The audience watching with a thousand, thousand eyes.
And then, with the tip of his gleaming formal boot, he dragged a pillow out from beneath his seat and arranged it on his right.
So I might slip into his shadow, as far from the widow Tilcot as I could be.
Without a word of protest, I knelt on my designated cushion. Sweating liberally in the cool morning breeze.
Hands balled into bloodless fists, I refused to see anything but the tattered edges where flesh met gold.
Refused to see the baskets of tropical flowers hanging from white pillars. Blinded myself to the enormous casket stamped with the Tilcot coat of arms, where it was partially concealed by a neatly folded Caledonian flag. Trying not to drown in the light breeze that was saturated with the scent of grief and mixed perfumes.
And I shut myself off from the wraiths of my homeland. The bowed, silver-blonde heads that speckled the front three rows of the audience as they began to settle on cushions all around us.
I focused instead on the way my ribs stretched the silky strips of fabric as I dragged in one breath after another, ignoring the sweat that trickled between my eyes, dripping down, where it traced the bridge of my nose.
And so it came as a shock when soft fingers landed on my wrist, a gentle touch followed by an breathy, “Greetings, sister.”
A priestess.
Alivingpriestess with icy blue eyes, watching me from beneath a fan of pale silver lashes. With rosy cheeks, and a gleaming white smile hidden beneath a sheer veil. One of rare potential, whose light, airy presence was a lure that caught the attention of an untrained monster starving in the dark.
I jerked away with a low hiss, leaning into the captain’s thigh.
Terrified of the sudden ache swirling at the back of my throat. Where I was parched. Desperate for just a little sip…
19
“You must be Mila,” she murmured, voice low enough to evade the Caledonians above us. A practiced hum spoken through lips that hardly dared to move. “I’m Carly,” she said, watching me without looking. “They said you were with”—she coughed, nostrils flaring white as she swallowed and swallowed again—“they said you were with Sasha when she died.”
For a moment, I could do nothing but look. My throat clogged with something bitter I couldn’t name as I took in her attire. That her silks were only half as revealing as mine, her makeup subtle and not the flashy paints of a well-used whore.
But I nodded.
Just once, before I tore my eyes from her achingly familiar face and forced my scowl back to my ragged fingernails.
“Did she… did she suffer?”
The question startled me enough that I glanced at her and found honest anguish scrawled across her elegant brow. Her eyes pinched at the edges where they were glassy with unshed tears.
I hesitated.
Sick at the mention of the most horrific thing I’d ever seen. Balking at the reminder that flashed behind my eyes, where it was seared forever into the backs of my retinas, mocking me with every blink.
A blazing deity cleansed in flames, surrounded by the flaking ash of those she’d chosen to die in her honor. Drained of their vitality, enslaved by a master who gobbled up every last drop of their magic until there was nothing left but a husk. Hollow men who couldn’t stop the wind from howling through their flesh. Their veins growing blackened with blood turned to char…
They’d crumbled together, six followed by one. Priestess and elites, spines twisted by exquisite agony as they were swallowed by the Void. Screaming. Choking on blistering, burning pain…
I’d felt every horrible moment.
Istillfelt it.
Knew exactly how hardthatnoble death had been.
Jaw flexing, I ground my molars until they squealed. Trying to throttle the revulsion that warred with the want. The desperate hatred of all that had come next.
Because it had been tainted by a thing I couldn’t help but want to taste again. A thing that promised to bask in the glow of death wrought by my own doing.
Bloodlust.
