LOGIN"Hello, brother."The voice came out of the smoke before the shape did, and I knew it the way you know thunder before you see the lightning that caused it, a sound that arrives ahead of the thing that made it and tells you everything you need to know about what is coming.He stepped through the haze with his sword already raised, the same sword, I realized, that had been a half breath from my granddaughter's father's heart only a moment before, in a version of this evening that no longer existed anywhere except inside the woman who had unmade it."Where is she?" Valentino said. He was smiling. He had always smiled like that, even as a boy, even before the mountains took him and gave something else back wearing his face. "Where is my Kayla. I felt her wake. I felt it from a hundred miles away, brother, like a bell I had been waiting two hundred years to hear ring again.""She is not yours," I said. "She was never yours.""She chose me first.""No, she never did."He came at me, and I m
KaylaI saw him before Viktor said the name.I had been awake for less than an hour, and already my body remembered things my mind had not caught up to yet. The smell of him came first, across all that distance, across the smoke and the blood and the dying light. Cold iron and burnt sugar. That was always his smell, even when we were young, even before he chose what he chose."Valentino," I said.Viktor did not answer me. He did not need to. His hand had gone still in mine, the good kind of stillness gone wrong, the stillness of a man watching a debt arrive that he had spent two hundred years pretending he would never have to pay."He is not Fae anymore," Viktor said. His voice was emotionless, and yet I could see the pain of betrayal in his eyes. "He gave that up a long time ago. What he is now, I do not have a clean word for."I knew the word. I had known it since before Kelly was born, since the year Valentino disappeared into the lower mountains and came back different, came back
Kelly"You really believe you could defeat me that easily?"I won't waste many words on what happened next. It deserves far less of my breath than the fear it stole from me.Behind them, the darkness filled with bodies. Dozens of them, then more, spreading across the ridge until the hillside itself seemed to breathe.I thought our enemies were just Merry, Anderson, and the Vampire Lord. But the man I am facing now defeats the three of them all at the same time.The man on the ridge walked towards us with such arrogance that it seemed like he owned the place. I don’t know exactly who he is, but I have a feeling that I have seen him somewhere. I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew him.His face tugged at something buried deep in my memory, something I couldn't quite reach. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember where I had seen him before.But one thing was certain.He was behind what had happened to Merry.I knew he wasn't a wolf. He wasn't a vampire. And somehow, I couldn
I had never truly understood the fire.I had only seen it in fragments. The candle in the kitchen. In the warmth that spread across the floor beneath Lylia's feet on cold winter mornings. Those were only glimpses.I had never known what the fire really was.Until now.Now, I know.After finding out about my mother and the endless secrets she kept, I found out that it is not a wolf thing. That there was something more inside me that I hadn’t discovered. That is what I learned: in the second after Merry’s wolf-suppressor took my wolf away from me, when by all the laws of the world I had been raised inside, I should have gone to my knees beside my brother and watched my half-sister walk past me with a smile.My wolf was gone, but I was not alone.The fire still lived within me.Waiting.And very much alive.It flowed inside of me, but this time I wasn’t afraid of it. This time, I welcome it as it came up the inside of my arms like a thing that had been waiting for a chance to flow. It c
My mother had been awake for nineteen minutes when the first vampire crossed the shepherds' wall at the southern line.I wish I could tell you those nineteen minutes lasted forever. But they didn't. I counted every single one in the silence as we stood together at the edge of the garden. It gave my trembling mind something to cling to, because when everything inside you is breaking apart, sometimes all you have left is the simple act of counting the moments before they're gone.Viktor revealed what was happening beyond the walls of the Fae Lands. Every vision showed our people risking everything for the future they believed in, each one willing to sacrifice their life for a freedom that had been denied for far too long.Then the image shifted.My brother. Aiden.I had spoken to him to tell him that our mom was awake. And all he replied to me was his last request, still echoing in my mind.Stay there. We'll come when this is done.As though that could ever be enough. Anyone who truly k
LeoThat is the part I keep coming back to, after, when I am alone with my own breath and the soreness in my left shoulder where the chain bit through to skin. He knew the fight had turned before I did. I am not sure, but I could see it on his face. The smug look he's wearing now tells me he knows more than he's letting on. He had been running on me since the second clash, delaying me and keeping me in the same spot I had been since the clash began. The steady, patient, infuriating defense of a man who only needed to keep me in one place. What stood opposite me then was just a tired old wolf who had run out of road and knew it.I would like to tell you I felt sorry for him. I did not.Since I couldn’t be there for the ritual that Kelly and my daughter were doing, Ella helped me out by casting a spell. I spell that would make me feel exactly what was happening even when I’m not there. Mateo offered to let me stay with my wife and daughter, but I refused to leave them to fend off the v
It’s been a while since I had some alone time with Leo. After watching him take care of me, the reality of what we are and who he is in my life became clear.I should be happy about it, because this has been my lifelong dream, but instead of feeling that way, the fear of being hopeless and abandone
‘Start running.’I didn’t hesitate when I heard my wolf order me to run. My feet moved on their own, and the next thing I knew, we were out of the packhouse. I could feel the pain all over my body, but it was still tolerable, at least for now. I’m not sure if my wolf has the power to lessen the pa
After a long and exhausting day, I was finally going home. Home…I like the sound of it. The packhouse used to be just a place for me to finish work and sleep. I never saw it as anything else until Kelly came back. “Have dinner in the packhouse,” I said to Aiden, who hadn’t said a word since we
“Wait for me,” I said with a wink. Leaving Kelly was the last thing that I wanted to do right now. But I made a promise to her wolf, and the last thing I wanted was for Aurora to think that I wasn’t taking things seriously.Still, I couldn’t help but be glad with the progress that I was making.It







