Page 20 of Three Dark Kings and the Gilded Serpent

He doesn’t make a sound.

His half-transformed head hits the snow and his body topples forward.

His fur coat floats down on top of him, a pool of blood spreading out from beneath it.

I continue to sail upward, the silver thread trailing at my side.

Airborne, I float for impossible seconds, the yellow ribbon in my braid whipping at my nearly-bare chest, the wind trying to thrash me to the ground, but vampyric powers thrum through my body and gravity will have to wait.

From this vantage point, I make out a rapidly approaching form racing toward us from the northeast. I recognize Lilis’s white wolf and the man the wolf carries on its back.

I would never have been able to make out the rider’s details before the blood bind gave me Antony’s sharp eyesight or discern its stealthy paws against the snow without Stellen’s sharp hearing.

Especially through the shouting and furious howls of Brunkil’s pack as they converge on my location.

They’ll tear me apart.

I take a deep breath as gravity catches hold of me.

Fighting my impulse to scream a command at my armor where it continues to bind Lilis and keep her down, I control my exhale, conscious of the thread trembling in my hand and how violently it wants to react.

These threads were sung together with love and passion, but I’ve used them to draw blood.

The first time I took a life, that of an assassin who came to kill me, I was left shaking and in shock afterward. Today, I’ve cut lives short without a second thought and maybe, soon enough, the aftermath will hit me.

Soon enough, I’ll have to face the death I’ve caused.

But for now, I put the consequences aside, hiving them off, because Stellen’s life hangs in the balance if I don’t.

As the shapeshifters leap toward me, my soft cry draws every silver thread holding Lilis down back to me. The threads lift upward, as softly as feathers, before shooting back to my body in a collision that feeds my soul.

The magic within this armor has formed a bond with me so strong that I feel pain every time they reconnect—the pain of having been parted from them.

While the majority of threads conform to me, the rest whip through the air, a whirlwind of sharp needles driving the first row of shapeshifters back from me.

Through the wash of silver strands, I make out Lilis, wide-eyed, jumping to her feet.

Her forehead deeply pinches, her lips part, and her head draws back as she stares at Brunkil’s body. “I’m…free.”

From my threads, too.

Which means she could turn on Stellen, who lies in the snow right behind her. Of course, she’d have to go through Nara first, and Lilis has proven she won’t hurt a wolf.

Nara hunches protectively over Stellen’s form, her teeth bared at Lilis, daring the fae to come closer.

Just as I plow toward them, Fable shoots out from the shadows of the gate, remaining in her small, gray wolf form, incredibly fast as she races toward me.

Damn! I don’t want to fight her.

She leaps over the heads of the other shapeshifters and I swing to face her, bracing for attack.

Her body transforms into her fae form as she lands lightly in front of me, coming to a stop at a crouch.

Tension thrums through my body as I try to keep both her and Lilis in my sights, one now on either side of me.

Fable draws herself upright, fully naked, shoulders squared. The scars across her back extend around her sides, visible across her right hip. Blood seeps from fresh wounds on her left shoulder and arm.

On the inside of her right arm, invisible to everyone including me, a white feather is inked into her skin. Her mother was a Ferocie Scribe who used that magical ink to draw the feather when Fable was a little girl.