He’s tall and otherworldly, with black-blue hair the color of the night sky and skin pale as moonlight. His eyes glint as hers do, and shadows swirl around him, following the curve of his arm as he moves to rest it on the edge of the child’s crib.
His voice is deep and instantly makes my hair stand on end. “Our daughter can be the link to my wolves and rule over your humans, but you know you cannot stay with the child. She is of us but not one of us.”
There’s something familiar in his voice, something that rattles in my bones.
The golden woman’s face crumples with grief.
She weeps softly. As she does, she lifts her hands, palms up, and cups the air before her. She catches her tears as though she’s catching the shattered pieces of her heart.
I watch in fascination as her tears start to pool together and warble. They gradually crystallize, taking on a familiar glow. An opal.
The woman leans forward and places the stone on the baby’s chest with shaking hands. Through her sobs, she whispers promises that it will keep her child and her kin safe. That it will protect them across generations.
The man’s voice is colder than Mount Wolfsbane. His face doesn’t strain in the slightest as he watches her cry. “Say goodbye now, Lumina.”
My breath leaves my body.Lumina?
The vision shifts again. I can’t make out anything but a handful of figures. Above us all is the same man from before, with the dark hair and the shadows curling around his fingers. He stares down with the same unmoving expression.
Below him is a Bonded woman with a direwolf at her side. They’re both bowing before the dark-haired man. The Bonded woman has the child cradled in her arms, the opal now strung around the child’s neck.
“I do not trust the unbonded humans to do right by her. You will raise her, and you will protect her,” the man orders.
The Bonded woman bows her head farther, so far that she’s touching the ground. “As you command,” she says.
I gasp back to reality.
There’s a sudden sensation of falling, then I’m vividly aware of my feet in my boots and the deck under me. I stagger slightly and hit the railing, grunting in pain.
The doubled necklace chains yank tight around my neck, and I gasp and step back until I’m close enough to slip out of their bind. I pull the necklace that belongs to me up and over Lucien’s neck, hoping he’s gotten whatever he needs from his vision.
I have to blink rapidly to convince my eyes that I’m capable of seeing more than three feet in front of me, but when everything clears up, I feel almost normal.
Or, notnormal.
There’s a deep, bone-rattling shock.
That name—Lumina—is the one from my mother’s delusions.
The one I’ve heard whispered in my own mind during vulnerable moments. I still remember a dark voice calling out the name on my first night as a Rawbond.
Is Lumina the true name of the Faceless Goddess?
And that baby, gifted with a Goddess Tear for protection, meant to serve as the link to the wolves, destined to rule over humans…
If that was my ancestor, the first of the Sturmfrost line, then I’m not just ofroyalblood.
Lucien is staring at his own opal necklace, face unreadable.
“Are you going to tell me what you saw?” I ask him, narrowing my eyes. Would he have seen the same vision as me? Or something completely different?
He presses his lips together, and then they curl up in a mockery of a smile. “Are you?”
We gaze at each other for a long moment.
Reaching into my pocket, I draw out the Tear from the tower.
“Perhaps this one also has something to show us?”
