Page 12 of The Hollow King

I stepped back to inspect her.

Humans disgusted me, but they had their uses. It was not often that I gave in to my baser desires.

I placed my hand over her neck and read the incantation to seal her flesh. Once her wound was sealed I tore the sleeves that had caught on the shackles and tossed the remains of her dress to one side. I unshackled her and carried her to the cage. Her head hung limp and her chest rose and fell for now. I placed her on the bedding.

Her fear had made her swoon, but tomorrow she would know her fleeting life was almost over.

✛ ✛ ✛

The taste of her blood remained with me and an image of my claw slicing through her flesh made my hunger grow. But then I remembered the soft curve of her hips.

How long had it been since I’d quenched my thirst while spilling my seed? I wanted to vent all my rage on her. Through the sacrifice, humanity suffered.

Something felt wrong. I couldn't place the unsettling feeling, but it grew until my stomach churned.

“Borin,” I rasped.

Footsteps shuffled behind me.

“Fetch me the key.”

He began to wheeze, but I waited.

Slowly, the familiar panic took hold and I wondered why I needed to get past that door. Something familiar in the sacrifice's blood or scent.

Why now after all these years?

Cold metal touched my hand as Borin placed the key on my palm.

His head was bowed and he slowly stepped back into the shadows without a word. As if he knew that something terrible was about to be unleashed.

I closed my hand around the long metal key until my claws pierced my flesh and stormed across my castle to the locked room.

Chapter 7

Varga

The key turned heavier in my hand than it had any right to be.

The door groaned as it had not groaned in three hundred years, hinges shrieking rust into the dark. Dust rolled out to meet me, thick enough to taste. I stepped inside and the air changed—old air, sealed air, the kind that had not moved since the world I once knew had ended.

Tattered curtains hung at the windows, their colour long since bled out by time. Wooden crates stood stacked against the far wall. Furniture crouched beneath white sheets like a congregation of ghosts, and paintings leaned against them, faceless, waiting.

I did not know why I walked toward the fireplace first. My feet decided before my mind caught up.

The sheet over it was the largest in the room. I gripped the fabric and it disintegrated at the edges where my claws pressed through, decades of dust falling like ash as I dragged it down.

The painting was massive. It filled the space above the mantel the way she had once filled every room she entered.

Morana.

I knew her before I remembered her. Some part of me had never forgotten the shape of her, only buried it.

In the painting, I stood beside her. Younger. Whole. My hand held hers, and my other hand rested low against her middle, where the fabric of her gown curved outward, gentle and full.

She was carrying our child.

I searched for the memory the way a man searches a burned house for something that survived. Fragments came first—the sound of her laugh, low and private, meant only for me. The weight of her hand in mine at the sitting for this very painting, her fingers cold, complaining that the artist worked too slowly. The way she had pressed my palm flat against her belly and told me to be patient, that he—she was certain it was a he—was not ready to greet me yet.