Bane of Winter Read online

  “Morrigan is gone. You don’t belong to anyone. Do you understand? You’re free to do as you wish. The quest to get to the winter king and to convince the courts to make peace is mine, not yours. I don’t know what will happen. I honestly have no idea where this journey will take me or even if…if I’ll survive it.” The words were tumbling from my lips, and the truth was blooming in my mind, a truth I’d pushed aside since discovering the tower and the potential fate of mankind. “I’m not even sure who I am, let alone whether what’s required of me is even possible to pull off, but this journey doesn’t have to be yours.”

  He blinked up at me slowly.

  “I hope you still want to help me. But if you don’t, then that’s fine too.”

  I lay back down, facing away from him, and closed my eyes, my stomach quivering. “I’m going to sleep now, and if you’re gone in the morning then I’ll understand. I won’t hold it against you. I swear it.”

  His body was rigid behind me, and my chest was tight, but he deserved a choice. I closed my eyes and willed my body to relax. My stomach rumbled—the berries we’d had for supper had done little to satisfy my hunger—but then sleep slipped over me just as a gust of cool air swept over my back.

  Chapter Two

  Veles

  He’d touched her. He’d held her close. My blood simmers and my eyes are hot in my head.

  Mine.

  Wynter is mine.

  The primal part of me, the part still more beast than man, aches to tear, shred, and hurt the Raven. To pluck his obsidian wings from his body and smash him into the ground. But he is there, and I am here, trapped and isolated from her. Forced to remain because of a godhood I would abandon without a moment’s hesitation simply to be by her side and protect her like the feathered fool fails to do. Granted, his glamour hid her from the insane pixies, but he is no fighter. If they had attacked, if he had been a moment too late, she would have been torn and devoured.

  I can protect her.

  Mine.

  I close my eyes and exhale, desperate to summon some semblance of reason.

  She is not mine.

  She is no possession. But it is a small comfort that she has turned down the bastard’s advances.

  “Stop torturing yourself,” Dagda says from the doorway to the crystal chamber. “There is nothing you can do to affect her journey. The Raven is with her. He will help her. It is his rightful place to do so.”

  “Help her? Oh, I know what he wants to do—he wants to help himself. She isn’t safe with him, with his moony dark eyes and his woe-is-me persona.”

  “There is nothing to be done,” Dagda reminds me. “I should not have shown you this window into her world.”

  I swallow the rage, allowing it to burn a path down my throat. “No, I will watch, and I will learn. I will know her fears and her triumphs. I will be with her in spirit even if I cannot be with her in the flesh.”

  Something dark flashes across the Dadga’s face. It is gone too quick for me to decipher and yet there is a stab of unease. A warning.

  But movement in the crystal catches my eye. The Raven is gone, and Wynter is alone. I reach for the dome beneath which the crystal gleams.

  “He left her. He fucking left her.”

  Dagda joins me, leaning over the dome to look into Faerie. “Oh, no, Veles, he leaves only so he can protect her, but he has been lax, for look … look what remains.”

  I peer into the shadows, past her sleeping form, and see the gleam of inky eyes reflecting embers.

  Wynter is most certainly not alone. And I am helpless to save her.

  The thing crawls closer.

  “Wake up, Wynter.” My breath lands like mist across the dome.

  The creature pauses and looks up, looks through the crystal right into my eyes. Ice spears me, and the fire of urgency envelops my heart.

  “Wynter, wake up!”

  Chapter Three

  It felt like mere minutes before I was awoken by something … Someone calling my name? My heart was racing, and I waited for it to slow, but it didn’t. It continued to race in warning. Don’t move. Wait. Listen. The fire was low, and the darkness was heavy around me. The Raven’s presence at my back was absent, and the weight of disappointment settled on me. He’d left. I’d set him free, and he’d left.

  But something was here in the cave with me—to my left, in the shadows—a gleam of eyes, a scrape of talons, and a soft hiss.

  Oh, God. My bone dagger was within reach, but it would involve moving, it would mean alerting the creature that I was awake and aware of its presence. It skirted the flames in a crouch, pale skin covered in a network of inky veins.

  It was one of the tainted pixies. One of the hungry biters.

  Fear surged through me, but I squashed it. This was my mission. This was my life, and I needed no man to save me. I moved lightning fast, sweeping the bone dagger into the palm of my hand, rolling away from the creature and coming up in a defensive stance.

  It shrieked and ran around the flames to leap at me. My bone dagger slashed the air, snagging in its flesh and tearing a different tenor of scream from its throat. It hit the ground, rolled, and came at me again. The wound in its abdomen was a gaping black thing, but it didn’t deter the rabid creature. My battle cry mingled with its screech, and then my bone dagger was buried in its throat. It hung suspended from my weapon, feet kicking almost angrily, but the thrashing slowed down, and a wet gurgle filled the cave as it finally went limp.

  Disgust and triumph warred in my chest as I gingerly reached out to slide it off my dagger. The bone gleamed wet and inky black with the thing’s blood. Infected blood. On instinct, I thrust the bone into the flames and watched the fire surge up, bright and orange. The bone came out clean, new, and free of stains. The fire had cleansed it.

  The creature lay limp and lifeless at my feet, and I backed away. The world outside the cave was still dark, and the wind howled softly, but there was no way I could stay in this cave with the dead body of that thing. What if more came? What if they followed their comrade’s scent?

  There was no choice but to move on.

  Gathering my pack and meager supplies, I headed toward the exit of the cave, but the entrance was blocked by a looming shadow.

  A low moan drifted toward me, echoing off the stone walls. My heart stuttered, but my dagger was up and ready, and then the figure stumbled and fell to its knees. An errant shaft of moonlight lanced across a face smeared with blood. Its hair was plastered to its scalp, but there was no mistaking who it was.

  “Oh, God. Raven!” I took a step toward him.

  He reached out for me. “Wynter, they’re coming. More are coming.”

  I grabbed hold of his hand and hauled him up. “Then we have to go. Now.”

  He staggered against me, leaning on me for support and shaking his head. “No. You go. I can’t fly. I’ll slow you down. I thought there were only two or three, that I’d simply scare them off, but I was wrong. You need to run. They’ll follow my scent here. They’ll track the blood.”

  He’d left to protect me, not abandon me. Heat surged through my veins. “Like hell you will. We’re in this together. We’re a team. Take off your jacket.”

  He raised his bloody face to mine. “What?”

  I pushed him off me and then grabbed his arms to steady him. “Off. Now.” The jacket was fitted and soaked with his blood; it wasn’t an easy task to remove it. His shirt was wet crimson too. They’d bitten him, lacerated the fabric through and through. With a grunt, I yanked off the jacket and then dropped it inside the mouth of the cave where it would serve as a distraction.

  He buckled again, but I slipped my arm around his lithe frame to hold him up. “Time to run, Raven boy.” A strength I didn’t know I possessed infused my limbs. “Together.”

  I broke into a jog, tugging him with me, boots sticking in the snow, and tugging to escape each step. Away from the cave and back into the forest we went, where the trees shone in the bright moonlight and the wo
rld gleamed white and deadly beautiful. We jogged, slipping and stumbling away from teeth and talons and hunger as the trees grew farther apart and the world opened around us. Howls and eerie caws drifted on the whooping wind. The night was alive with the unknown, and we were nothing but prey. But I would not be prey. I’d come this far. I’d survived Berstuk, and the baku, and Veles’s insane ex-girlfriend. I was no ordinary mortal, and I would not fall. This was my destiny. This was my purpose. The words staved off the chill and the despair. They lent me the strength to haul a bleeding Raven through the crisp, white snow. There was no chill, just the burning desire to get as far away from the cave as possible.

  “Stop,” Raven said. “I can’t … I can’t go on. You must leave me behind.”

  Ironic that the more blood he lost, the heavier he became. “No. Move. We can do this. The forest is thinning. We’re almost out.”

  “Almost isn’t good enough. Wynter, my life is not worth yours.”

  How could he hold so little stock in his own worth? “Shut up and focus on making your limbs work.”

  Shadows ran low to the ground to our left and to our right. Wolves? Foxes? Some type of wild canine. No, don’t think about it. Keep moving. Eager howls bounced around us, growing closer. Up ahead, an expanse free of woodland winked at me enticingly through the trees. The hillock that would lead us to civilization loomed closer.

  “We’re almost there.”

  “And they’ll follow. There is no salvation unless you leave me behind as bait.” The Raven shoved me away. “Run.” I made a grab for him, but he staggered back, turned, and ran in the opposite direction. Toward the hungry wolves and critters. “Run!”

  Chapter Four

  Veles

  “Run! Dammit, Wynter. Run!”

  “Veles …” Dagda’s hand settles on my shoulder. “This is Wynter’s quest. Her journey of self-discovery. The power to survive lies within her, and only she can find it.”

  “Why does she stand there staring at death? Why isn’t she saving herself?” I want to back away from the crystal, to turn away from what I am sure is about to happen, because this is Wynter, and she won’t run. She will fight, my brave little warrior, she will fight, and in doing so, she will die, and I owe her this much. I owe it to her to bear witness to her courage.

  She takes one glance over her shoulder at freedom and then my nails dig into the palms of my hands as I watch her finally break into a run. But it isn’t freedom she sprints toward. No. She sprints after the Raven.

  Chapter Five

  I ran, not away from danger but toward it. The terror that should have accompanied that move was absent; instead something akin to euphoria erupted in my chest. The bone dagger, my weapon of choice, was warm and solid in my hand. Wolves rushed toward us, pinning us in, snarling in readiness to attack. One leapt at Raven, but I was there to defend, and my dagger smashed into the wolf’s head, killing it on a whimper. Blood sprayed, hitting me in the face, and crimson bled into my vision. Heat rushed through my limbs as I spun and stabbed another wolf, halting its arc as it attempted to sail over my head.

  “Wynter, no ...”

  But his voice was merely a nuisance, because there was another, more appealing sound in my head—the whisper of carnage and battle, and the thirst for gore. The rush of my blood, the drum-like beat of my pulse, and the molten power flooding my limbs were all that mattered, and with it came righteous indignation at the audacity of these creatures.

  How dare they? How dare they attack me and mine. My bone dagger flashed and swiped, suddenly longer, serrated, and powerful. It took off two heads.

  I grabbed Raven’s arm, hauling him up with ease. He shone brighter, his face a mask of awe as I leaned into him.

  “Fight! Fight alongside me.” My voice was deeper, strong and sure.

  The Raven stood taller. The hair that had been plastered to his scalp lifted and dried on a phantom breeze, and the blood smeared across his face sank into his pale flesh. His eyes flashed crimson, and then he spun away and tore the hide off an attacking beast with his newly sprouted claws.

  Laughter, wild and free, echoed up into the air, and as I turned on the rest of the wolves, I realized that laughter was mine.

  We lay in the snow, side by side, as if about to make snow angels. My breath plumed in the air above me, and the stars winked at me through the sparse canopy of trees. My blood was still galloping through my veins, and my heart felt too large for my body, but in that moment, the world was beautiful.

  The fingers of my right hand were slick and still fastened around the handle of my bone dagger, but my left brushed something warm. The Raven’s fingers curled around mine and then his face appeared above me, his dark hair falling forward to shield us.

  “It was you …” he said softly. “I see you. I see you now.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, to ask him what it was he saw, but his lips were on mine, sweet, tentative, and searching. With the heat of battle still throbbing through my limbs and the euphoria still gripping my brain, I kissed him back, reveling in the taste and feel of his mouth and his tongue sweeping against mine, and then the coppery stench of blood hit my nostrils and a chill seeped into the periphery of my consciousness.

  What was I doing? What was this? My hands came up to shove him away. I scrambled up before stumbling back and slipping on the massacred carcass of a silver wolf. One, two, three, a head, a limb, and entrails. Four, five, six, smeared into the snow like discarded butcher cuts. Panic was a fist around my throat as I brought the bone dagger up. It was no longer as long as my forearm, but was now the same length as my whole arm, wickedly curved, polished to a sheen, and dripping with blood.

  “I did this …”

  The Raven stood and adjusted his torn and bloody shirt, and I caught a flash of the unmarred flesh beneath.

  I pointed the dagger at his abdomen like a lethal finger. “You were hurt.”

  “And you healed me. It seems you have tapped into your power, hmmm?” He canted his head.

  Power? I stared at the death scattered around me, death I had wrought, and nausea clawed up my throat. “You call this power?”

  He frowned and took a tentative step toward me. “Wynter … you saved my life. You fought valiantly, just as Morrigan would have, and you saved us both.”

  Yes. I’d saved us both. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I’d enjoyed it. I’d enjoyed it way too much, and even now, as I stood in the bone-numbing chill, my body trembled, not from the cold but from desire … From the need for more.

  The Raven tilted his head up to the sky and his skin glowed crimson. “The sun is coming up, and I feel it, Wynter. I feel my strength returning.” He opened his dark eyes. “You gave it back to me. You allowed me to drink from your well.”

  His words resonated with a deep part of me that I didn’t fully understand yet, and at the same time, they sent a shiver of apprehension through me. This power inside me may have always been there, dormant, but it was alien, unpredictable, and bloodthirsty, and that wasn’t me.

  “It wasn’t me.” I met his eyes. “That wasn’t me?” Then why did my statement sound like a question?

  “Wynter?”

  Dagda had told me who I’d been, what I’d been, but that goddess was gone, and I was Wynter now. If the power wanted to play, if it wanted out, then it would be on my terms and my way. Protection for those I loved, and death only if there was no alternative.

  My gut twisted as if in reprehension, and the back of my mind itched in agitation.

  “No.” I stood taller, surer. “This is me.”

  The Raven bridged the gap between us and lifted my chin with the crook of his finger to look down on my face, and then locked onto my gaze with a searing intensity.

  “Yes, Wynter. I see you.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You will tell me …” I cleared my throat. “You’ll tell me if I begin to disappear?”

  His expression was earnest. “I will do more than tell you. I wi
ll drag you back.”

  I nodded curtly and made to tuck my dagger into my belt. Was it smaller now?

  The Raven watched me silently.

  I adjusted my cloak and picked up the pack I’d dropped. “Let’s find the winter king and take the first steps to peace.”

  It was almost pleasant now that the whispering forest was behind us. The blizzard hadn’t made a pass over us yet. Maybe it was confined to the woodland. The sun was high, beating down on us, but the world was still frozen and cold. The Raven didn’t seem to feel the chill like others. He walked easy and loose-limbed in his torn shirt and dark pants, his boots barely leaving any tracks in the snow. His hair was pushed back and tucked behind his ears, and his face was clean. We’d used fresh snow to wash the blood from our hands and faces.

  He could have transformed and flown the rest of the way, but he was here, walking with me, and I was grateful for the company.

  The silence around us was at odds with the world I’d been warned about. “Dagda said there was war, but it seems much too peaceful right now to imagine such a thing.”

  “We are on the fringes of the winter lands,” the Raven said. “But you have seen the plight of the animals and the forest folk. Civilization lies farther south. No doubt we will see evidence of the taint when we reach the villages and towns, and as we near the winter court we will see the true colors of the havoc the taint has wrought.”

  Oblivion. “Why not just say its name?”

  “Even the wind has ears, and if we are to succeed in our quest then it is best to remain unknown and unseen until we are ready to reveal ourselves.”