Calum was nothing, and Aidan could not understand how he had ever viewed the Kin as a threat. As an equal.
When clearly, Calum was subservient.
Tomás squeezed Aidan’s hand, searing visions through Aidan’s thoughts: burning skies and charred fields, squares of bowing servants and praying Howls, everything, everything, praising Aidan’s glory. Fire burned in Aidan’s chest. And there, in the darkest part of the flame, he heard the voice that had taunted him the last few days, the whispered words of a woman who spoke a deeper truth.
You will be a stronger ruler than Calum ever was, my child, the Dark Lady promised. You will make the world bend knee.
“It is time to take your place in history,” Tomás said, drawing Aidan from his dreams of destruction. “Fire keeps my brother alive. Destroy the affected Sphere, and you destroy him. Destroy him, and take your rightful place as King.”
Fire burned. Aidan knelt at Calum’s side.
That’s when he noticed the tattoos on the man’s abdomen.
In that moment, the world around him seemed to still. Fade out. Even Fire quieted.
He stared at the tattoos that curved over Calum’s hips, the sigils and symbols that crisscrossed over his belly. Aidan reached out and gently lifted Calum’s shirt. More symbols. No. Not symbols.
Runes.
He knew them. Some from the markings on his own arm. Some from study. And others...others he just...knew. Harsh and sinuous, burning black and glowing red, a half light haze that seared into his retinas. They whispered to him, hissing like steam, like serpents, like that internal oceanic whisper that pushed him toward the edge of oblivion. Like the Dark Lady herself inscribed them in his mind.
Entranced, his limbs moving on their own accord, he undid the buttons of Calum’s shirt, revealing more tattoos and more runes, lines and symbols that formed constellations over the pale expanse of his skin. And in the center of his chest, right where the Sphere of Fire was meant to be, a dark black circle was inked into his flesh, a black hole around which galaxies of runes danced and spiraled and were consumed. Within the black void, he saw the faint impressions of other markings: brands and burns, scabs and blank spaces of skin. More symbols. Layers and layers of runes, all spelling out words that hissed like poison in his mind.
Distantly, he felt Tomás’s hand on his shoulder, the Kin’s voice saying Aidan was meant to kill Calum, not undress him. Aidan barely heard it.
Not as the runes repeated in his mind.
Not as they became a language he thought he understood. A language he had known his entire life.
Every word a curse. A promise. Every word uttered by the low, feminine hiss he’d heard through Fire.
Be mine, and be consumed. Be nothing, and be reborn. Death and life are yours to walk between.
He heard Her voice, and it commanded him, moved him, hypnotized him. His hand shook as he traced the runes scarred into Calum’s body.
When he placed his hand on the dark mark of Calum’s chest, the shadows swallowed him whole.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Clouds dripped from the sky, seeping down to the sodden earth below, long gray streaks of fog and rain. Dark fog billowed over hills of tombstones, melting with the sky. Fog pooled at his feet, spilled into the open grave. Fog and rain and earth, black and gray and white, the whole world a blot of ink on paper.
Fog curled. And it was no longer just black and white and gray.
Red seeped through.
Red from rain. Red from rain and blood.
A lot of blood.
Blood from the black-clothed bodies strewn about him, their faces twisted in horror. Blood from the sky, raindrops thick and congealing like scenes from Revelations. Blood that soaked into his clothes, stained his skin. And when he turned toward the open grave, he realized he wasn’t the only one amid the massacre.
The Dark Lady knelt beside him, staring down into the grave. Fire burned in her chest, glinting off her golden hair. Her black dress was slicked with rain, but she didn’t shiver. Like him, she didn’t mind the cold. Not with Fire burning the chill away, making rain sizzle and steam.
She stared down at the black casket, and it was then he saw the shard of crystal she held in one hand. Black as night, curled with pewter and engraved in countless silver symbols that writhed and whispered under her touch. It spoke through his mind, calling like a void, a broken sun he couldn’t escape, snaring his chest and pulling him closer to the heart of all darkness. Aidan broke his gaze away. Realized the Dark Lady was whispering something he could barely make out over the thrum of rain, the hiss of steam, the splashes of water in blood.
He stepped forward gingerly, his feet slurping in the blood and mud, until he was right beside the grave. Smoke curled from the casket lid, where the wood had been burned away, the edges glowing red and orange with embers. The corpse within, however, was untouched.
The man’s hair was light brown and short, his eyes closed and hands clasped across his chest. He looked like he was in his late forties. But Aidan knew that face, as well. Calum. Looking so much younger here than in life.
“You have fulfilled your end of the bargain,” she whispered to Calum’s corpse. “And now, I shall fulfill mine.”
She opened to Air then, and reached a hand into the grave. Calum floated up from his coffin, his limbs dangling limp like a rag doll. She followed him with her hand, bringing him to hover a few feet from the grave’s lip before rotating him to standing. Another curl of her hand, and the suit he wore snapped open, his dress shirt slicing down the middle to reveal lightly tanned flesh. And the countless tattoos that snaked over his body. She smiled at them. Admired her handiwork.
Calum floated closer to her, until she could reach out and touch his dead skin. She did so, trailing a finger over the runes. They curled under her touch, shivering and twisting like insects, like serpents. He heard them hiss in his brain. Their words. Her words. Whispers of power, of eternity, of nothingness. Of return.
“Death is but a doorway,” she said. “And through that void, that which is fallen may rise again.”
She pressed the black crystal to his chest, right in the center of that dark circle. Fire flared in her chest as she twined its magic through her fingertips. Into the shard.
The crystal burned white hot, silvered runes turning black, shadows burned into Aidan’s mind. The runes snaked down the crystal, melted against Calum’s flesh and spread across his skin, inking themselves beside their brethren, completing phrases that howled in the echoes within Aidan’s ears. Calum shook with power. Arcs of energy lashed around him, red and black, shadow and light, all snapping out and back toward the shard in the Dark Lady’s hands.
That’s when Aidan realized that the crystal wasn’t exuding energy—it was stealing it.
He squinted. Calum’s Sphere of Fire still smoldered in his chest. Impossible. The Spheres died when the body died. So how was it still active? How was it being drained, when at death it should have just...winked out?
The runes.
Truth shattered through his mind. The runes inked into Calum’s skin had kept his Sphere of Fire going even in death. And now, the Dark Lady was draining its final energy. Inverting it.
Turning Calum’s corpse into a Howl.
It should have been impossible. Howls could only be born of living hosts. If they could be brought back from the dead...
Aidan felt it in his own chest. The moment when Calum’s Sphere tipped over. The moment Fire stopped exuding power. There was a stutter. A skipped heartbeat. An ache of recognition as the crystal pressed to Calum’s chest pulled out the very last shred of energy Fire could create. And kept going.
The pause.
The pain.
And then the transformation.
Aidan had never seen a necromancer turn a human into a Howl up close. Only on television, in the aftermath of the
Resurrection, when every single station showed the woman before him turning a man into a kraven.
This was worse.
Life leached from the man, his skin freezing in a second as all heat drained from him. Ice shattered over his flesh, turned him white-blue, while deep within, his Sphere turned black. Red swirls of light inverted to shadow, the spiral and swirl switching directions. Even as the shard of crystal burned white-hot and curled with flame, the air around them froze. Rain shattered to ice and snow. Bloody puddles crackled purple and crimson as shards struck from them like lances. The Dark Lady’s breath came out in a cloud, and even Aidan—in the grips of the vision—felt his skin freeze, felt the heat rip from his chest. Felt his own heart scream in pain.
Then the ice on Calum’s body shattered, his entire body convulsing, a cloud of crystalline white falling from him like dust.
He fell to the ground. Collapsed to his knees.
But he didn’t fall forward.
Instead, he looked up. His movements shaky. His pale eyes rimed red. The moment his eyes locked on the Dark Lady, he smiled.
“It worked,” he whispered.
She nodded as she lowered the stone. It still burned red in her grip, sizzling in the rivulets of rain that ran down her snow-flecked skin. She didn’t seem to mind.
Calum looked around. At the empty grave. At the bodies scattered about like dominoes, offerings to his resurrection, black and white and bloody. He pushed himself to standing.
“They...they are my family,” he said. Was Aidan imagining the tilt in his voice? The tinge of doubt? Of anger?
“Were,” the Dark Lady corrected him. “They ceased to be your kin when you turned to me. Consider them offerings to us. To our reign. To your true family. They will not be the last.”
“As you say.” His face cracked back into a smile. It seemed forced. “In their blood, we will rule.”
“Indeed we shall.” She pressed the shard to Calum’s chest. He held it like a child, fierce and protective. “Behold, your scepter. And soon, you shall have your throne and crown. I will give you Scotland. There, you will spread my truths. There, you will help me rule.”
The Dark Lady looked over then, as though she heard a voice in the distance. But her eyes weren’t turned to the horizon. They bore straight into Aidan’s heart.
“And you, my Hunter, you will help me rule again.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“The hell is this?”
Trevor’s voice cut through the vision, snapped Aidan back into the bloody, broken present.
Aidan knelt there, besides Calum’s seemingly lifeless body, Tomás at his side and Kianna unconscious behind them at Trevor’s feet. Aidan looked from his former co-commander to the two Kin before him. He knew what this looked like.
The trouble was, things were exactly the way they seemed.
“Aidan,” Trevor said. He hesitated in the doorway, three hunters flanked behind him, their hands on their weapons and Spheres blazing. It was clear they had been ready for anything. Anything but this. Trevor kept looking at Kianna. The flick of a finger, and one of the Hunters broke off to kneel at her side. Earth opened in the man’s stomach as he probed Kianna for wounds.
As he did what Aidan should have done.
Why did everything suddenly seem so cold?
“What did you do to her?” Trevor asked, his voice shaking with anger. Then he looked to Tomás. “And what the hell are you doing with that?”
Tomás snarled, but he didn’t attack like Aidan expected. Instead, he stayed at Aidan’s side, hand digging into his shoulder, as though Aidan were the attack dog and Tomás the holder of the lead. Aidan couldn’t move; his hand was still pressed to Calum’s chest, his fingers frozen and tingling, the rise and fall of Calum’s ragged breathing reminding him that he still hadn’t done what he had come here to do.
This close to Calum, he felt his Sphere being pulled, felt the Howl vainly struggling to sap out Aidan’s heat, his strength. It was barely more than a chill. It didn’t account for the cold in Aidan’s bones. The feeling that things were going irrevocably to shit. Fire faltered in Aidan’s chest.
That was the problem.
Aidan pulled deeper through Fire, and the ache and the doubt burned away. He was the sun to Calum’s shadow. To Trevor’s disapproving stare. He could burn it all away.
“Aidan...” Trevor said, and though his voice was a warning, Aidan didn’t know why.
He stared at Calum. Stared at the runes that whispered through his mind of secrets and succumbing, their words somehow stronger in the wake of the vision. Almost, but not quite, he could read what they were for, could sense the strands that tied Calum to the world of the living, that allowed him to be raised from the dead.
Fire burned through him. And even though Calum had been one of the Dark Lady’s creations, he heard her voice in the char of flame. Kill him. Prove your might.
Prove yourself to me.
“I’m doing what I promised I would do,” Aidan said. To Calum. To Trevor. To the darkest whispers of his soul.
He reached back. Slipped a serrated dagger from his boot. And stabbed straight through Calum’s chest.
It wasn’t an easy cut. Calum’s flesh was thin, but his bones were strong, and even though the Howl didn’t fight, his scream echoed through the room as Aidan hacked and sawed, his hands coated with frigid blood. But not just blood. He felt it, as Calum died. He felt the Howl’s Sphere fade. No, not fade. He felt the power flow, bleeding from Calum’s heart to Aidan’s hands, sinking deep beneath Aidan’s skin. Filling him. Completing him. As Calum died, Aidan felt himself becoming more whole. Felt Fire burn with satiation.
Satiation, and then silence.
Silence, and then the cackle of Tomás’s laughter.
Aidan stood, slowly, the dagger embedded in Calum’s chest. A flag. A marker that this land was now his.
Trevor and the other Hunters looked on, horror or perhaps awe splashed on their faces as he righted himself, as he curled flame around his fists, blood burning and charring against his skin. It reminded him of Vincent’s burning scent. And this time, it didn’t turn his stomach.
“Well done, my king,” Tomás whispered into Aidan’s ear. Heat curled around the two of them. Heat pulled them together as the sun draws in the stars. “Scotland is now yours. Well...” He turned his gaze to the Hunters before him. “It will be, as soon as you get rid of them.”
“Aidan—” Trevor began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. He knew there was no point.
For the briefest moment, Aidan reconsidered. He had killed Calum. That had to have been enough.
“He commands Glasgow,” Tomás said to Aidan. He crossed his arms over his chest, everything in his posture and tone nonchalant. Tomás already knew the outcome. He’d set up his game pieces, and they had fallen in place exactly as he’d wished. “So long as he rules the Guild, you will never have your place as King. So long as he knows you have helped a member of the Kin, you will never walk free. Look. You can see it in their eyes. The doubt. The fear. Well, they should fear you. And they should doubt.”
Tomás gestured to the throne beside them. When he curled his fingers around Aidan’s, Fire roared in Aidan’s ears. Fire, and Tomás’s words.
“This is all that matters, my prince. My king. This throne. This kingdom. This moment. Your past is but a burden. A shroud. Burn it away, and embrace your new destiny.”
Aidan looked to the throne. To Calum. To Kianna. And finally, he looked to Tomás. Guilt should have churned in Aidan’s chest. Fear and worry. Dread. But in the light of Tomás’s eyes, in the promise of their shared heat, he felt only purpose. He was meant to rule. He was meant to rule it all.
He looked back at his former co-commander, his former lover, and all he could see in Trevor’s face was the slam of his office door, the frustration in his eyes as he exiled Aida
n from the only home he had left. As Trevor damned Aidan to a life of nothingness.
As Trevor tried to make Aidan less than what he was destined to be.
No more.
Fire burned through Aidan, chased away the doubt, filled him only with anger. With a blinding, blistering destiny.
Scotland was his. His. Trevor had tried to take it away. Even after everything Aidan had done, everything he’d sacrificed, everything that had been stolen from him in this damned land, Trevor had declared it wasn’t enough.
“Aidan, don’t—” Trevor reasoned, his voice softer. He took a step forward, hand raised, weapon lowered, while the other Hunters behind him readied for attack. “Don’t listen to him. The war’s over. We did it. We won.”
“No.” Aidan said. His voice rang clear and assured through the hall, burning with Fire’s heat. “I did it. I won.”
“Please—”
Yes, Fire hissed. Bring them to me. Bring them...
“—Aidan—”
They will defy you. They will turn against you. Again.
“—you don’t want—”
Trust no one. Trust no one.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Trevor,” Aidan said. Fire burned brighter in his chest. He barely heard his own words over its incendiary roar, barely felt the cold of the room through the heat that threatened to tear him apart. The heat, and the power. The hunger.
Scotland was his. His. And he would never let these fools take it from him.
“I do want,” Aidan continued. “I want it all.”
He looked to Tomás.
“And now, I think I will let myself have it.”
Tomás smiled. In that smile, Aidan saw his future.
Aidan didn’t move a muscle when he lashed out, when Fire burst from the pores of his three former comrades. Just like Vincent. Just like the unconscious action that had dragged him to this outcome. Only now, he was awake to hear all of their screams. Wanted to hear their screams. Their short screams, as flames filled their throats and stilled their words.
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