switched to breathing through my mouth. And then his scent coated my tongue like honey laced with sunlight.
