Awakening.
He’d been asleep his whole life and never knew it.
That Voice.Shehad Shouted. And all the world fell away, leaving only the need to answer... to serve... to protect.
The roar ripped out of him, exploding from his throat. Raw. Pained. A thundering cry of bliss and fear and fury. An answering Shout of exultation and of warning.
The waters of the fjord went wild, the surface ragged with crashing, foaming waves. His knees bent. Strength gathered in his thighs. Exploded in a burst that sent him diving into the spout of water that rose up to meet him. The water carried him across the width of the fjord and delivered him onto the village docks within seconds. He hit the ground running.
There was no need to search. No need to wonder where he was going. Earlier today, he’d told Ari he felt like a fish on a hook. But that feeling was nothing compared to this.Thisfelt like he’d been impaled by a whaling harpoon. And the invisible line attached to it was reeling him in faster than his feet could run.
He flew through the streets of Konumarr. Around him, thousands of others were running, too. Every single Calbernan in Konumarr... following the same invisible line.
He bared his battle fangs and snarled. He would fight them if he must. To the death—theirs or his. His claws were sharp. His body strong.
They had gathered, his potential rivals, around a tall stone building a block off Konumarr’s main thoroughfare. He barked a Word he’d never known before. It spewed up from that newborn volcano inside him, filled somehow with more than just the vast power his mother had gifted him. His would-be rivals staggered back, clearing a path that led to the stone house.
He took the stairs three at a time. Raced through the splintered doorway. He’d never been in this building before, but he found the stairs without a thought and vaulted up them. There were others inside the stone building already. Crowding the hall between him andher,the one so inexorably drawing him to her side. They had heard her Shout, and they had come, like him, to answer that wordless call. Males hungry to be claimed, ready to prove their strength, their speed, their ferociousness in battle.
The tendons in his neck stood out like steely cords. He roared a challenge. Eyes hot, fangs bared, a few roared back, but the flash of golden fire in his eyes and the terrible Word that he spat from his lips and drove them to their knees made them bare their necks in submission and let him pass.
It was good that they did. He would have shredded their flesh and painted the stone walls with their blood.
At the end of the hall, another shattered door stood ajar. Beyond it, a room with many desks piled against the wall. Calbernans crowded in the space remaining. The ones who had been closest when she Shouted. Unlike the ones in the hall, these parted and let him pass without challenge, though there was rumbling in more than a few chests and more than a few bared fangs.
The acknowledgment of his dominance settled him. The hot rush of his blood calmed, no longer drumming through his veins so loud it deafened him.
Only then did he hear the muffled sound of sobbing. A female. Frightened.
He shouldered past the last line of Calbernans into the small ring of space at the back of the room, where he found a slender young female in a yellow dress sitting on the bloody floor, clutching the prone body of another female, this one clad in torn and bloodstained lilac. Both of the females had come from some Summerlea farm or village, judging by their dark skin, black hair, and the style and quality of their clothing.
Blood covered them both in scarlet spatters. Covered the wall behind them. The floor around them. A thick, wide swath of scarlet led away from them to the opposite wall, where what looked like a pile of butchered meat lay in a heap against the wall.
It took Dilys a moment to realize the pile of meat was the remains of a man. His chest had burst open from the inside out, ribs splayed and bent back, organs liquified. His head and limbs had separated from the torso. Popped off like a cork from a bottle.
Dilys turned back to the weeping female huddled over the lilac-clad one. Was this sobbing Summerlanderher? The one who had Shouted with such force she’d ripped a man to bloody shreds and summoned every Calbernan in the city?
How was that possible? No one but the rarest of Calberna’s native-born daughters could have given voice to that particular magic. Dilys should know. His and every other great House in Calberna had been trying to bring that great, long-lost magic back to their land and their bloodlines for millennia.
It couldn’t be this Summerlander. The one who’d Shouted must surely be Calbernan. But what Calbernan parent would ever let her daughter—especially a daughter with that particular gift—leave the protection of the Isles? And how could such a daughter have been born in the first place and not be known?
It was impossible. It simply couldn’t be.
And yet, without a doubt, a woman of great, long-lost Calbernan power had Shouted with a Voice that had not been heard in Mystral in more than two thousand years.
“Who are you?” he asked the crying Summerlander. “Where do you come from? Where is the woman who did this?” He pointed to the pile of meat.
He had not meant to sound threatening, but his reaction to the Voice that had summoned him was still so strong his words came out as a deadly growl. Coupled with his fully extended battle fangs and claws, he must have looked and sounded terrifying.
Certainly he did to the weeping girl in the yellow dress, because in response to his inquiry, she clutched the lilac-clad female’s body more closely to her chest and began tearfully sobbing for him not to hurt them.
Behind him, the rest of his men began to rumble. They’d initially submitted to his dominance and given way, but this girl’s reaction to him—a clear rejection—had just opened the door for challenge.
Dilys was torn. On the one hand, he needed to calm down and retract claws and fangs so he could calm the hysterical girl enough to get some answers. On the other hand, with thousands of Calbernan warriors at his back, all of them riding the killing edge, he needed to remain battle-ready until he put an end to the mystery, determined who had Shouted—and find out where she’d gone if she wasn’t one of these Summerlander farm girls.
Which, surely, she couldn’t be.
Then came a realization that tied his guts in knots. It didn’t matter who the owner of that Voice had been, because he was bound by contract to exclusively court the Seasons of Summerlea for another ten weeks. To break a second contract bound in blood and salt would brand him forever as an oathbreaker and make him unworthy of the woman who wielded that Voice.
