Hakkon’s panting breath touched my ear, raising goosebumps on my neck. “I smelled it on you.” He took a deep breath, his nose buried in my hair, and I squirmed away. “I saw it in your eyes. No part of you is a mystery to me.”

I turned my head away, gagging silently at the carrion stench of his breath, unable to look into his mad eyes: his pupils had eaten the brown iris, merging into the sclera, and the white pinpricks in their centers were growing brighter.

“I am an honorable man, despite what you may think. If you had not struck first, I would never have touched you, but you have let anger overcome your better sense.”

His face was warped, pushing outwards under his human skin.

“Our pups will be ferocious wolves,” he said with no small amount of pleasure, his brogue thickening. “But, little one, you forgot a terrible and very important detail.”

I bared my teeth, wishing I had Bane’s fangs, that I could rip his throat out myself.

Hakkon chuckled, and whispered in my ear. “You don’t need your hands to bear my children, redling.”

Icy terror emanated outwards from my spine.

Breath frozen, knees shaking, he tore me from the wall and slammed me into the table. Pain radiated through my ribs and my chin, my mouth filling with hot blood as I bit down on my tongue.

And oh, it would become so much worse.

“Daniil!” he called cheerfully, and I felt his hardness press against my hip, the bastard getting excited over what was to come.

The door opened, and the tattooed warg in a man’s skin gazed at us with dead eyes. No surprise, no shock, only expectation.

“Bring me a hammer.”

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Chapter 46 Bane

Tension trembled in every limb. Thirst scorched my throat, a burning ember of need in my belly. Rage coursed through me, from being held back from what I wanted most.

The day was sinking towards night, and the golems still hadn’t moved.

The legions had caught up. Wyn had visibly aged another twenty years. Voryan had found a dead rabbit and was carefully separating flesh from bone and tendon, laying out veins plucked free with surgical precision. Just like the old days.

Exactly like the old days, like the past had been preserved in amber out here on the plains, a sliver of time where nothing had changed and we played out the same actions we had before: a bloody night, followed by a bloody morning, and too much gods-damned waiting in between, all of our hopes hinging on a single miracle.

But the miracles weren’t awakening this time.

Voryan’s third eye rolled wildly, while the other two focused on removing the rabbit’s spinal column. He was simply biding his time, waiting to wash the world in blood. Andrus was in quiet contemplation, making his peace with his gods before battle, as he had always done before. Wroth paced back and forth, not worried about tactics or strategy—as soon as the order was given, he would hunt, then leap into the fray, blazing with unleashed joy at the chaos of battle.

And once upon a time, I would have been relaxed and ready, arrogant in the belief that I would wade through a river of blood and come out triumphant on the other side.

Those days were long over.

Now I crouched at the golems’ heads, every muscle taut and trembling with the strain of waiting, my tongue flicking out uncontrollably to taste the air: the charred cabin was all I scented, but I kept hoping beyond hope for the taste of roses, for soft skin, for her sweet blood.

Anything at all to tell me she was still alive and close enough to find.

“Why do we wait?” Voryan breathed in that nightmare voice, the sound of dying wolves and screaming humans. “Let us hunt now. We’ll find her eventually.”

“We wait.” The words hurt to speak; I wanted to rush into the vast darkness, to use the blood coursing through my veins, pounding at my temples. My back ached, the final stage of my transformation preparing to break free. “Until the golems wake. She could be anywhere in Foria; Hakkon could’ve moved her.”

Andrus sighed, touching a silver pendant hanging around his neck; it had burned into his chest, leaving a smoky afterimage of itself embossed in his flesh. “Always so bloodthirsty. May the gods have mercy on all our souls. If we die in battle, we die in Her sight.”

“Still on the religious nonsense, are you?” Wroth’s eyes, now a deep crimson, flashed over Andrus and his charm with amusement. “What does Mother Blood care for us? If you’re correct, then was she not the one who opened a door to this hell and locked us inside?”

Andrus had always been a master of his emotions; not even his level gaze gave away a hint of annoyance. “Is it hell, or do you simply fail to see the forest for the trees?”

“And what do you mean by that?”

“Our lives are a test,” Andrus said. “A trial of patience to atone for our choices.”

Wroth snorted, his tail lashing, but we could all see that it was a facade; compared to the Wroth of Bloodrain, he was positively cheerful. “What the hell kind of a trial would that be?”

I exhaled silently; this, too, was from the past, the same circular, pointless conversations and friendly—sometimes not so friendly—arguments; the ways we clawed through our days, second by second, waiting only for the next round of war to sweep all else aside.

“The kind where, perhaps…” Andrus dropped the pendant; it hit his bare chest with a sizzle of freshly-scorched flesh. He held up his blackened fingertips, claws curling over them and adding to the uncomfortable appearance of too many joints. “We are rewarded with new lives. A new beginning.”

We all fell silent; of all of us, Andrus alone had not chosen to be reborn as a vampire. He had been forced into it, leaving behind a human family.

Later, when the woman and children he could never have again were dust in their graves, he had joined us, eventually choosing to become something worse than a vampire—he had already lost everything he had to lose.

What was becoming a monster, when you had nothing to live for at all?

But he alone hoped that there was a way to return to what he was. In his wildest fancies, I believed he thought Mother Blood would turn back time for him, dispel him from her red embrace, return him to everything he’d lost.

We never had the heart to disagree. Not even Voryan, who ate pain and drank despair.

“This too will be marked in Her ledger.” Andrus gazed at the golems, solemn and certain. “We are not here for blood, but to save the innocent.”

Voryan let out a laugh like a dead man’s choking wheeze. “No, Andrus, I am most certainly here for blood.” His actual eyes glanced sidelong at me, the third still rolling. “Mostly to save your woman, but blood, too.”

“Would you save yours?” The question came from Wroth, who looked startled that he’d spoken it aloud. He growled to himself, ears twitching to lay flat.

Voryan tipped his head back and forth. “From something in the Moor? Yes. Would I go to Foria for her? Doubtful. All she does is eat, sleep, and cry. She’d probably do the same here.”

“But she is innocent,” Andrus said softly. “She did not ask for this.”

“Innocent?” Voryan reared up. “She ran from me.”

“Because you’re a fiend, and a notorious murderer beyond that, perhaps?” Andrus suggested coolly. “Perhaps you are her trial.”

Voryan looked nettled at the idea, but shook his sharp-snouted head. “No,” he said. “I was kind to her. I’ve never liked the idea of killing women much, nor do I want to hurt them. But she screamed and cried from the moment she saw me. Why should I give her a chance, if she gave me none?”

As much as I appreciated my brothers, with our bonds forged in war, I thought that love was beyond Voryan. For him, the world was divided into two categories: Voryan, and everything he could kill.