The world shifts.
We’re backin the underground hall of the hunters’ fortress. Tersius reverently places the three books on the statue of himself for safekeeping. He positions tools of ritual on the altar.
He makes the elixir from Loretta’s blood and his own.
I blink,and things are different again.
Tersius addressesa small crowd underneath the bell tower of Hunter’s Hamlet.
“Do you see? Do you see now? The Elf King lied about the Fade keeping us safe from the powerful magics of Midscape. They will come and they will kill us all if we do not kill them first. We must protect our land or we will perish at their hand, just as my dear sister did,” Tersius shouts to a group of young hunters. “Kill them. Kill them for humanity—for our future.”
The memories are becoming hazy,the blood is running thin. The images blur.
A battleof fire and silver.
Solos is outnumbered. Loretta was a secret. He couldn’t bring his army to defend his human lover. Only the small contingent of sworn guards who knew about her—the few he sent across the Fade to “collect the humans who ran away.” Men and women who all took the secret of the true founder of blood lore to the grave with them.
I follow Tersius into the fog. We race through the crimson night. Deep within me is a thread, pulling me forward. Pulling me to a tower, not far from the secret entrance to the Castle of Tempost, a stopover on the road that was cleaved in two by the Fade.
Solos is there, wounded and fleeing.
Tersius launches into an attack. He and Solos exchange blow for blow. Despite Tersius’s earlier fears, they’re surprisingly well matched. His elixir has worked. But not well enough to win.
They’re both bloody, wounded.
Dying.
Tersius grabs the carcass of a raven from the muck of the marshes. He bites into it and his skin rips. Bones crunch. Feathers sprout from where there were once none.
He flies away.
“Damn you, curse you,” Solos growls toward the sky. He turns to the dagger in his palm, the dagger he had been using to fight, a dagger with the same luster as Loretta’s blood silver. “A curse upon you. A curse of vengeance, a curse wrought in blood for blood.”
Solos retreats into the tower.
I jolt awake.My heart is racing, but not faster than my feet carrying me back deep into the castle. Down into the passageway that leads through the Fade.
I know who laid the curse…and I know where—and what—the anchor is.
CHAPTER46
Sometimes,when a woman steps into the smithy, a cauldron of infinite possibility, she doesn’t know yet what she intends to make. She has her tools, her supplies, and most importantly her skill. A whole world of opportunity is before her.
Sometimes, what she ends up making is astounding. It’s new. Different. Like Grandmother’s lock. Sometimes, it’s nothing at all, just a mess of metal—practice. And sometimes what’s made isn’t what she intended at all. It’s something different. Maybe not good, or bad, just different.
This is one of the first lessons Mother taught me about the smithy.
Creation will happen for its own sake. Things happen, regardless of our intent, and all we can do is judge the result. We were helpless to change it in the process.
I stand before the ruins. This is where I was drawn to on the night of the Blood Moon. This is where I was pulled to when Drew was staying here. Every time, I had an excuse, a reason to find myself attracted to this spot. At first it was the power of the vampir calling out to Ruvan. Then it was my connection with my brother, pulling me toward him after so much time apart.
But now I know, there was an undercurrent all along. There wassomething elsedrawing me to this place time and again.Loretta, the woman whose blood I drank in the elixir that was supposed to be for Drew. She was calling out to her own bloodsworn, to the man she loved. The man she has been separated from for thousands of years. Regardless of whether it ends the curse or not, it’s time to put an end to their story.
I arrive at the ruins of that forgotten tower. There’s not much. I’ve seen all of it before. But now I look with new eyes. I remember the shape of the tower, the small room off to the side.
I search the ruins from top to bottom. I spend hours combing through muck and mud until I find what’s been calling me. The cellar door is completely rusted. Heaving it open takes all my strength. Like a primordial monster, it’s resurrected from the mud. Water flows down into the earth below.
If King Solos had gone up in the tower, his body would’ve been found long ago. There would’ve been some record from those who patrol this wasteland, some mention passed down in the lore of the hunters. I would’ve heard it from my brother. There would’ve been no way that Tersius would have let Solos die without gloating into eternity that he was the one to kill the mighty Vampir King.
