"If you won't obey me willingly, then I will take you by force." Narcisse stared at them, holding hands, his focus solely on Delphi. His face turned from anger to a portrait of desperation. "I don'twantto do this, but I don't have a choice anymore. You brought this on yourself, and what happens now is your fault."
He raised a hand, palm outward toward the ward, and began to chant in a language that slithered through the air, oily and wrong. The air crackled. The invisible barrier flickered, showing itself as a web of silver light.
"Narcisse, stop!" Delphi cried out, cold dread seizing her.
"I tried to reason with you," he said, his voice straining with the effort of the spell. "But I can't stop this now. I won't."
The silver web of the ward began to fracture, hairline cracks of darkness spreading through the light.
"There is only one way you could have power like this. What have you done?" Delphi demanded in a horrified whisper.
His face was pale with sweat, but his eyes burned with a feverish light. "The only thing I could do," he panted as the final thread of magic snapped. "To get you back."
A sound like the world cracking in two echoed through the clearing. A tremor ran through the earth, and the air, once humming with protective energy, fell silent. The wards were gone.
And in their place, something else appeared.
He materialized from the shadows behind Louis, not with a sudden rush but as if the darkness had simply condensed and given him form.
He was tall, leaner than Tenebrys, with a grace that was both fluid and predatory. A cascade of hair the color of fresh blood fell over the shoulders of his fine, dark tunic. But it was his eyes that stole the breath from Delphi's lungs. They were blue. Not the pale blue of a summer sky, but the impossible, chilling azure of a glacial rift—the very same shade as her own. She knew who he was without ever having to ask.
Kaelis.
Louis turned, his sneer dissolving into wide-eyed surprise at seeing what was behind him. The beautiful, blood-haired male smiled, a slow, languid curve of his lips that held no warmth, only a promise of exquisite pain.
"You are in my way," he said in a low, musical voice.
"Don't forget our agreement, creature," Louis replied, trying and failing to sound authorative. "You make me king of Chantelun, and your people will be allowed to come and go with my blessing."
"You and this miserable alchemist gave me acess to the world again. I have what I wanted from you, boy."
Kaelis's hand, elegant and pale, shot out and cupped the back of Louis's head. There was a wet, tearing sound, a spray of red that painted the leaves, and Louis fell, his spine no longer connected to his skull. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Panic erupted. The soldiers, so bold a moment before, broke ranks and fled. They didn't get far.
From the trees, sleek and shadowy figures emerged—the Fae had come. They weren't beautiful like their lord but wild raiders, their teeth sharp and their eyes glowing with malice. The screams of the humans were short-lived, swallowed by the sudden, brutal cacophony of slaughter.
The blood-haired male's gaze swept over the scene, dismissive, before landing on Tenebrys and his shifters. He lifted a hand, and tendrils of shadow, laced with a virulent green, erupted from the ground. They coiled around the legs and torsos of the shifters, tightening like chains forged from a nightmare.
Tenebrys roared, fighting against the bonds, but they held him fast, sizzling against his skin. Delphi felt his strangled fury, his power straining against a force that smelled of grave dirt and ancient decay.
Only Narcisse was left untouched, standing frozen in a puddle of his own making.
"Kaelis," Narcisse breathed, his voice trembling. "This wasn't part of the bargain."
The Lord of Plagues laughed, the sound like breaking glass. "Oh, but itwas, alchemist. Long ago, you bargained for power, and in return, you were meant to ensure the destruction of the Beast King and his kin." He gestured to the bound shifters. "You couldn't get it right thirty years ago. What made you think I would leave it up to you now?"
His blue eyes found Delphi, and his smile widened. It was a terrible, beautiful, knowing thing. "He wanted power so badly then that he offered me his pretty little wife, Cassia, in exchangefor it. This time, when he summoned me, he could only offer a whore from the street. Pathetic. Still, I needed a human to break the wards, and he was only too eager to have another taste of magic."
Delphi's blood boiled. She had known Narcisse had sacrificed her mother, but hearing the fae lord admit it out loud made her want to wring Narcisse's neck. And to offer up another poor woman? She couldn't believe he would be so fucking stupid and cruel.
"Did he tell you about our bargain all those years ago, little witch?" Kaelis continued, his voice a silken, venomous whisper as he glided closer. He circled Narcisse like a shark. "He traded me your mother's witch magic and her body for a pittance of my own. In exchange, he was to finish off the Beast King and his dying minions. A foolish, desperate deal. Did Narcisse tell you how your mother moaned for my cock that night when I took her magic? Her power wasn't strong enough to give me the witch fire her bloodline promised, but magic is a strange, unpredictable thing."
His gaze locked with hers, sending a bolt of ice through her soul. "All the power the bargain promised to Narcisse… It seems it ended up here. In you. How wonderful."
Delphi's hands balled into fists. She could feel Tenebrys's panic and rage through their bond.
She wasn't bound in vines like he was. She kept her face neutral as she fed some of her magic through the bond toward him, hoping he would know what to do with it.
