This wasmysarcophagus.
My tomb.
Mymurder.
No, not murder.Worse, so much fucking worse.It was my eternal prison.
Had the shock of Teo’s death not woken me, I would have grown weaker and weaker as my blood gradually depleted, until I became a shriveled husk at the bottom of an ocean where nothing was supposed to shrivel.
Someone sentenced me to a fate worse than death: never-ending purgatory.
Someone had taken me from my brother, and my brother from me.
I released my hold on mytomband kicked my legs to speed my ascent.
I wanted to live after all.
The dead couldn’t go hunting.
Chapter3
Run, Run, Run, Motherfucker, Run!
What felt like an entire lifetime later, I staggered onto shore.My legs flopped, my toes chipped at the sand.
Before I was free of the reaching tide, I pitched forward, breaking my fall at the very last moment.My wrists gave out, my body jelly.The lapping waves rolled in and out, wetting my heels.After endless hours, I finally didn’t have to move.
It was daytime when I’d first broken the water’s surface, late afternoon based on the positioning of the sun and the Fuerin Star that trailed it across the horizon before swapping it for the moon.
I had swum and swum and swum, only to discover I was swimming in the wrong direction, farther into the StarRay Ocean instead of toward Zaraga.
I’d wanted to cry then but hadn’t let myself.The time for breaking was over.Now that I was on my way to locate my brother, the only option was to hold myself together.If Teo was dead … well, no doubt I’d be breaking all over again then anyway.
It was deep into the night.The moon and Fuerin Star had reached their zenith and begun dancing back down toward the waves.But I’d made it.
I used to love the water.Now I wondered if I’d ever want to see it again.I was so waterlogged I might never dry out.My chest was heavy against the hard-packed sand, my breasts smushed.A night breeze chilled my bare skin, heightening the shivering that had been a miserable constant during my escape.
I considered waiting for the trembling to pass, but it might never stop, and I was fed up with waiting.Fed up with being cold.Sick of being hungry.
No … that was an understatement.I wasn’t hungry, I wasravenous, a fact that was unsettling beyond my probable bloodlust.While I’d pushed my body to keep swimming, for periods my mind would clear.I’d scour my memory for any hint of what had happened, but only remembered the night before.I’d been with Teo in his rooms, which adjoined mine, at the palace.We’d hosted a private party.Our guests had been lovely, eager participants.We’d fed and fucked, then fed and fucked some more, all throughout the night.I should be sated.My blood should be at full power.My blood couldn’t have depleted this dangerously in such little time.There was always dark magic, its effects often unexpected, but Teo and I knew better than to tangle with dark sorcerers…
Though my body insisted never moving again was a far wiser idea, I forced myself to my hands, my knees, then wobbled to my feet.The palace crowned a sheer cliffside, overlooking the ocean.Assuming my captor wouldn’t have bothered to transport me across an entire continent to dump me in a different ocean, if I walked the beach, eventually I’d catch a glimpse of it hulking far above.How far and how long that would take depended on the disposition of the demigods.
Heartbreak seemed to whisper,Left.Hope:Right.The sisters were almost certainly fucking with me.Since I’d earlier called Heartbreak a cowardly cunt, I went right.
The Fuerin Star dipped behind the mountains.I’d been crawling for at least an hour, my knees scraped raw by grinding sand, when I scented blood, its call more potent than the drug olvidian, or the glittering black lotus aphrodisiac.It lured me in.
In the ocean, here and there, a few sea creatures had accidentally crossed my path.But they’d been too swift, and I too weak for any sort of pursuit.
But humans—and oh, these were humans, alright—didn’t dart away like the shadowrays and the fish, fast as lightning.Especially humans so drunk on sunrise spirits their blood smelled overly sweet and heady.
A man and woman were so caught up in each other, hands and mouths touching everywhere all at once, that I crawled within a few body lengths before the woman pulled away from his kiss toward some sound I’d made.
Her eyes grew wide as she blinked at me, dazed.The scent of her blood was stronger now, as was that of the sunrise spirits flowing through it.If the drinker indulged in too much, the liquor made your vision spin, and that was for fae.For humans, it had to be much worse.
While the woman attempted to steady herself, the man dragged his kiss insistently against her jaw, her neck, her cleavage.She didn’t react.
With a start, he glanced over at me.
