Page 1 of The Bonds of Indigo

Prologue

The Night of the Emethye

They screwed up by not killing me when they had the chance.

I’m sure they regret hesitating to pull the trigger as they rot in the pits of the Beyond. If they’d have trusted me, maybe Vendra would’ve favored them.

I’d call this an inconvenience, but watching this little boy scream “monster” at me hits a bit differently. The blood coating me doesn’t help—it makes things a little more complicated than any single word could capture, anyway.

“Monstrum! Monstrum!” he just keeps screaming in their old tongue. The old tongue, Latin. “Monstrum occidere!”

Lifting my hand, I drag trembling fingers across my cheek to my nose, where I can feel the split flesh and the cold kiss of bone. I hiss immediately and slump backward. Everything fucking hurts, and it goes without saying, I’m not in a good position.

Tilting my head back, I stare up at the sky, bathed in the deep purple glow of the Emethye Moon—an anomaly that appears only once every fifty years. And of course, it would arrive with the slaughter of hundreds around me. They speak of sacrifices made by us Witches, but they never said it would be like this.

Nothing like this.

I drop my gaze and as much as I don’t want to look at the carnage around me, I can’t just sit here with my eyes closed. I have to see what I couldn’t avoid, and take witness to not just one body. There are dozens strewn across the heart of this quaint, quiet little town that clings to the mountain ridge of Uhara.

Fuck, I’ve made such a mess.

“Monstrum! Timeo…”

“Me too.” I’m barely able to say those two simple words, my throat’s sore from screaming.

I drag my gaze to the family huddled against a building—a mother, father, and child. The mother’s throat is torn out, the father’s head completely gone. The young girl… well, like all the other children here, is missing her heart.

Footsteps pound against the wet cement, splashing through puddles of blood. They’ve come for me. I’ve had plenty of chances to run, but godsdamn if I’m not tired.

With a frustrated grunt, I press a hand to my thigh and push myself upright. The boy screams bloody murder, and I stumble forward, nearly tripping over the dismembered body at my feet. I turn away from him, clutch my shredded left arm just above the elbow, and begin channeling.

Vendra is trying, but her world is as exhausted as I am. I’ve taken too much from her, and it shows in how hard it is to mend the wound.

“Asshole…” I breathe out before sucking sharply through my teeth.

I’m surprised I make it twenty feet to the broken water fountain in the middle of town, now completely diluted with blood. My knees knock against the concrete, and I roll my shoulders, watching as my white hair falls over my chest.

Biting down on my bottom lip, I weave between the bodies and the shattered structures littering the ground—destruction I tried so hard to prevent. But that matters very little. I’m a fucking Witch, not some godsdamn divine being who can twist time on a whim.

Fucking Beyond itself.

“Find the girl!” someone shouts from the direction I came.

Good thing I wasn’t trying to flee or anything. Vayl forbid they actually try to be stealthy.

I clutch my arm tighter, silently pleading for Vendra to hear me, to let me siphon just a little more of the energy below. But there’s no response. No tingle at my bare toes, no burn like the embers of the Beyond. No breeze curls around me, offering the shelter the old texts say you feel at the Vayl’s entrance.

I know you’re tired, too. I’m so sorry.

My pace quickens as I turn down an alleyway. The shadows cast by the buildings are too thick to see where I’m going, and I nearly trip over a bag of what I can only assume is trash. The automatic lights stay dead as I pass, and the distant ring of a phone behind one of the doors feels deafening in the silence my head has forced me into.

I wind through a second pathway and spot the metal gate ahead, its door slightly ajar, the one that leads to the trail cutting toward the park at the mountain’s piedmont. I don’t know how much longer I can last like this, but it’s better than being⁠—

“There you are!”

My gaze snaps upward. On the rooftop above, bright crimson eyes flare in the dark. I barely have time to breathe before the figure leaps—dropping four, maybe five stories—straight toward me.

“Fucking Vampires…”