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KINGFISHER
EIGHT OF THEM stood in a line along the embankment.
They were still as the dead—the actual dead, rather than the undead. They didn’t snarl at the Fae on the other side of the river watching them. They were like decomposing statues, so still that for a second, I wondered if someone had
propped them up there.
“What are we looking at?” I asked.
The things Danya had witnessed over the years had made her just as unshakable as the rest of us, but her face was deathly pale as she jerked her chin
toward the feeders. “Just watch.”
A minute passed.
Another.
And just as I was losing patience and about to demand that Danya explain what was going on, they moved.
Together, they scrambled down the slope toward the river, moving in unnatural unison. Left foot first. Right. All eight of them skidded, losing their footing in the mud. They fell forward, onto all fours, threw back their heads, and screeched.
The sound had every hair on my body at attention.
As one, they came forward, crawling death on hands and knees.
“Do we break the ice?” Danya breathed.
“No. We wait.” If they were swept away with the river, we wouldn’t be able to inspect them once they were dead. These creatures were different, and we had to know why. As if reading my mind, Ren gathered his magic, forming a blue-white ball of power in his hands. My shadows coiled around my feet, pooling, prowling, ready to be unleashed.
“As soon as they reach halfway . . .” Ren murmured.
Lorreth already had Avisiéth in his hands. I left Nimerelle strapped to my back. My shadows would be enough for this. The feeders crawled out onto the ice. Further. Their hands and feet met the frozen surface in unison: left hand, right knee, left hand, right foot.
Lorreth twisted the sword in his grip. “I do not feel good about this.”
I didn’t, either. Something foul hung in the air. Toxic. The smell of the campfires and cooking food filled my nose, but there was something else, too.
Odorless, but I could feel it snaking up my nostrils and probing down into my
lungs. Whatever it was, it was not go— The feeders sprang.
All eight of them launched into the air like stags. They raced toward the middle of the river, to the point where our magic would take effect, then barreled straight through the invisible boundary without hesitation. The moment it happened, Renfis unleashed his magic, I loosed my shadows, and smoke and light streamed across the Darn. Ren’s energy hit first. The orb struck two of the feeders head-on. I diverted my shadows, sending them to the right to take on the remaining feeders, but . . .
Ren’s magic didn’t crackle and ebb, leaving bodies in its wake as it normally did. It flared, illuminating the dark, and then it absorbed into the two feeders that it had struck. They were male. Shirtless. And where the orb of magic had hit their chests, a network of brilliant white magic fissured outward across their ribs. The two feeders shuddered, and then suddenly all eight of them bore the same white convergence of power.
The light pulsed, glowing, and the feeders juddered again, their spines
arching.
“What in all the gods?” Ren whispered.
I urged my shadows out, fanning in all directions, eight narrow tendrils of black, shimmering with my own magic. Strike hard, I thought. End this. But when they hit home, spearing the feeders through the glowing marks where Ren’s magic now appeared to be trapped in their chests, my magic was pulled into them, too. And gods, did I feel it. It was like breathing in ice water. The cold struck hard, ripping my breath away. And the loneliness. The sorrow. It coiled up in my chest and wrapped around my heart so tight that it felt as though it were breaking. In over a hundred years trapped inside Malcolm’s maze, I had never felt as bereft as I did in that instant.
I wanted it to stop. The kernel of misery felt like it was taking root of my soul. It was hard to breathe; it was as though I’d forgotten how. I gasped, eventually sucking down a lungful of air, but it tasted all wrong.
I tried to pull my shadows back, but I couldn’t. The feeders drank them in and held on tight to them. A metallic black sheen swirled at the center of their chests, roiling amid the white energy they had taken from Renfis.
I looked to Ren and found him pale, his expression full of horror. Was he feeling what I was feeling? It damned well looked like it. “They fed on our magic,” he whispered.
It was so much worse than being bitten. Worse than them feeding on our blood. Blood was sacred, yes, but our magic? I wanted to be sick. In the grand scheme of things, neither of us had expended much of our power, but I could still feel it—that small piece of me that I had sent out into the world and would not be getting back.
The feeders shuddered again, half closing their eyes; they looked as if they were gripped in ecstasy. They groaned, all eight of them, running mangled tongues over their torn lips . . . and then they snapped back to attention.
“They’re still coming!” Danya screamed.
They ran, loping along, their strides unnaturally long, buoyed by their
stolen power.
They had almost reached the bank.
Setting his boots in the mud, Lorreth raised Avisíeth in both hands and angled the sword out point-first before his face. “I’ll hit them all with Angel’s Breath,” he growled. “They won’t survive that.”
“No!” Ren and I cried out at the same time.
“Don’t!” I panted. “They’re siphoning from us. If they take the Angel’s Breath . . .” It didn’t even bear thinking about. Would it make them stronger still? Would . . . would they be able to wield it back at us? Fuck, my mind was upside down. More of Irrín’s warriors were joining us at the bank. “No one use any magic!” I hollered, thick plumes of fog clouding my breath. “Use silver alone. Blades and daggers. Here they come!”
They broke apart as they reached us. Where they had been moving in unison, they now acted independently, their cloudy, bloodred eyes fixing on different members of our party as they attacked.
Had Lorreth heard what I’d said? I fucking hoped so. No rippling forks of Angel’s Breath broke apart the night.
One of the feeders—a tall, stocky bastard with shorn hair and arms covered in runes—bared his ruined teeth as he came for me. I reached for the dagger at my waist and my hand closed around nothing. Fuck! I’d given Saeris that blade.
There wasn’t time to think. I clasped Nimerelle and drew her, sweeping broad as the feeder hit.
No magic. No energy, I pleaded with the sword as I swung. Just take his fucking head.
The sword heard and obeyed. When its razor-sharp edge met the feeder’s flesh, no plume of smoke or magic erupted from it. The iron drove home, sinking easily through rotten flesh and jellied muscle, skittering along the edge of bone. But where Nimerelle bit through the flesh, a thick black substance crystallized along the blade like frost.
“What the—”
Nimerelle screamed.
I heard it in my mind, deafening and full of pain. Nimerelle shook so violently that the vibrations traveled all the way up my arms and rattled my teeth. The feeder didn’t even notice that I’d run it through. It came on, teeth snapping, pulling itself along the blade so that it could get to me.
Even without her magic, Nimerelle should have caused the feeder immense pain. She was both silver and iron. I could only hold her because of what had transpired at Ajun. The part of the feeder that had once been Fae should have recoiled from the iron, though. The part of it that was vampire should have been affected by the silver. But nothing.
I raised my boot, sliding in the mud, and kicked the feeder in the stomach, shoving it off the blade. The monster staggered back three steps, sliding back down the bank, which gave me enough time to gather myself. I couldn’t use the sword again. It had caused her pain. I jammed her back into the scabbard strapped to my back and drew another dagger from my boot, ready when the
feeder came flying for me again.
Shouts and screams pierced the night.
There were bodies everywhere now—more of the camp’s warriors, rushing to join in the fray. The feeder pounced, springing into the air. It caught a silver- tipped arrow to the throat as it descended, but the weapon had no effect. As the monster landed, I snapped the arrow and drove the splintered shaft into the feeder’s eye, but even that didn’t slow it. The feeder lunged, swinging its claws at me. Where the male’s fingers had once been were now sharp claws curved into hooks, dripping black with ichor. If it so much as scratched me . . . I wouldn’t die, but it would be bad fucking news.
I darted back, out of the fiend’s reach. I couldn’t use magic or my sword on it, but I was still faster. It snarled, frustrated, as it leaped again— “The ice!” Someone screamed. “They’re breaking it!”
A sinking feeling in my gut told me that the rushing water beneath the frozen surface of the Darn would no longer have any effect on these feeders,
though. There were only two similarities between these monsters and the demons we were used to dealing with: They were dead, and they were hungry.
Apart from that, these things were an entirely different breed.
Sure enough, when the ice shattered below the bank and one of the other feeders toppled into the water, it didn’t make a sound. It coiled itself below the waterline, compressing its body in the ink-black water, and then sprang up from the rippling surface, falling on Renfis.
“Ren!” The cry rang out over the sea of warriors. Somewhere, Lorreth sounded like he was fighting for his life, and yet he still called out to our brother.
The feeder snaked forward, its tongue lolling out of its mouth, snagging on its serrated teeth. I spun and whirled to its right, fast as I could, plunging the dagger through the side of its skull.
I needed to take its head, but I wasn’t going to be able to do that with it swiping at me with those fucking claws. “Fire!” I shouted. “Light them up!” We were running out of options. If fire didn’t work, we were fucked.
My warriors answered the call. In seconds, bright orange flames cast monstrous shadows along the banks of the river. Hundreds of torches appeared, glowing hot and spitting embers. A normal feeder would have balked at the sight of the open flames, but this one just kept coming.
“Stand back, Commander,” called a tall warrior with dark hair. He ducked around me, hoisting his torch forward, and I moved out of his way as he hurled the torch at the feeder. Fear whispered in my ear, or maybe it was the remnants of the quicksilver . . .
It won’t work. Won’t work, won’t work . . .
But the monster went up like bone-dry kindling as soon as the fire made contact with its moldering flesh.
The feeder didn’t make a sound as it was engulfed. Not a peep.
It didn’t flail or flee. It just crouched there, burning. Time slowed as the feeder pivoted and turned, sailing through the air and landing on the warrior who had set it alight.
“No!” I moved as quickly as I could, but it turned out I wasn’t as fast as the cursed creature after all. I was too late. It grabbed the warrior and Elroy still had a little speed left in him yet. He grabbed my arm, holding me back long enough to look me in the eyes. Pleadingly, he said. “What if they track you down and realize what you can do? The way you can affect metal—” sank its claws into his skull, crushing bone as it wrenched his head to the side and plunged shattered teeth into his neck.
The fight was over in an instant. The warrior who had come to my aid had his head caved in and blood drained dry in a heartbeat. The feeder was a torch now. It didn’t seem to feel the pain or notice that it was slowly incinerating. It hurtled off into the gathered crowd, falling on other warriors, unfazed by the blades and swords they plunged into its chest and at its throat. I watched my men fall as it rampaged.
“Flank it!” someone shouted. Danya. She was there, on the other side of the melee, running fast to meet me. I ran, too, and we both crashed down on the feeder at the same time, grabbing it and forcing it to the ground. We held it, and it burned. The flames licked up our arms and danced as it caught on our clothes. The heat was unimaginable.
“Take it!” I bellowed. “Take the fucking head!”
I had no idea whose axe completed the task. As soon as the feeder’s head was cleaved from its shoulders, I was dragged back from the flaming corpse by a multitude of hands. The sky overhead swam with streaks of light. The ground ran thick with churned mud and stinking ichor. A thousand knives sank deep into my chest as I was thrown backward into the Darn.
Being stabbed hurt. Being poisoned by a feeder’s toxin, too. But burning alive?
That really fucking hurt.
I hissed in the war tent as Te Léna administered a cooling salve to my hands. She was doing as much as she could for me, but she had exhausted her
supply of magic healing Danya. Healing was her birthright magic, though.
Unlike mine, it would replenish soon. She’d tried to help me when I’d been rushed into the tent, but I’d insisted she work on Danya first. I had gone up pretty quickly, but Danya had flared like a living torch. Her injuries had been significant. They would have killed her had the healer not tended to her immediately. Her blistered skin had been transformed to raw meat, her face badly burned. And her hair? Te Léna had done her best to soothe the angry burns all over Danya’s body, but her long pale hair was gone, leaving only singed stubble behind.
“In a couple of hours, I’ll be able to take a look at these,” Te Léna murmured in a hushed tone, gently applying another layer of the mashed poultice she had created from her store of medicinal healing herbs. I gritted my teeth, giving her a lopsided smile.
“It’s all right. I can barely feel a thing.”
“Liar,” she chided. Her eyes shone bright with unshed tears. “I know how bad that must hurt. You’re not doing anyone any favors by hiding it.”
“Okay, then. I’ll cry about it, shall I?” I winked at her playfully, letting her know that I was just teasing.
She said nothing to that. Just gave me a sorry smile as she went about tending the other open wounds on my hands and my arms. “A few hours,” she said again, when she was done. “As soon as I’m about—”
I closed my hand around hers, hissing a little when my skin split. “It’s okay, Te Léna. I’ll bear it fine.” She would never know it—thank the gods—but I had endured far, far worse.
Renfis and Lorreth passed the healer as they entered the war tent. Their faces were both soot stained, their armor plastered with ichor. It had taken them a long time to put down the other feeders. From what I’d been told, they had lashed them with ropes and pinned them in place while they sawed off their heads.
“We have their bodies trussed to a tree,” Renfis spat, throwing his gloves
onto the chair by the fire. We’d been sitting here, only hours ago, joking about my misfortune and discussing my new inkwork. It felt like an age had passed.
“They still won’t fucking die,” Ren seethed.
“We have their heads in a sack down by the river. They’re currently trying to chew their way out.” Lorreth looked weary to his very bones. He sank into a crouch, leaning his back against the wall; he held his head in his hands for a moment, his breath making rushing sounds as he inhaled and exhaled through his fingers. He struggled to find the right words when he surfaced again. “What in all five hells was that? Centuries, we’ve been posted here. Only once before have they ever reached this side of the river. That wasn’t ideal, but at least we put them down quickly. Half the camp is in ruins right now, thanks to eight feeders. Eight. And we still haven’t officially managed to kill them.”
“I feel sick,” Ren said quietly. “In the pit of my stomach. I feel connected to them, like . . . the magic they took has tied me to them. I can feel them tugging on it, trying to siphon off more. Do you feel that way?” he asked me.
I hadn’t wanted to think about it, but yes. That was what it felt like. I nodded. “We need to figure out who was controlling them.”
“Do you think anyone was?” Lorreth asked. “They seemed feral. Wild.” He shivered.
“At the end, maybe. But at the beginning . . .” The way they’d moved together, in unison, implied that they were under some sort of control. Even Malcolm hadn’t been able to work that kind of magic on his feeders, though. It would have required an exorbitant amount of power.
“You know who it was,” Ren said. “There’s only one person capable of something like this.”
I shook my head. “Tal hasn’t sired any feeders.”
“And you believe that simply because he told you so?” A sharpness rose in Ren’s voice.
“Why would he lie, Ren?” Gods, I was tired. My whole body felt like it had been chained to a horse and dragged three miles over rocky ground.
“Because that’s who he is. He’s a liar. He’s never been honest with us about anything. Foley’s where he is because of him. And he was there, the other night.
With Everlayne. He had her on a fucking leash, Fisher.”
“Malcolm commanded him to do that—”
“Why do you always defend him!” Ren brought his fist crashing down on the table. His shout echoed off the walls of the war room. His pallor had turned from ash to a furious red. “At every turn, you deny what’s staring you right in the face. He abandoned you. He left you over a thousand years ago. He willingly chose to leave us all and go with Malcolm. How do you think he is still walking the realm, hmm? The only way he is still here, proving to be a thorn in all our sides, is because he feeds from the living. He is everything we despise, and yet every time something like this happens, you make excuses for him.”
I let him pant away his fury. It wasn’t worth trying to speak until he burned through the anger gnawing at him. It struck me, as I watched him, his shoulders hitching up and down as he glared back at me, that the only time I had ever seen Renfis angry was because of Taladaius. In some ways, he was right about him.
But in all the ways that really mattered, he was not.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I know that there can never be anything but bad blood between you and him. But you’ve never been bound by a curse, brother.
You’ve never been forced to act against your will. And you have never been so in love with someone that you’d sell your soul to the devil to protect them. I pray that when you find your mate and you fall in love, you’ll know nothing but an everlasting peace with them. But for others . . .” I added sadly, “it isn’t that simple.”
Hours later, when Te Léna had returned to heal me and the sun had broken over the crest of the black horizon beyond Sanasroth, we ventured out to inspect the damage that had occurred in the night. The section of the camp closest to the river had been destroyed. Tents lay in ruin, fabric shredded, supplies strewn all over the churned-up ground. The dead lay along the bank of the river with Widow’s Bane blossoms resting over their closed eyes.
I was numb to the core. “How many did we lose?”
“A hundred and fourteen,” Lorreth answered.
The number didn’t make any sense. We’d never lost that many at Irrín.
During open battle, yes, higher losses were to be expected. But not here at our outpost. And not to eight feeders. “We’ll bury them back at Cahlish,” I muttered.
“I’ll open a portal, and we’ll carry them through one at a time.”
My brothers said nothing. Frustration still radiated from Ren as we crossed the bank to the large oak tree, but he kept the peace. We would talk again, he and I, when tensions weren’t running so high. That was the way it had always been with us when we were at odds.
The oak tree had been there for as long as I could remember, tall and proud despite the cold. Now, its trunk was shriveled, its bark sloughing off in thick slabs. From its roots to the tips of its branches, it festered with slimy mushrooms. The charred, headless bodies of the feeders struggled against their ropes, trying to wrestle free, but thankfully their restraints held true.
“These fell things aren’t of Yvelia,” Lorreth said in a hushed tone. “Nothing in our world could produce this kind of evil.”
But we had thought that once about the vampires. And power was an addictive drug. It never surprised me, the terrible things a corrupt soul would do to garner more of it.