Shaking his head, he said, “It’s time to reclaim the ancient traditions. No magic.”
“As it should be,” Ariadne agreed. “I suppose I thought with how many are doing it tonight, magic would be the fastest route.”
“Perhaps.” Azriel nodded. “Phulan is doing enough by mixing the ingredients for us. Now…everyone else will be getting the symbol of Keon. Would you like the same?”
With a gentle touch of her left shoulder, just below the collarbone, where the only scar left from Ehrun remained from when Phulan removed the others back in Algorath. It wasn’t one that Azriel thought about often, and by the way her brows creased a bit, she hadn’t either.
“No.” Ariadne dropped her gaze. “No, I believe I would like something different.”
Azriel took her chin in his hands and lifted her face, forcing her to lift her attention back to him. “You are here. You are safe. You aremine.”
A small smile played on her lips. “Yvhaltrin.”
Now it was his turn to frown. “What?”
“I amYvhaltrin—at least for now.” Ariadne’s voice grew more confident with each syllable. “I wish for the world to know it.”
“Yvhaltrinja,” Azriel rumbled, “you will forever be so to me. Where?”
Defiance sparked, hardening her expression. Without uttering a word, Ariadne straightened a little more and gestured to the left side of her neck.
The dhemon priestess paused, then asked Azriel, “Is she certain?”
Azriel didn’t look away from his wife as he nodded. “You heard your Queen. Mark her title on her neck and do the same to me.”
The first prick of the needle in Ariadne’s neck shocked her system. The second set it aflame. As the new priestess inked her skin with dhemon runes, beginning behind her ear and trailing the singular word down the left side of her throat, she never once looked away from her husband, who received the same on his right. Somewhere that sounded far away, the lead priestess, Ilna, continued to read aloud the scripture that infused the ink with celestial power, tying them forever to the Underworld and Keon.
Binding them together forever.
The women worked fast, dipping their needles and puncturing their skin with practiced precision. Each drop of ink enlivened Ariadne—and not in the way she would have expected. Pain, perhaps, or even annoyance at needing to endure so much for the long word she had chosen.
No, it awakened something that Ariadne had never experienced before. Something beyond the physical realm. Beyond her mortal comprehension. Her limited vampiric mind. It vitalized a shadow deep in her soul that she had not even acknowledged until then, dragging from it a piece that molded to nothing she recognized in herself, but a fragment she could not have possibly seen or known existed outside her own consciousness.
It fit like a metal link attached to a chain that stretched out from Ariadne’s soul…and attached to Azriel’s.
All at once, the world fell out from beneath Ariadne as she gazed into her husband’s eyes. She hurtled through the universeas though seized by the very core of her existence and tossed amongst the stars. Only once she grasped that new chain did everything steady itself.
Was this what Azriel had felt all this time? As though he were tumbling through a vast emptiness with no tether to ground him?
By the way her husband gaped at her, no doubt feeling the same tug on his soul, she had to guess it to be true. A clarity unlike anything Ariadne had ever seen shone from Azriel’s eyes at the same moment tears tumbled free from them, cascading down his cheeks in silver rivulets as he gasped for breath.
Azriel released her hand and clutched at his chest as though he could physically feel the new tether there—the stronger chain that now bound him to her…and her to him. Choking back a sob, he froze as the needle punctured his skin again, finalizing the tattoo that trailed runes down his neck.
“Did you…” His words trailed away as he heaved another breath. “Can you feel it?”
With her own tattoo a touch longer and not yet completed, Ariadne did not move as she whispered, “I can feel all of it.”
The priestess stepped back a moment later and placed the hollow needle on a tray meant for sterilizing. No words were needed as Ariadne and Azriel collided in a fierce tangle of lips and tongues and clash of teeth. Around them, the dhemons raised their voices in triumph even as the din seemed to be swallowed by the sudden thrum in her ears.
Everyone was raw and new and beautiful, yet when they pulled apart, Ariadne did not see her husband. In fact, everything seemed to have vanished around her. The dull cries from excited dhemons had been but the first hint that something was not quite as it should be.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Ariadne found herself standing, not beneath the Keonis Tree, but in a field ofwheat that stretched far into the distance. Though logically she knew the color should be gold and beige, all she could comprehend was a combination of grays and blacks and white. A monochromatic landscape that did not make sense.
Not until a dhemon man who resembled Azriel stepped out of nowhere, as though he had slipped between space and time to stand before her. A dhemon man Ariadne recognized, though it took far too long to recall from where.
It was the dhemon who ran past her as she escapedAuhlaalongside Madan—not Whelan, but the figure she later learned was Azazel the Crowe, the Dhemon King and her father’s greatest enemy.
Azriel’s father.
