“You think I came unprepared?” Leanan’s voice echoed through the dark. “I knew, eventually the time would come where theslutwould bond with all of you.”
The shadows slowly receded. Gwendolyn was gone.
GONE. I lunged forward, grabbing my whore of a mother by the throat, and slamming her against the wall.
“Where is she? What have youdoneto her?!” I growled, barely able to breathe through my own fury. I should have killed her. Right then and there.
But she only laughed. “Do you really think you can hurt me, my son? Layrch, the demon guardian, was quite helpful. Inexchange for two thousand souls, he revealed the location of your precious Veil. With that, I’ve heightened my power far beyond your childish shadows.”
Two thousand souls. Sacrificed. Innocent lives, damned to the Demon Court… for power.
My mother wasn’t just cruel. She was a monster.
“You made a deal with the Witchmaker?” I asked, horrified. The Witchmaker was only mentioned in some myths, but his power had been said to be the price of killing millions of people, only to grant himself one wish: power and destruction.
She laughed, cold and echoing. “Oh, please. I’ll be far more powerful than him once I destroy his only child.”
My blood froze.
His only child?
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Xavier,” she said, her voice softening with sweet venom, “you were never stupid. Think. The Witchmaker had a forbidden child with the Queen of the Faeries, one who inherited both their powers. I tried to protect you from her. But now she’s fully bonded… and the curse won’t be able to hold her much longer.”
“No,” I whispered. “That’s not possible.”
It was. Gwendolyn wasn’t just someone. She was the legacy of magic itself. One of the reasons why I couldn’t find out what she was when I met her decades ago. Why the goblin man said she smelled of ancient magic.
She was one of a kind.
“I don’t care who she is,” I growled, being so close to the verge of turning into the vampiristic monster which always lay underneath my skin. “If you don’t give her back to me, I’ll tear you apart!”
My body trembled, trapped in that unnatural darkness, helpless and blind. I reached for her through the bond, but there was only static. Only emptiness.
Then, a sharp sting seared across my leg.
Damien.
He was using his emotional powers to open a mental bridge between us, using pain as the key. I understood. He needed to merge our strength. Together, we might be able to reach her.
“Gwendolyn,”I whispered across the emptiness, “wherever you are... hold on.”
“I’d give you my body, my soul, my life, anything,” Malakai said suddenly, his voice shattered. He was on the edge of willingly breaking down in front of Leanan. “If it means she lives… take me.”
“No!” Damien screamed at him. “Gwendolyn wouldneverforgive you for that.”
“Oh, poor Malakai,” Leanan purred. “I did enjoy your body. But Gwendolyn’s corpse,” she grinned like the evil, soulless being she was. “…that will be so much more valuable to me.”
Rage detonated inside my body. The anger caused me to burn up. She dared to speak of my mate like that? OfGwendolyn? Of what wasmine. My skin burned. My breath hitched. Heat surged through my arms and fingers. I screamed, barely containing the force building inside me. What was going on with me?
Orange light burst from my hands. Flames. I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was something more. My back arched, tingling, and then…
I felt her. Her pain, her fear, and her fury. She waswithme, around me… in me.
And then she appeared.
Bathed in firelight, standing tall and terrible. Behind her rose a phoenix, glowing with golden-copper flames, feathers shimmering like sunlit embers.
