AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dane’s hints that the lands had begun dying out just twenty years ago.
The way the magic sang along in agreement with his words.
“Do any of us really have a choice, daughter?” Carex asked softly, tipping his head to the side, his smile revealing pointed teeth. “Or are we simply pawns of the Old Gods?”
Fast as an adder, his hand swept out, raking through the air between us.
I was already moving, rearing back from his low, vicious hiss, the one that warned me, a second before he struck, what was coming. But not quickly enough. The tip of his nail caught my throat, raking a furrow through my flesh…but no deeper.
Sharp, excruciating pain. But not death.
Another inch, and I’d be bleeding out on the floor.
Magic poured out of me so fast I screamed, a writhing, demanding force that might have torn me asunder if I had tried to contain it. But I didn’t. Icouldn’t. I’d barely gotten my hands up when the ancient Fae power burst out of me, as if the magic had a score of its own to settle with the Fae King.
Like Solok, the magic was not kind to Carex Centaria.
Sharp curving thorns burst from his blackened hands, fingers becoming gnarled vines, half his face disappearing beneath a tangle of ruined flesh and twisting roots in a horrific, writhing mass. I would have stopped the transformation, but I couldn’t lower my shaking hands.
Not until the magic decided it was finished.
And when it was over, I stared at the creature I’d created.
Only then did I become aware of the thudding all around us as everyone closest to us fell, their faces and bodies marked by twisting black vines, mouths stretched wide in silent screams of pain.
The king writhed on the ground, ruined hands and feet scratching against the stone with a horrible rasp.
But beyond the king, beyond the smoking corpses of his guards and the fallen prisoners, I saw who approached, and my heart stopped beating altogether. The Mistress’s lips were pulled back from her pointed teeth, her eyes burning as she bore down on me.
I turned and ran.
30
RAZIEL
Tavion carried Adele out of the palace, through the doors, into the sunlight, rushing to get her out of range, his cape snapping in the wind. Prisoners scattered out of his path, recognizing him as their liberator, not one of their jailors.
Good.
I sucked in an unsteady breath, tinged with smoke and the strong scent of freshly spilled blood.
Adele was too weak to survive even a touch of Anaria’s magic. I swallowed, watching them disappear into the crowd of prisoners fleeing through the city streets.
Once, Adele had been the most stunning Fae I’d ever seen. Proud and cold and haughty, yet fully vested in our plan to claim the king’s magic and bring down his regime. Though, perhaps, that too had been one of the Oracle’s lies. Shame roiled inside me like a nest of snakes when I saw what our plan had wrought—the sheer devastation of the once-beautiful female.
Adele might have been a willing participant, but Anaria was right.
We’d failed her mother in every way.
An emaciated prisoner lunged at me, a shard of glass clenched in his bleeding hand, and I shoved him away. “I’m not your fucking enemy,” I growled, though his fever-bright eyes didn’t register he’d even heard. By the time I got him to understand, Anaria—dressed in a threadbare servant’s uniform—was already facing the Fae King. Her hands were coated with magic, the king circling to her right, his guards flanking her, waiting for an opening to throw a knife or a spear.
“Anaria, watch…” I was too far away for her to hear.
But Anaria saw his trap and cast a fatal lash of magic into the guards, enveloping them in white, starry power that swept around them in a dazzle of light and motion, then sucked back into her in a voluminous rush. Every guard dropped like a stone, a faint haze of smoke rising from their crumpled forms.
I couldn’t hear them over the chaotic rioting, but their lips moved, the king’s malice apparent on his face. I couldn’t see Anaria’s face, but her hair floated in the air, lifted by the star-dusted wind whipping around her.
The prisoners broke away from their feverish destruction to watch, and their eyes flicked from the king…over to Anaria, none of their rage fading as they pressed in. I inched closer, trying to hear what they were saying, but could only catch bits and pieces.
