by Alice Wilde
Damien grunts. The room is silent for a moment or two.
“I’ll watch her.”
I want to scream. Of all things, the last thing I want right now is to be bedridden under Damien’s supervision.
“Thank you, Damien,” Father says, “but that shan’t be necessary. I’d prefer to keep her here with me. See it as a dying old man’s wish if you will.”
I’m surprised by this instead of relieved. If Father really is being poisoned, I doubt he’d ask to keep me around.
“As you wish,” Damien says grudgingly. “I will excuse myself. As we can all see, there are some matters I must attend to in regards to our wedding.”
I can’t believe my luck. Well, not luck exactly. Now, I just need to find the right moment to express my concerns to Father. If he won’t listen to my concerns about the marriage, perhaps he’ll at least hear me out about his possible poisoning.
“Papa,” I say, although I have a hard time saying it, “when did you start feeling unwell?”
“Oh, I can’t really say for sure anymore. I’ve been unwell since the day your mother abandoned me.”
His words are bitter. It isn’t until this moment that I realize Father blames Mother his misery. No wonder he never talks about her.
“But, you did love her?” I ask, knowing full well this question could be the last thing that is allowed out of my mouth, but I can’t help myself.
“Love,” the king laughs sharply. “Yes, once upon a time. I did love.”
I hold my breath, hoping he’ll say more if I stay quiet.
“Love. A fate worse than death.”
Okay, not what I was expecting. If this is really how he feels about love, it’s no wonder he isn’t concerned with my feelings about Damien.
“And worth every moment,” Father says so quietly, I almost don’t catch it.
My heart skips a beat. “Papa…”
“No, Annalise. I have not and will not change my mind about your marriage.”
I make the hasty decision to feign innocence.
“No, of course not, I was only going to ask…” I let myself trail off, hoping my silence will intrigue him enough to want to hear more.
“Out with it.”
“Do you think it’s possible someone might be poisoning you?”
“Where would you get such an idea?”
“I’m just surprised by how quickly you’ve become so ill,” I say, not wanting to admit I had a source, especially without evidence. “A few months ago, I’d have thought you were in perfect health.”
“Silly girl, how would poisoning me benefit anyone? No, I have no reason to think that. Besides, my physician tests everything I take first.”
I hadn’t thought about this point.
“Even the potions Damien gives you?” I ask boldly.
The king coughs, and I can hear him shift in his chair to spit. He claps his hands. “Take me to my bed.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the physician says.
“And yes, Annalise, even Lord Godfrey’s potions,” Father says. “I’ll have no more groundless accusations made of your future husband.”
“Papa,” I venture in one last attempt.
“What, Annalise?”
“If, for some unexplainable reason, evidence was found, could you stop the wedding?”
Father sighs, exasperated, and for a long moment, I am sure he won’t answer.
“If it sets your mind at ease, yes. In theory. As long as you and Damien have not consummated the marriage, I could retract my decision.”
I bite my tongue to keep from saying more. The only thing I can do now is wait. I have to find a way to prove Damien isn’t the man father thinks he is. I have to prove he’s poisoning him or that he has some ulterior motive for marrying me. I have to do something.
I only have a few days left, perhaps a week at most if Damien gives me time to heal. I try to sit up, but my head screams in agony and my consciousness begins to fade. I fall back. Looks like I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
Another day lost.
Twenty-Three
Roan
We smell the blood before we see it. By the time I see Annalise lying on the floor, a deep gash across her forehead, Li is by her side.
I see his resolve to stay away has been broken as quickly as it was made.
Ero and I join him a moment later and all teasing falls from my thoughts as the gravity of the situation settles over me.
There’s too much blood. Far too much.
“Li?” I ask, my stomach sinking as I watch the pool of blood slowly growing larger. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell if she’s still breathing.”
Li dips his head low, close to Annalise’s mouth. We watch carefully and sigh as a collective when we see a trickle of air move Li’s whiskers.
“Okay, so she’s breathing. What now?” asks Ero.
“I have to close the gash,” Li replies.
“There’s too much blood,” Ero says. “If your beast takes over, you will kill her. It’s too dangerous.”
“That’s why I’m telling you now. I need you to take me down if I can’t control it. Do whatever it takes. She’ll die if I don’t try.”
“Fine.”
“Well, hurry up!” I say, already positioning myself into a crouch. “I’ve always wanted a good reason to take you down.”
Li snorts but ignores me as he turns back to Annalise.
“Don’t die on us now, lass,” I mutter quietly to myself.
Li licks the gash as gently as possible. His eyes glaze over slightly with the taste of her blood. He makes a second pass at the wound, and I can see it has started to close, the blood no longer spilling out. Li’s growl is taking on a more primal sound.
Ero and I are both poised, ready to attack at a moment’s notice, watching for even the smallest change in behavior. I don’t know how Li is keeping himself together, but the wound has closed up nicely. I’m beginning to think he might just make it through when I see his eyes glaze over, and the next instant, both Ero and I are screeching as we lunge at him, barely managing to get him off Annalise before he kills her.
Li lets it go too far, her blood too powerful even for him. His beast has taken over and is showing no signs of letting go. Ero has latched on to Li’s back, digging his claws in hard. The screams and roars are deafening as beast tears into beast. I take my chances and go for Li’s neck, tearing at the collar around his neck.
“Sorry,” I say jumping back as he collapses to the ground. His collar tightens relentlessly around his neck, the spikes burrowing into his flesh. Ero and I flinch, knowing full well the terrible pain we’ve just caused him.
“We had to,” Ero sighs.
The door crashes open and the room is quickly filled with guards. Damien storms in, barely glancing over at us before he has Annalise in his arms. The room empties just as quickly, and we’re left to wait.
“If she doesn’t survive…”
“She’ll survive. She has to.”
Twenty-Four
Annalise
There’s a certain amount of terror in waking up and not being able to open your eyes. It takes me a minute to remember where I am. I quiet myself and listen, trying to decipher what time of day it might be.
I hear a snore from somewhere in the room, perhaps Father sleeping in his bed. I try to lift myself into a sitting position, but another noise stops me.
An almost inaudible tinkling of glass is coming from the far side of the room, but then the person moves quietly, shuffling across the room toward the snoring.
“Your Majesty?”
It’s the physician. I let out a small sigh of relief.
A grunt, but there is no answer from Father.
Again, the tiny sounds of glass on glass clink, and a moment later, the snoring stops. Then the feet start shuffling toward me. I slow my breathing to appear as if I’m still asleep. I can feel him standing over me and I wonder why I’ve n
ever felt so uncomfortable around him before. Now, alone and with my focus uninterrupted, I feel the same twist of unrest in my stomach as I do with Damien. A darkness.
Long bony fingers brush against my face and I flinch. I hear glass placed on a surface near my head and then both his hands press against my cheeks.
My heartbeat speeds as the physician begins to murmur quietly. By the time I realize it’s an incantation, my body is frozen in place. He continues to speak strange words over me as he unwinds the bandages from around my eyes.
He jumps as he pulls the last strip of bandage from my eyes.
“Dark mercies, you’re awake,” he gasps sharply.
I try to speak, but can’t.
“Relax, my dear,” he says, the words slippery. “This will help you heal faster.”
He places his thumbs over my eyes and forces them shut. The ache of my injured eye intensifies as he presses on it, continuing his spell. I feel the discomfort start to diminish, but not in the same way as when Li healed the mark on my neck. Everything about this feels wrong. The words are dark and sit heavy in my soul, the energy from his fingers spreading through me like worms wriggling through my skin.
When he finally removes his hands, I’m even further repulsed. As each finger leaves my skin, it feels like a long thread is pulled up and out with it, tugging slightly at my skin as it exits.
I want to demand an explanation, but I still cannot move or speak.
“Now, rest. We don’t want to disappoint Lord Godfrey, do we?” he says, picking up the glass vial he placed by my head earlier and leans over me as he pours several drops into my open mouth.
I want to scream, to fight, but the liquid trickles down my throat, and almost as quickly, darkness fills my mind and I descend into a thick fog.
“Lass?”
I claw at my darkness, the familiar voice cutting through the fog.
“Anything?”
A second familiar voice. Ero? I try but fail to hold onto it, again sinking back into the gloom.
“Not yet, but there’s a heartbeat. It’s weak.”
“I killed her,” a third voice says. Li. Pain saturating his words.
“Shut up,” Ero snaps. “She’s the one who tripped on her skirt. You had no way of knowing she’d crack her head open walking around her own room.”
“I should have acted faster.”
“Stop being a moody arse, Li. You’re not helping matters. We don’t have much time,” Roan says.
I scream without sound. This is by far the most terrifying of my dreams. I can see nothing but the oblivion of my mind, their voices the only thing keeping me from slipping entirely into the dark mists.
“Lassie? I don’t ken if you can hear us or not, but you need to fight. Don’t give up on yourself. Don’t give up on us.”
“Yeah, we haven’t even made out yet.”
“You idiot, can you please just shut up, Ero?”
“Hey, you can’t discount the power of desire. For all we know, it might just be what saves her life.”
“You’re both arses, thinking only of yourselves.”
“And you’re not?” Li says.
I hear growling.
“Fine, we’re all arses,” Roan says. “Frankly, lass, we need you. We’re selfish, and without you, I’ll be miserable. You don’t want to be the death of me, do you?”
“Roan!” Li and Ero voice in unison before all three voices fade from my mind.
I have to fight. Whatever is happening to me, I can’t give up. I can’t give in.
If not for me, for them.
My leopards.
I can feel icy tendrils spreading through my body, my veins their pathway, my blood their power. My soul.
My soul is mine. But even as I challenge it, the darkness seeps in, lapping at the edges of my spirit, inky stains rippling through me.
My heart.
The crushing gloom weighs heavily on me.
My heart, I say, my inner voice rigid. My heart…is theirs.
A white light explodes in my mind and a fire ignites in my heart, burning at the darkness with a great vengeance.
No, my inner voice says forcibly. You can ravage my body, even take my soul captive, but my heart is already spoken for.
Numbness takes over, and I sink deep into my only remaining safe haven.
I enter my beasts’ hearts.
Twenty-Five
Roan
It’s been at least eight hours since Annalise was taken from us. Li is back to his old self, but it took several hours to free him from his beast heart. I think it’s the longest I’ve ever seen him gone. When he finally surfaced again, the last thing he could remember was his teeth at Annalise’s neck, certain he had killed her.
The blood still staining the floor didn’t help. No one has come to Annalise’s room since the incident. Not to clean the blood, not to feed us, nothing.
Ero and I have tried to reassure Li as much as we can, but none of us are sure what kind of state she’s in, or if she’s even still alive. I tried linking with her several hours after the accident, but she must have still been unconscious.
We’ve been waiting, rather impatiently, for the dead of night to try again. Li is in a state of self-loathing, which is making the time pass even more slowly. Ero is by the door, trying to sleep, but it’s easy to see that that’s not going to happen.
I occupy my time by tearing up random things in the room to help calm the rising storm in my own heart. Feather pillows are highly satisfying to destroy. In human form, I’d be ashamed to be caught destroying anything out of anger, but as a beast, I relish it.
It doesn’t take long for me to rip them all apart, feathers littering the floor, small feather fluff still hanging in the air. I sneeze. Okay, that was a bad idea. I sneeze again, and again.
I run to the other side of the room to escape the chaos I’ve just created, rubbing my nose in my paws as I try to extract the small bits of feather dust from my nostrils.
A bell sounds somewhere in the distance and our ears prick up to listen.
One…two…three…
The bell rings midnight.
It’s the witching hour. Everyone should be asleep by now, or at least in bed.
“All right, let’s try again,” I say.
Li and Ero are instantly alert and focused. We link our minds and search for Annalise.
It’s harder than I thought it would be. Even if she’s sleeping, as long as she’s no longer unconscious from the accident, her mind shouldn’t be this hard to find. We’ve linked with her before, and our bond to her, however much we’ve tried not to allow it, has grown since.
I can sense Li getting anxious, and I growl at him.
“Keep calm, we need to have an unwavering focus,” Ero says.
He’s right. I clear my mind of everything except Annalise.
“Lass?”
I’ve found her. Li and Ero focus in on the link I’ve created, her scent filling my mind. She doesn’t respond, but there’s a heartbeat. She’s not dead. Not yet. Then I sense something else…
A darkness. The mists of oblivion. I’ve seen its work once before, on Ero’s predecessor.
It’s part of the Book of Lethe, a dark magic used to overwhelm a non-compliant being, body and soul. On normal people, there are two outcomes. You either succumb to the will of the binder, becoming a prisoner in your own body, or you go insane, lost forever in the mists of oblivion. On humans, you can’t really tell one from the other except that those who go insane often die within a few weeks’ time.
Damien found out the hard way not to use the curse on shifters. For whatever reason, the magic doesn’t work on beasts. Somehow, the boy must have entered his beast heart just before the spell was cast. He went mad, permanently imprisoned in his beast heart, and his beast lashed out and ran. The boy was found dead in the forest not long after, no longer a beast.
Either way, Annalise is in grave danger, but if she can fight long enough to keep her sanity, at le
ast we’ll have a chance.
She has to fight.
Twenty-Six
Annalise
“Is it done?”
“Yes, My Lord.”
Damien and the physician.
“Very good. It’s about time she was brought under control. I can’t have her tearing apart my plans, not when we’re this close.”
“Of course, My Lord.”
“And her father?”
“I’m afraid the effects of the poison cannot be reversed. I’m not sure how much longer the king will survive. My best guess is at most a week.”
Damien growls. “Then the wedding ceremony will have to be performed immediately. Time is of the essence. If we’re not married before her father shoves off, it’ll all be for nothing. Not that I won’t leave my mark either way,” Damien says, and I feel his finger brush across the mark he’s left on my neck.
“I should warn you, My Lord, there’s always the chance the oblivion has taken over her mind. She may no longer be…there…”
“No matter. As long as she is seen alive at the wedding, I have no concern for whether or not her mind is functioning. After the wedding, all I need is her body.”
“Of course, My Lord.”
“Once I am crowned king, we will be in the perfect position for conquest. The situation couldn’t be more perfect. No one worries about the smaller gateway kingdoms. Once I have taken her magic and the kingdom is under my control, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Indeed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, My Lord, I will prepare the waking potions for the king.”
“Is that really necessary anymore?”
“No, but I enjoy making a king drink my piss. For health’s sake, of course,” the physician snickers.
“Certainly.”
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to discover the two have been working together. If only I had seen it the first time Papa called me to his room. I hadn’t recognized him then, but I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to it. Everything is far worse than I already believed.