A knock at the door sounded, and Torrin stood, stretching his arms before he walked to the door and accepted the clothing. He walked back into the room and dropped them beside where I sat. His eyes locked with mine, and he smiled wolfishly, leaning down and holding his mouth a hairsbreadth away from mine.
His hot breath fanned my lips, forcing my eyes to close. I waited for them to skim across mine. Dark, deep laughter escaped his throat as his hand slid through my hair, gripping it firmly while he tugged on it, stealing a moan from my lips.
“You try to get into my head again, and I’ll use my magic on you. Mine makes your nightmares into reality and holds you there in my mind until I allow you to escape. I can do whatever I want in your dreams, and when you awake, you’ll still feel me there. Now, be a good girl and get some rest. We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“You expect me to sleep like this?” I asked, watching his lips curl into a smile.
“You should try because you look exhausted. You just fought off a horde of dark creatures less than three days ago, Alexandria. I know because I’ve watched you from the shadows. You were led here because I wanted you to be. Your brother wasn’t ever in this village. He never reached this far before the sickness set in,” Torrin stated, exhaling as he lifted the glass and polished off the whiskey.
“How do you know that?” I asked softly, hiding the pain his words caused me. My chest tightened, and I swallowed hard past the uneasiness that fought to swallow me whole.
“Goodnight, Alexa.” He smiled tightly, ignoring my question as he returned to the bed, lying down.
My eyes swam with unshed tears, pricking my pride while my chest constricted with pain. Landon had shown signs of the moon sickness before he left. Or at least, the first sign of it. I turned my eyes to the fire, watching the flames dance as the use of my nickname clicked.
“How did you know that?” I asked, turning to look at him. “How did you know that was my nickname?” It wasn’t, not really. I was Lexia to everyone but Landon, who preferred to use the name my mother had called me before she’d died from a raid by Aragon’s people.
“Your brother told me, right before he ended up in chains.”
“You have him!” I growled.
“I don’t, but he is being held somewhere to prevent him from succumbing to the moon madness. Or, more to the point, he’s someplace that he can’t hurt anyone else as he suffers from the sickness. I’m certain he’s past the beginning stages by now. You already knew that, though,” he stated impassively. “If you hadn’t known he was sick, you wouldn’t have broken protocol and come out searching for him without the backing of your Order.”
“They sent me to find him,” I hissed.
“No, Alexandria. They sent you to find the library because they had already written him off as dead. Landon and his entire team were infected, and yet the Order still sent them. Why?” he asked, smiling coldly as I narrowed my eyes to angry slits. “Because the Order didn’t want them to expire where the others would see it happening and lose faith in the Order of the Moon,” he said softly, turning onto his side, which bunched the muscles of his abdomen. “Now I have your attention, don’t I?”
I swallowed, closing my eyes before turning back to the crackling fire. If Torrin knew where Landon was, he knew that I’d come for him. The thing was, if the king got inside the Sacred Library, he could destroy the entire world. It held the first spells of our race and the history of the world. What would he possibly want from within it?
If I helped him to locate the library, would I be damning everyone to something worse than the plague of darkness? It was said that someone in Aragon’s line had read from one of the books, unleashing the frozen darkness onto the world. What if I helped him, and I lost myself to save Landon and the others in doing so? I’d seen my death once in a soothsayer’s dream, bathed in shadows that made it near impossible to know who it was that had murdered me, yet I’d felt the truth of it to my core.
“Sleep, because we leave at dawn.”
“There is no dawn anymore. Only darkness resides within these mountains,” I whispered icily, not bothering to tear my eyes from the fire. “Your king wants one of the books, the Book of Life or Death? Which one is it that Aragon craves to read?”
“If I told you, would you shut up and go to sleep?” he asked, and I turned to see Torrin close his eyes.
“Yes,” I whispered before sucking my bottom lip between my teeth.
“Liar. You suck your bottom lip when you lie, Alexa. Go to sleep, or I’ll gag you so I can.”
“Right…” He slipped off the bed and grabbed the curtain to rip a large section of it off before moving toward me. He smiled coldly as he lowered to a crouch in front of me.
“I warned you.” Standing, he leaned over me, securing the cloth around my mouth. I growled, but the fabric muffled the noise. Torrin patted my head, lowering his lips to my ear. “Sweet dreams, pray that I am not within them, Little One. I find I rather enjoyed the sounds you made when you entered my mind. Keep me awake tonight, and I’ll make certain you don’t sleep for days while we travel through the Badlands.”
Chapter Four
The mountain passes were covered in thick snow, making the large party move slower through the slippery trail. We’d been on the path since dawn, or what would have been dawn if the entire mountain wasn’t bathed in the darkness. There had been no sign of animals or people since we’d traveled past the first village.
The girls on my team paired up and rode with Torrin’s men. None of us were allowed to ride on our own mounts this morning, and none of us spoke, ignoring the men and their comments to one another as unease filled us. Until we knew what their actual intentions were with us, it was best to remain silent and listen.
Repositioning my body, I stiffened against the masculine form behind me. If Torrin noticed, he ignored it. It was mortifying to be forced to ride with the pompous cave dweller, and it had pissed Chivalry off to no end that I wasn’t to allow to ride him.
I hissed as Chivalry nipped my leg once more. Leaning forward, I patted his head even though the arm around my midsection tightened. Torrin grunted while he watched me, comforting my horse. Chivalry chose that moment to toss his head back and neigh loudly, complaining.
“I know, Chivalry. The stupid warlord is making me ride with him. Don’t be cross at me. You’re still the best boy ever, and the only boy for me,” I cooed, reassuring my horse that I wasn’t willingly choosing to ride with the brainless warrior instead of him.
Another grunt sounded, and then the warhorse I was on reared back on its hind legs, sending me flush against Torrin’s heat. I peered around the trail while he got the stallion back under control, slowing it to an easy walk.
The surrounding woods were silent, which wasn’t normal. Usually, the creatures immune to the darkness would be prowling, hunting, or scurrying around. They weren’t today, which meant either they were afraid of the group passing through, or something worse was within the forest that had only months ago been teeming with life.
A scraping noise started to the right of the path, and we paused to search the woods. The hair on my nape rose, and a shiver of unease settled within me. The warlord’s arm tightened around me as if he was expecting to have to move quickly.
“Hold still,” he gritted as I adjusted, settling closer until I’d felt his body molding against mine.
“Something is coming,” I warned at the same moment something dropped from the sky, snatching one rider at the front of the line from his horse.
“Into the woods!” Torrin ordered, and before I could argue that we may not want to enter the woods where we could be separated from the others, he moved toward them.
“They may want us to go into the forest!” I screeched as all of my warning bells were triggered, screaming that we were purposefully being split from the others.
“Hold on and shut up, woman,” he growled, pulling Chivalry with us.
Inside the woods, darkness reigned. Still, no sound met our ears. Not until something whizzed past us, zigzagging through the woods. One minute we were on the horse, and the next, Torrin had dismounted fluidly with me in front of him, forcing me behind him with the cloak still covering me.
“I need weapons,” I growled. Hearing Torrin’s grunt of disagreement, I bristled.
“No, you don’t. Shut up and stand there.”
My head snapped to the right as a shadow moved within the darkness. Turning, I placed my back toward the obtuse warlord and faced the road where a horse laid unmoving. The ominous sounds continued, growing louder until a sinister form met my wide, horrified stare.
Standing in front of me was a faceless body hovering over the ground. Bloody clothes hung over its form, the stench pungent and obnoxious until it was sickening. Beneath the bloodied clothes it had stolen from its victims was grotesquely disfigured, graying, rotten flesh. My eyes burned from the reeking stench, and my stomach roiled with bile pushing up against my throat.
“Reapers,” I whispered, barely audible enough to be heard by Torrin.
Reapers were scavengers of the Darklands—a place filled with death and despair. No light touched them and hadn’t for a very long time. The plague of darkness created monsters like reapers and other creatures that devoured those who still held light within them. They fed on corpses and victims left behind by the stronger beings that hunted the living down, sucking their marrow from their bones like juice from a fruit. Reapers came in behind those creatures, feasting on the remains of what was left, stealing their clothes to hide the skeletal, emaciated form that comprised their bodies.
The reaper shot forward, and I was shoved to the ground by Torrin’s large hand, barely avoiding the blade that moved, swinging wide to cleave the monster into two parts. I was yanked from the ground as Torrin made a loud clicking sound with his teeth, forcing everyone back to the road.
“I told you they were trying to separate us,” I snapped, but he ignored me.
The moment we reached the road, more reapers slithered out of the woods to surround us. I could hear the others making their way toward us, still riding their mounts. I dropped my cloak, pulling my power from deep within me to ignite like a flame within the darkness.
My skin glowed iridescently, illuminating the dark road. My hair floated, glowing white within the darkness, remaining platinum without the power of the moon to highlight my vibrant colors. My skin pulsed, swirling delicate, silver markings that covered my flesh as I lifted the shirt over my head. I exposed more light before I sent it shooting toward the reapers, which jerked back as if they’d been physically struck.
I felt my team sliding in around me, shedding their clothes to reveal light much weaker than my own. Light terrified the creatures of darkness, or at least ours did. It drove them back into the shadows, forcing them to abandon their hunt of living beings. The reaper’s behavior was off, growing bolder with the new area to hunt inside.
My eyes filled with light, and my lips parted to whisper the words of a spell that danced on my tongue, forcing the beings to remain in place while the light pulsed through them. The reapers imploded one by one, folding into themselves until the sounds of their bones popping and cracking with their final death filled the clearing.
When it was over, my body sagged, and strong arms caught me, lifting me. I glanced into Torrin’s angry stare and then lifted my eyes to the sky, seeing something move directly above us. Slowly doing a double blink, I watched a body fall toward us from the sky.
“Move,” I whispered weakly, and Torrin sidestepped seconds before the body would have landed on us. I shivered and pressed my head closer to his shoulder, uncaring if I looked weak.
I knew how the body on the ground looked. It was a corpse, sucked dry of moisture and marrow, with nothing but skeletal remains left. It was in the beginning stages of becoming a reaper. Swallowing bile, I gagged at the putrescent odor and cadaverous, decomposing organs.
No one spoke as we backed away from the body of the fallen warrior. The loud screech that had ripped through the darkness, moments before he’d been plucked from his horse, sounded again. I was dropped to the ground as Torrin withdrew his sword in a lightning-fast move, slicing through the air like a whirlwind as the red runes on the hilt glowed, causing the blade to pick up speed.
Torrin wasn’t just skilled; he was freakishly fast, each swipe aimed with precision. Pieces of the creature dropped from the sky without it ever touching the ground whole. He had sliced it into tiny parts, cutting it in midair until chunks pelted the ground.
I didn’t move, didn’t gag at the blood now covering me from head to toe from Torrin, slaughtering the monster adeptly and skillfully.
Torrin turned, staring down at me with a look of annoyance while I studied the sword he had used. He cleaned the blade before pushing it into the scabbard, crouching down to pluck a sizeable chunk of rotten meat from my chest before cocking his head to the side, surveying my pale, glowing face.
“You fucking stink,” he announced.
“You just cut up whatever the hell that was on me. Did you expect me to smell like moonflowers?” I grunted, pushing up into a sitting position.
“I would have preferred it if you’d have tried to dodge at least some of the dead flesh falling from the sky.”
“I did, the entire…” Hissing started behind us, and Torrin exhaled, drawing his blade as the warrior turned reaper stood, spewing poisonous spittle at us.
Torrin stepped in front of me, barring the poisonous saliva from reaching me. He grunted, slowly lifting his blade. He spun and ended the reaper’s life before it had even begun with the first feeding. Torrin reached down to rip off the patch that adorned the uniform’s shoulder, pushing it into a pocket.
“Let’s move,” he ordered. “There’s a town a few miles away from here. We’ll find lodging for the night and tend to the wounded there.”
I stood, picking chunks of the creature off my skin. I started toward Chivalry, but a hand gripped my wrist, pulling me backward. Turning, I stared into frost-colored eyes that warned me not to push the issue of riding my horse again.
“I stink,” I whispered through chattering teeth.
“You’re also freezing because you did a strip show in the middle of the fucking mountains. The temperature is dropping, and you’re almost naked.” Torrin pulled off his cloak to wrap it around my body. “On the road, further down, is Alexandria’s cloak; retrieve it and let’s move out,” he ordered, sitting me on his horse as if I weighed no more than a feather. “Over there.” He pointed to a warrior who slipped into the woods, then returned with my soiled cloak.
I pulled Torrin’s earthy scented cloak around me and held it up to my nose. Silently, I inhaled the smell of citrus, masculinity, and sandalwood. He narrowed his eyes on me while I watched him, frowning as I found the combination enticing. His icy stare held mine, not looking away until I lowered it and scooted forward, giving Torrin room to mount behind me.
“You can bathe at the inn,” he stated, and I shuddered at the putrid scent of my skin. “You will bathe because you fucking reek.”
“Do you intend to watch me take a bath?” I frowned at his dark laughter that vibrated over my flesh, sending a shiver rushing down my spine to wrap around my ovaries.
“I may since you’re sharing a room with me again, Alexandria,” he said in a raspy tone that grated on my nerves.
“Will you do something for me while I bathe?” I whispered, feeling his nose pressing against my ear, uncaring that I reeked of death.
“What’s that?” he asked, tightening his arm around me.
“Hold your fucking breath until I’m done?”
Torrin kicked the horse forward without warning, forcing me to yelp in surprise. The arm that held me released, forcing me to grab for the saddle or chance falling. I growled, pushing my ass back to grasp the pommel, making my backside connect with something masculine. I turne
d, glaring over my shoulder with a withering look that died a short death at finding glowing winter-colored eyes smiling at my discomfort. It was going to be a long ride to the village.
Chapter Five
We entered the inn with only a portion of the war party Torrin had brought with him to capture us. The inn was also the tavern, and instead of moving toward the stairs, I was directed behind it by Torrin, who pointed to a bucket of sudsy water.
“Wash up because I intend to eat before we retire for the night,” he ordered, turning his back on me.
I slipped off the cloak, studying the dark-eyed creatures that watched my every move. We’d stepped into the Darklands, where only those who could live through the poisonous shadows remained. Unlike the other side of the mountain where we’d been, the king and his people were immune.
Kneeling, I grabbed a scrap of cloth from the pail and slowly began wiping myself clean. I studied the layout, learning each path out of the town. More creatures started coming out of the small homes, staring at me with something akin to curiosity.
Long ago, the Night King had removed those with the moon-sight from his lands. No one was certain why he’d banished the moon-touched people. But then he held no love for his people, or so the rumors said, and he loathed our kind.
The people of the Darklands had adapted, growing immune to the darkness that had swallowed his land entirely, unlike those who weren’t immune to the darkness like the moon-touched people. The darkness didn’t consume those from the Darklands, which had spiked our interest in discovering why they were immune, while others were devoured. King Aragon had intervened, sending his troops to guard their borders against us entering.
I used the cloth to wash my chest and neck, turning my attention back to Torrin, who had spun and now watched me with attentiveness burning in his wintery gaze. Those heated eyes slid to mine before they lifted, glaring at the people who were openly gawking at me.
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