by D. D. Miers
Reign of Rebels
Half-Blood Huntress Chronicles: Four
D.D. Miers
Graceley Knox
Praise for D.D. Miers & Graceley Knox
“The dawn of a new age of vampire.” - Crafting Geeky Bibliophile
"Thirst is the first in a new series from the writing team of Graceley Knox and D. D. Miers. Whatever they are doing, they are doing it right because Thirst had me riveted." - Tome Tender Book Blog
"The premise for Thirst is so unique... And these aren't just vampires, they are Kresova." - IB Book Blogging
“If you haven’t read any books by Graceley Knox or D. D. Miers well get busy because you are missing out on two very gifted story weavers!" - Goodreads Reviewer
"A CRAZY, WILD, INSANE RIDE THAT KEPT ME ON THE LEDGE" - Marie's Tempting Reads
Reign of Rebels Copyright © 2019 by D.D. Miers & Graceley Knox
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $ 250,000.
Cover Design by: Yocla Designs
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 1
Dear Reader,
Also By Graceley Knox & D.D. Miers
About the Authors
One
Sweat dripped into my eyes as I swung my sword, Caorach, wildly, trying to push my opponent back. It sang in my head as it sparked against its twin, Bas Fuar, literally icy death, and Eowynn leaped away from the flame that erupted along its edge.
“Watch yourself, Morgana. You lose your concentration, we could both end up mortally wounded.” She circled me and advanced again, her mortal blade glowing blue with the magic that would freeze the blood in my veins if it so much as nicked me.
“I wasn’t the one who had to power up her blade to gain back the advantage I’d lost, Eowynn.” I reminded her. “Caorach is a greedy son-of-a-bitch. It won’t let magic go unanswered, and I haven’t figured out how to stop that.”
She lowered Bas Fuar and sighed. “I know. But you must. The point of the exhibition is to show how powerful you are. Caorach must answer to you, not to your opponent. Try it again, and this time, you light it up first, so I can show you how to control it.”
We practiced the move three more times, each time with her holding her blade’s power back as Caorach flamed to life. Her control was absolute, but she and her sword had been bonded for centuries, I’d only accidentally been bound to Caorach months before.
“I don’t know if I should do the exhibition match, Eowynn.” I sheathed Caorach and scrubbed my sweaty face with the bottom of my t-shirt. “You’ve been doing this since practically before time. I still lock my demon-blade away in a warded chest back home to keep it from randomly appearing in my hand at Trader Joe’s.”
She sighed and slid Bas Fuar into the leather thong hanging at her side. “I understand your concern. But you are the princess, and your father must have this show of strength. Many nobles who weren’t in the room when you defeated your cousin are already pretending the assassination attempt never happened.”
Rage boiled in my stomach, and Caorach responded in my head with a call for their deaths. "How do you shut yours up?"
She held her hand out, palm up, and breathed across it, the moisture in her breath freezing over her hand and landing on her palm in tiny crystalline snowflakes. “The blade answers your own magic. control yourself, and you control the blade.”
“Not very diplomatic, are you?” I scoffed, and she shrugged.
“It was thought you would not respond well to soft words.”
I exhaled slowly in a piteous sigh. “Probably not.” I turned my own palm up and called a flame to it, my blood heating as the tiny flicker of amber materialized in the cup of my hand. In my head, I spoke to Caorach across the bond between us. Do not fuck this up for me. I’m trying to be a team player, here.
I will not do anything you do not wish, Blood Seeker. I am, after all, only a sword.
I stifled the curse that sprang to mind automatically and took a deep breath, then another, until I filled my mind and body with calm. I called to my blade, and my thigh warmed through the sheath as magic flowed between us, but Caorach remained silent, and the dancing flame in my hand grew to the size of a sunflower. At the thought, it changed shape, petals fanning out from the center until it was a flower made entirely of flame.
“Well, I didn’t expect you to do that,” my tutor exclaimed softly. “How did you change the nature of your magic?”
“I didn’t.” I closed my fist, extinguishing the flame. “I simply tapped into my human half. I’ve been a practicing witch a lot longer than a practicing Fae princess.”
She paced, her gloved hands clasped behind her back, silver-blue braid bouncing against her thighs as she thought. “So why don’t you do just that when we perform for the new king of the Unseelie?”
“The prince who reportedly ate his own father’s heart? I don’t think there’s a lot we can do that will impress him.”
I didn’t voice my concern that he’d accepted the invitation just to get in the door to kill us all and eat us too. First, because she probably already knew it, second, because he was the king of the Unseelie Sidhe, and that meant that he could hear things whispered in dark places. If he hadn’t already thought to do it, I wasn’t about to give him the idea.
“Maybe, but I’d wager that the rest of the nobles would be impressed by your ability to use both magics interchangeably. Isn’t that what we’re fighting for anyway? That the Fae accept you despite your mortal heritage?”
She was right, but I was still nervous about the thought of celebrating the part of me they hated, instead of focusing on my Fae lineage. I sheathed Caorach and ignored its whining song of complaint in my head.
"If that's what we must do, I'll do it. I wish I had control over Caorach the way you do Bas Fuar." I shook back my hair, now glamoured to the rich blood red shade that was popular in court. I preferred my natural purple, but Myst, the queen of the wisps, assured me that someone with as little popularity as I had couldn't afford to buck trends.
“I don’t control my sword, Morgan. We are one.”
I tried to school the horror out of my face as Caorach sang the magical sword version of ‘I told you so’ in my head.
Fat chance, demon-blade. I am in control here, and if you don’t like it, you can stay in your wooden chest, I replied silently.
I followed her out of the training ring we'd set up out in the ‘tween space, the in-between place that the Fae made look like a courtyard garden. It served as the front doorway to the sithen. Fairy exists outside of the mortal plain, held together by wild magic. Shifters and witches were the product of wild magic that leaked out the edges of Fairy to our world.
It was the only place I was permitted to have the local pack attend practices or meet with me while I prepared for the upcoming visit from the new King of the dark Fae. I’d already come to regret helping him gain a kingdom of his The High Fae had for a millennium denied that shifters like my pack back home, or witches, were in any way connected to the magic of Fairy. Then Grayson had accompanied me into the palace, and Fairy had allowed him entrance.
Instead of closing the gap between the Fae and the mortal magical world, the nobles had circled the wagons and refused to hear us out. The wee folk, however, the wisps and brownies and assorted pixies and imps who were the source of Fairy's strongest magic had welcomed the shifters as long-lost kin.
Of course, the shifters had rethought their petition to be accepted as Fae once the first refugees from Fairy had shown up on their doorstep. The apartment building that had once housed only the members of Grayson's pack now had a regular influx of Fae, both visiting and seeking asylum from former masters. Masters who belonged to the Fae nobility I was desperately trying to ingratiate myself to.
But you don’t care if they love you, Mistress. You despise them as much as they do you. Caorach’s whining was beginning to sound suspiciously like my own.
No, I admitted, but I would like them to stop sending assassins after me, too. Caorach was no help there. The more battles we were in together, the tighter the bond between us became. If I lived long enough, I might forget where I ended, and the blade began.
I opened my hand and called a bloom of flame to my palm, its petals opening until it looked like one of the lotus blossoms on the naiads’ pond out in the ‘tween. It was a simple focus of my power, like holding a breath. The nobles wanted to pretend that I was too weak to lead the Fae, despite the assassins I’d killed or sent running back to Fairy with their tails between their legs.
This beautiful, deadly magic is what they thought made me weak. Maybe Eowynn was right. I’d tried the softer side of diplomacy, following Fae etiquette, wearing their ridiculous fashions. I shook my hair out of its ponytail and lowered my glamor at the same time.
The violet strands that fell into my peripheral view curled up the corners of my mouth. I didn’t know if my father would agree, but that one small act of rebellious independence from Seelie regulated fashion made me feel more myself than I had in days.
A light bell sound pealed near us, and Eowynn gasped. “I’m late for drill. I’ll see you later, Princess.” She raced ahead through the great door that opened to the sithen, and I paused by the pool to think.
“You don’t follow the rules of Fairy at all, sometimes, do you, Nineve?” I asked nobody in particular, waiting to see if the naiads felt like visiting.
One of the shimmering, lovely creatures surfaced and glided to me. Her hair was the green of lake weeds, her body iridescent and shifting. To most humans, that body would solidify in the shape of their greatest fantasy in order to lure them to their deaths. Being part Fae made me immune to their glamor, but that didn't explain the pixie I'd had to dredge out before practice.
I guess like any other species, some Fae are weaker to temptations than others.
“You think we break the rules of Fairy?” She sounded cautious, her voice low, like lapping water on a quiet shoreline.
"I think you have your own rules, and those take priority." I trailed my fingers through the water, and she turned the ripples into the shapes of various underwater creatures and plants. "I think you are true to yourselves, and Fairy must bow to that. Am I wrong?"
She regarded me for a moment, the solid black of her eyes unnerving in their flat emptiness. It was like staring into the eyes of a shark that, at the moment, happens to be full, but still might eat you if you stay too long.
“You too have your own rules. Has Fairy punished you?”
“Only the nobles.”
“Those are Fae, not Fairy. The sithen has welcomed you, the wisps give you light, and even the great pit of nothingness opened to you. Fairy accepts your rules.”
She flipped her tail, splashing a few droplets of water onto my hair. The droplets glimmered and hung without dripping down, and my reflection showed clear jewels clinging to my violet hair. “Fairy does not ask that you hide the wild magic in your ancestry. Fairy does not demand that you wear a corset, or duel for standing among the Fae.”
"No. Those are antiquated rules that I think are probably just as silly now as when they were set forth."
“Be like the wee folk, the wild ones, or be like the Seelie High Fae. But you cannot be both.”
“But I am both.”
Nineve scoffed and splashed me again, this time dousing me with pond water. "There is no such thing as the Seelie High Fae if you take away the silly rules. Then there would be only wild magic, and the Fae would again be the most powerful people on all the planes."
She gave a hiss of disapproval and dove under the water as a shadow behind me gained features, and his crown glinted in the sunlight.
“They don’t much like you, do they, Father?”
He shrugged and sat next to me on the stone edge of the pool. “Once we were almost friends, but the nobles were afraid of their glamor and demanded I bind them.” He looked out over the water. “If you hadn’t taken quite so much pleasure from drowning noblemen for eternity, I wouldn’t have had to.”
Nineve didn’t reply, but a water spout appeared out of nowhere and soaked my father, Emris Stormkeeper, king of the Light Court, through his golden silk robes.
“She was drowning immortal noblemen forever? Why didn’t they simply use their own magic?” I scoffed. “Sounds to me like men were going to her willingly and pretending they were captured to avoid punishment for infidelity.”
“It was suggested behind closed doors, but when I gave her a chance to stop on her own, she refused. I had no choice but to follow the wishes of my people.”
That sentence was the tilting point of most of our conversations. I would remind him that Nineve and the wee folk he so readily used as servants and soldiers were also ‘his people.' Then he would give me some bullshit about diplomacy and leadership that made me want to tear my own hair out. And if it was a really bad day, then he'd say something condescending about my ability to lead my people, and I'd start listing the assassins (of both the physical and character variety) that had come after me all the way in San Francisco. I'd successfully defeated every one of them, and sent some home in pieces, but he still pretended I lived in some proverbial ivory tower.
“You’ve been quiet for an uncharacteristic amount of time, Daughter.”
I chuckled and pushed my hair back from my face, dislodging the jewels still hanging there. “I was just going through what we’d say in my head. Figured I’d save us both some time, and you the headache.”
“Because you wanted to remind me of my duties to the lesser folk.”
“Because you don’t have lesser folk, Father. You have powerful high Fae nobles who would become powerless if it weren't for the wild folk. If you want to be a strong ruler for a few more millennia, those are the ones who will keep the magic of Fairy flowing…whether you want to admit it or not." I held up some of the diamonds that had fallen to the ground. "What nobleman can turn water into priceless gems with a flick of a hand?"
I let the jewels fall into his palm, and they turned to water. “Parlor tricks,” he sniffed.
I counted to ten in my head. “Since when do parlor tricks allow magic to differentiate between a friend and an enemy? Your ignorance, the ignorance of the sycophantic, disloyal nobles you surround yourself with, are why
I’m terrified that the dark Prince is going to steal your kingdom. When he does, I pray he only makes slaves of you all. Even you must admit there are worse things to do to an immortal.”
He didn’t agree with me, but he didn’t argue, either. It was a tentative step in a direction that might save his people. I left him staring down at the small puddle of water in his hand and stepped into the pool, my breath catching as the bottom fell away and the naiads sent me to the fountain in front of my apartment building in San Francisco.
It was the fastest mode of travel between the ‘tween garden and my pack. My father didn’t know yet, but I had even more surprises I’d be bringing to the feast in honor of the new Dark King’s coronation.
Two
Grayson’s second in command, (and my best friend) Niall held out a hand as I stepped shivering and complaining onto the pavement. “There has got to be a spell to make this spot warm. Fucking temperate zone bullshit sixty-degree weather.” I took off my t-shirt and wrung water out of the tank top underneath. “Still, beats flying across the country every other week, doesn’t it?”
He grinned at me and handed me an oversized terrycloth robe. “That’s the Morgan I was waiting for. You usually don’t complain until after you’ve said hello.”
“Sorry, Love. The last person I spoke to before I passed through our very wet portal was my father. It left me a little out of sorts.”