by Nalini Singh
“You won’t be near me, warrior.”
Already challenging her, he moved closer. Not touching her. But walking so near that her cloak swept against his leg with every step.
“I will,” he said, and iron hardened his voice. “We are both forsaken. We must both remain separate from our people. So we’ll live together in the Weeping Forest, and when Krimathe needs your help, we’ll go to them. When Blackmoor needs us, we’ll be here for them. And every morning I will kiss you awake—”
“No,” she whispered.
“—and every night I’ll hold you as you fall asleep.”
The longing that had pierced her with his every word was unbearable now. “Stop this, warrior.”
“Wherever you go, I will ride beside you,” he said, and added when a sharp snort sounded behind them, “and Shim.”
“You can’t risk this!”
“And whenever you wish, you can ride me.”
All at once, agony and frustration hacked through her control like an axe. No more. Mala whirled on his shadowed form. She slammed her palms into his armored chest and shoved. “Go!”
He didn’t move.
With a scream, she set her feet and threw her shoulder against his breastplate. Pain shot down her arm. A soft grunt escaped him, but he stood firm.
Eyes burning, she pushed harder. There were so many ways to defeat him. To make him go. To make sure he couldn’t follow. But all would hurt him more than he deserved.
“Use your sword, Mala.” The suggestion was soft. “I will not defend myself against it.”
And she could not use it against him. Not now. But did he know?
Salty tears scalded her ravaged skin as she backed away. In the darkness, her polished blade was only a dull slice of smothered moonlight. “Is it truly worth your life to have me?”
“Merely the chance to have you is worth far more than my life.” His massive shadow came nearer, then sank before her. Hoarsely he said, “But my life is worth nothing at all if you will not have me.”
Her breath wouldn’t come. It wouldn’t come, though she dragged it in, over and over, trembling as she looked down at him. His head was bowed, she thought, but wasn’t certain until she searched for his face in the dark. Her fingers slipped over his hair before sliding down to cup his jaw. He shook, and a ragged groan burst from him before he turned his cheek against her palm.
“Mala.” His mouth pressed against her inner wrist in a hot, shuddering kiss, and the jagged pain in her chest eased. “Can you see? I am on my knees before you. I am tamed. For as long as I draw breath, I will walk by your side and do it willingly. I will fight to walk by your side.”
Not tamed. Still strong. Still free. And just as stubborn as she.
But he could call it whatever he chose.
“You cannot walk by my side on your knees, warrior.” She sheathed her sword. “You’ll fall behind.”
Or he would carry her forward, because as he surged to his feet Kavik lifted her from the ground. His mouth found hers, so sweet and rough, and her tears would not stop falling.
Abruptly he tore his lips from hers and stepped back, fingers lightly brushing her shoulders, then her arms, as if he couldn’t bear to let her go but was afraid to touch her. “Your tears, Mala.” His voice was agony. “I forgot your mark. Did I hurt you?”
She had forgotten it, too. And there was no pain at all, as if the burning, swollen mask had peeled away.
But she had no time to wonder over it. From behind her came Shim’s urgent whinny, and a moment later, a thunderous roar echoed across the moors. Kavik stiffened against her.
Dread settled in her stomach. “You know that sound?” she asked, and could barely make out his nod through the dark.
“The demon tusker,” he said.
WITH Mala beside him, Kavik raced to the top of the next hill and looked north. Her path from Perca hadn’t lain along the roads, yet he knew this land, and a village didn’t lay far distant. If the demon tusker passed it by, he and Mala might not have such a dangerous fight on their hands.
Dread filled his chest when he saw the flames flickering in the distance. “It’s at the village,” he said.
“Then we will be, too. Shim!”
His heart clenched. He wanted to tell her to let him go alone to help the village, but knew she would not remain here any more than he would.
The gelding waited down the hill. Kavik started toward it, but halted as heavy hoofbeats drew alongside him.
“Kavik!” Mala called from atop Shim. The hood hid her face, but the light of the distant fire made her into a dim silhouette, her hand extended toward him. “Shim is strong enough to carry us both, and he’s faster. On your gelding, it will be over before you arrive.”
He only hesitated long enough to glance at Shim. “You agree?”
The stallion snorted and Kavik swung onto his back as lightly as he could without a saddle. As soon as he settled behind her, Mala’s small form crouched over the stallion’s neck.
“Go!”
The stallion surged ahead. Only Kavik’s light grasp on Mala’s hips saved him from tumbling over the horse’s rump. He leaned forward until his chest pressed against her strong back. The sides of her cloak flared out like wings as they raced across the hills, Shim’s hooves like rolling thunder. Her hood flew back.
“Mala!” he shouted into the wind.
By the slight turn her of head, he knew she listened.
“If this is the end, it’s not because I was with you! It’s because of the demon and because I pissed in her offering bowl!”
The vehement shake of her head whipped her braids against his face. “It’s not the end,” she shouted back at him. “Because if I’m the one to herald it, then I want to be the one to end you!”
Grinning, he squeezed her waist. “Don’t try to fight the demon! Just guide the villagers to safety, if you can! If they can’t reach the southern gate in the wall, make them climb over it. Then they need to run out over the hills, away from the demon’s sight!”
The demon rarely followed. It only attacked what was in its path. Her nod told him she understood.
“There will be revenants!”
She tensed against him and nodded again just as the demon bellowed, a deafening roar that drowned out the drumbeat of Shim’s pounding hooves. The stallion carried them over the next hill.
The village lay directly ahead. Its northern wall had been destroyed, the mortared stones lying in shattered heaps. Houses nearby burned, the thatched roofs blazing. Indistinct figures darted through the dense smoke that choked the northern half of the village and had begun billowing south along the road. Human screams mingled with the revenants’ shrieks.
“People will be hiding in the houses!” Kavik shouted. Almost a hundred and fifty lived in this village. “They think they’ll be safe if the demon doesn’t destroy their building. But the revenants will hunt them down.”
“Can we draw the revenants?” Mala called back to him.
So she was already thinking the same as he. The creatures might be searching individually for prey now, but they would converge upon a stronger foe.
“Take me to the northern wall!” The demon tusker had already broken through—moving south. The demon likely wouldn’t turn around, but the revenants would still come for Kavik. “I’ll draw the revenants. You stay on Shim! You can move through the village and help any people you can, but if the demon comes at you, let Shim run! You can ride back around to help them from another direction!”
She nodded, and her hand reached back to grip his thigh. “My heart is yours, Kavik!”
Fierce love grabbed hold of his chest. But before he could reply, her fingers abruptly clenched. A gust of wind blew through the billowing smoke and revealed the demon tusker.
Given a choice, Kavik wouldn’t want to face a tusker even if the animal hadn’t been possessed by a demon. With legs like thick tree trunks, a hulking back, and heavily domed head, the bulls were aggressive and territoria
l—and big, often growing as tall as the mammoths that roamed the far southern steppes. Unlike mammoths, however, a tusker didn’t wear a pair of long tusks beside its prehensile snout. A tusker’s snout and the tusks that flanked it were shorter. The primary tusks jutted straight out from beneath the jaw like a pair of flat blades. The animals used them to slash through thick branches and vegetation as it foraged, and as defense. He’d seen a tusker cut a hunter’s horse from beneath him by swinging those tusks like a scythe.
The demon’s possession transformed an already-dangerous animal into a monstrous terror. The tusker’s long red hairs had been shed from its hide. Bloated white skin stretched tightly over its enormous frame, as if the burning evil inhabiting the creature expanded its body to an ever-greater size to contain the demon inside it. Each of its tusks had elongated and sharpened, and its jaw could unhinge to reveal jagged teeth unlike any natural tusker’s.
And unlike a tusker, the demon didn’t lumber. It stalked the ground swiftly, silent when it wasn’t roaring. Now it slipped through the smoke like a wraith and vanished from their sight again.
Through the dark, he spotted a handful of villagers scrambling over the eastern wall. No one had yet fled through the southern gate as Shim raced north around the village. “Check the southern gate first! Revenants might be blocking escape!”
Nodding, she squeezed his thigh and released him. Throat tight, Kavik pressed his face against the back of her neck and breathed deep. Mala. No longer in red. But he’d been on his knees. Now there was only the end.
He would still fight to his last breath against it. Never would he leave her alone, forsaken. He would never leave her side.
Shim rounded the northern wall. Fire raged in the nearest houses, throwing wavering orange light through the wall’s shattered remains. With his sword, Kavik pointed to the breach. “There!”
The horse slowed as he passed it. The shrieking howls of nearby revenants sounded as Kavik swung to the ground, landing amid the broken stones. Without stopping, Shim continued on, and Kavik stole a last look. His gaze met Mala’s. She’d glanced back over her shoulder, her face lit by the burning houses behind him.
Her unmarked face.
Shock jarred him forward a step, but the stallion’s speed had already carried her past the breach and into the darkness beyond. Kavik stared after her for a breath. His heart pounded as he crossed the shattered remnants of the wall.
He’d been on his knees. That didn’t just mean the end. Kavik had told her something else—that he was tamed.
Now her mark was gone. No longer forsaken. Her task accomplished.
The beast of Blackmoor was tamed.
Wild elation whipped through him and he answered the revenants’ shrieks with a howl of his own, banging the flat of his sword against stone. “Come for me, then!” he shouted. “I am leashed! An easy kill!”
A red-eyed shadow raced toward him. A wulfen revenant, jaws slobbering. Kavik cleaved through its neck with a mighty swing, then set his boot against the neck stump and ripped the creature open from gullet to stomach. Hot blood poured out, steaming on the ground, stinking.
The stench of a revenant’s blood always drew more—as if its scent told the others that their blood had been spilled, so there was a foe to defeat.
Within moments, he’d killed two more, then charged forward to protect a white-faced woman who emerged from the smoke screaming. He slaughtered the revenants chasing behind her, then sent her over the breached wall.
They did not stop after that. Revenants by twos and threes. A family who scrambled gratefully past him in the dark, a bleeding old woman that he couldn’t help over the broken wall until he’d put down the five revenants that came at him. The demon’s roars were followed by the crashing of stone, more flames.
Rapid hoofbeats pounded through the smoke. Mala.
Her sword cleaved the neck of a revenant snapping at Shim’s hindquarters, her blade already dripping with gore. Her grin was wide as she approached him and took in his pile of corpses. “We ran!” she shouted on a laugh. “We’re heading back around! The south gate is open now!”
So she’d encountered the demon and fled. “Your mark!” he called as Shim swept past him. “I’m tamed!”
With a heaving snort, Shim abruptly wheeled around. Mala clung to his back, her expression a mask of disbelief and astonishment. She touched her cheek.
Suddenly she laughed and looked to the sky. “Vela!” she shouted. “I would appreciate those ten thousand warriors now!”
Kavik grinned but couldn’t respond. Another revenant was upon him—what had once been a cow. Grunting, he swung through its thick neck, and the next was already lunging. He greeted it by shoving the point of his blade through its eye.
He glanced back. Mala had crouched over Shim’s neck again. They were gone.
A chorus of shrieks and howls warned him before he saw the pack of revenants coming. His grip firm upon the handle of his weapon, he moved closer to the wall, made sure the stone was at his back.
As much sweat as blood dripped into his eyes when he could pause for breath again. Where was the demon? He hadn’t heard its roar since Mala had come through. If it had passed through the village, then there were only revenants left. And no more of the creatures had come for him yet—the slaughtered pack had been the last, and he’d taken at least fifteen breaths since.
Was it done?
Kavik listened. The only roar was from the nearby fires, the loud rumble of roofs and walls collapsing, the snap and crack of heated stone. Animals bleated outside the walls—probably those that had escaped through the south gate and were running loose. A distant shout.
He started in that direction as another sound carried across the distance—Shim’s enraged, trumpeting neigh.
Kavik bolted toward it. Smoke burned his eyes and throat. The thick clouds obscured everything past the reach of his sword. Obstacles appeared almost the same moment he was upon them. He vaulted over a cart abandoned in the road and landed on the lump of a body. A revenant. Mala’s work.
Icy dread filled his chest, squeezed at his lungs. She was another strong foe.
But she was on Shim, fast and mobile. By the time any revenants were drawn to the others she’d slain, Mala would already have been gone.
Unless she’d come upon a pack, too. One might have slowed her down.
Heart pounding, he raced south through the village, faster than he’d ever run. The smoke thinned. The roaring of the fires dimmed. And he could hear them now, the shrieks and howls. He followed the noise through a courtyard and abruptly saw her.
They’d swarmed her. Four or five dozen of them. With Mala still astride him, Shim had backed up against the stone wall of a cottage, and they fought together as if one. Mala’s blade and axe protected their sides, and Shim’s tearing teeth and striking hooves guarded their front. Every revenant that leapt at them was driven back or slain. Given much longer, or a single miss, they might have been overwhelmed—but not yet. And not now.
Kavik didn’t howl to announce his presence this time. The revenants did not know what was coming behind them. Mala saw him, and he saw her fierce grin.
Then he saw his end.
Vela had not said it would be his death. But it mattered not. This was the same.
An oxen revenant charged through the pack. Mala’s axe fell upon its skull but couldn’t stop the thrust of the heavy body behind it. The creature slammed into Shim’s shoulder at the same moment the stallion reared to strike at a revenant. The impact whipped the stallion around, hind legs swept from under him. Mala flew from his back and into the middle of the swarm of revenants. She disappeared beneath them.
Red filled his vision. Kavik roared, charging the swarm, and his heart was a shredded thing, the agony growing with every beat. Shouting her name, he began hacking a path toward her through the mass of revenants. The nearest creatures turned toward him then, but he didn’t see them anymore, his gaze fixed on the spot where she’d vanished. She was
still fighting. Through the swarm, he saw the flash of her sword. The fall of her axe.
And the demon tusker silently coming from around the cottage behind her.
“Mala!” Desperately Kavik tried to reach her, his sword swinging, but the mass of revenants pushed him back. He couldn’t get to her.
But she must have sensed the huge demon, or realized the revenants behind her had scattered, or felt its hot breath. She spun to face it.
The demon swung its head. The blades of its tusks swept into her like a scythe.
“Mala!” He screamed her name, then there was nothing, nothing but the blood and agony and the fall of his sword. He had to reach her.
With a final swing, abruptly he was through the mass of revenants, and he knew the madness of battle was upon him. Or simply the same madness that had befallen his father after he’d lost his queen and his sons.
Ahead, Mala was still standing. Feet braced, her jaw tight with effort, she held the edge of the tusks away from her stomach, as if she’d instinctively caught the ivory blades and tried to stop them from cutting her in half.
The demon screeched. Rage filled that shriek, and its own powerful legs were braced. A spasm shook its head.
Not a spasm, Kavik realized. It was trying to shake her off. To move her.
He wasn’t mad. She had captured the tusks in an unbreakable grip. An immovable grip, as if she weighed more than the demon tusker could lift.
Kavik had felt an unbreakable grip before. But no silver light filled her eyes. Her skin didn’t shine.
This was Mala. Only Mala.
A revenant slashed at him from behind. Still staring, Kavik swung his sword in that direction, and still didn’t look away even when the stamp of hooves sounded beside him and the revenant’s brains splattered his boots.
The demon roared, its terrible jaws opening wide. Nose wrinkling, Mala closed her eyes and turned her face away.
“By Temra’s fist,” she breathed. “It smells worse than revenant.”
Kavik’s wild laugh broke from him. She laughed, too, then shook her head.
Determination set her face. “I still don’t know if we can kill it. But perhaps I can make it easier to try.”