“How can you be sure, sir?” Dante asked carefully.
“I skimmed Morrigan’s mind while she was talking.” I had never violated my team’s privacy before. The mental shields I’d given them were for protection, not surveillance. But Morrigan had crossed the line. “I caught flashes of images. That’s why I let her walk away. I was hoping she’d lead us straight to Bloom.”
“But she didn’t,” Dante said. “She ran. And no one knows where the Fates dwell. They’ve hidden their weave-room for eons.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ll track my mate through our mating bond.”
They both gaped at me.
“The bond has been growing stronger since I woke her magic,” I revealed, the words cutting through their doubt. “I believe she’s starting to remember.” I held their gazes. “It’s stronger than in any cycle before. Strong enough to trace across realms. Through whatever barrier the Fates believe can hide her from me.”
I closed my eyes and reached for it—the golden thread tying my soul to hers. A constant, quiet hum in the depths of my being.
I let it pull me.
The bond was muffled but undeniable.
“Found her,” I said, opening my eyes. “Gear up. We leave in five.”
My enemies would discover that while I had been broken and grieving for an eon, I was still Hades.
Still Death.
And I was coming to collect.
Chapter
Twenty
Bloom
Blades in the Barren Land
Sebastian hauled me through the doorway as the roof gave way in a shower of splintering wood.
Thunderous hooves shook the ground. Blood-curdling yowls split the air.
Monsters—not the elegant high Fae but the exiles, the ones too monstrous, too ravenous to be allowed in the gleaming courts—poured from the barren earth and headed in our direction.
Banished here, they fed on whatever stumbled into their territory.
“Shit!” Sebastian cursed again.
The first one reached us, eight feet of wrongness. Its scaled skin was mottled gray and green. Its yellow eyes glowed. Claws curved like daggers.
A tide of them followed.
Some bore humanoid features with twisted torsos. Others crawled on all fours. One had no face, only a gaping maw ringed with rows of teeth.
The stench of old blood and raw hunger washed over us.
An army of the damned.
“Weapons!” Sebastian shouted.
He’d already drawn a longsword—summoned before the dead zone stifled his magic. He tossed me a dagger. Plain steel. No enchantment, only an edge that would slice.
My fingers closed around the hilt.
