Delphi didn't breathe again until he stepped back. She stared at her new surroundings. In the dim light, it took her a moment to recognize the familiar equipment of an alchemy lab.
"What is this place?" she asked, staring about her.
"This is how your parents ruined me and mine. He never told you about it, so this is your proof," Tenebrys growled. He snatched up a book from a table and shoved it into her hands. "Hereare their sins."
Delphi frowned as she looked down at the book. "Do you want me to try and undo what they did? Because I'm not an alchemist."
"It was magic, not alchemy, that made us this way, and there is no undoing what was done," he replied, his gold eyes icing over. "You're not here to help me, little flower. You are here to suffer."
The wooden door slammed behind him, the bolt on the outside sliding shut, imprisoning her in the past.
7
Tenebrys slid the bolt shut on the old laboratory and took his first deep breath of the night.
Fucking Narcisse. He almost had him in his claws, but the coward was still smart enough not to get within arm's reach of the forest borders that trapped Tenebrys.
He had been so close…
Tenebrys stared at the locked door. The night hadn't been a total loss, but gods only knew what he was meant to do with the woman. He had been using dream magic to connect with her for years, wanting to use her to get to Narcisse, but none of it had been as clear as the previous evening.
Dark goddess, he had barely started the spell, and she was there waiting for him. She had given herself up to him so willingly.
Tenebrys hadn't felt any kind of sexual drive for decades, and now he was like a horny cub. The fact that she was his enemy's daughter only made him more ashamed of himself.
He had intended to use the dream to pry their location from her. He hadn't expected her to change the nature of the magic and then to melt in his embrace.
Tenebrys ran a clawed hand over his face. Her scent was in his nose, cloyingly deadly and feminine like the flower she was named after.
"That's the expression of a male whose night didn't go as intended," Felix said, walking up the stairs.
The plague and Narcisse's subsequent experiments had left his second in command stuck between his wolf form and his human one.
All that remained of Tenebrys's warriors was a handful of bodies trapped in the same distorted state, caught between their natural shifter forms and their human ones with twisted extras like horns they had never had before. The exposed bone plating that jutted from their flesh in different places was the result of Narcisse's so-called cure gone wrong, and they wore that cursed magic carved directly into bone.
One of the advantages of the bone plating was that it acted like armor when they fought incursions of fae. And by the dark gods, did they need the extra protection.
There were only seven of them left, and the fae kept coming.
Felix crossed his thick arms, exposing the plating of bone and sigils, and waited for Tenebrys to reach him.
"I almost had Narcisse, Felix. He was so close, I couldsmellthe fucker," Tenebrys growled, his hands going in front of him to strangle the air.
"He looks old and much diminished. Killing him would be a mercy at this point," Felix replied. He nodded toward the locked door. "What is your plan there, Ten? She is innocent of her father's crimes."
"Hopefully, she will make good bait," Tenebrys said unconvincingly.
Felix's still-human blue eyes filled with amusement. "I highly doubt that. Narcisse had the chance to be a good father and give himself up for her, but he didn't seize it. That skinny lordlingwants her, too, but I doubt it would be for anything good. If it were, she wouldn't have been climbing out windows and running for her life into the forest."
Tenebrys had been thinking about that all night. Narcisse would never have passed up an opportunity to hustle a lord out of his money and connections, but Delphi had been trying to get away from both of them. He had smelled her fear right before she crashed into him.
"Maybe I took her because I needed to takesomethingfrom them. I don't know, Felix. I wasn't thinking straight," Tenebrys admitted with a sigh.
Felix's fangs flashed in a smile. "She is very pretty, my king. If nothing else, she will give us all something shiny and new to look at."
Hot, possessive fury rushed through Tenebrys like a fever. "Anyone touches her, I'll bite their hands off."
"I said,look, Ten. Not touch," Felix replied with a soft chuckle. "You don't think we all saw that mark on her neck and knew whose fangs put it there?"
