High Elves face to face. They were the mortal enemies of my kind, Dokkalfar, Night Elves. And now, the blond bastards ruled Midgard, what had been world of men. They killed my kind on sight, or for sport.
When they weren’t slaughtering Night Elves, the High Elves were imprisoning us in caverns under the ground. Every Night Elf like me had dreamed of freeing our kind. And I’d nearly had the chance…
There it was again, that frosty bloom of regret spreading over my heart.
But revenge against the High Elves would never be easy. Here in Midgard, we were outnumbered. Barthol and I had spent the last year planning the robbery. We’d kept a low profile, sleeping in abandoned townhouses, scrounging food on the streets. We’d steered completely clear of the High Elves the whole time, never getting too close. Never risking death until we had to.
The guard slowed, and I heard him suck in a sharp breath. Something had him on edge. He stopped, fumbling with his keys. Judging by all the jangling, it sounded like his hands were shaking. What did he have to be scared of?
A low growl reverberated in the cellblock, and the sound slid right through my bones.
It was like nothing I’d ever heard. The hunting cry of the troll had been terrifying, but at least it’d sounded dumb. This growl was barely audible, yet somehow managed to convey a brutal savagery. It was a strangely haunting sound, shivering over my skin and turning my veins to ice.
The guard ripped the cell door open and pushed me to the ground. My knees bit into the cold, jagged rock, and I tried to stand, but the guard pressed a foot to my back as he undid my handcuffs.
Again, that low, quiet, forlorn growl slipped over the stone like wind howling through trees.
The guard gasped. He was terrified.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer as he ripped the blindfold from my face. I rolled over to look at him, catching golden eyes wild with terror. Then he stumbled back out of the cell, slammed the door shut, and ran down the corridor and out of sight without looking back.
I was left alone in complete darkness. Not that I particularly cared. Night Elf eyes were magically adapted to a life underground.
I squinted, studying my surroundings. Unsurprisingly, a row of thick iron bars separated me from the corridor’s glistening stone floor. Jutting from the wall behind me was a granite slab, covered in straw. My bed, apparently. No sign of food or water.
My instincts told me to stay back, that something deeply unnatural and evil lurked nearby.
And yet—curiosity had me shifting closer to the bars, peering between them and into the corridor. I scanned the narrow hall, counting ten cells in the block, five on each side. Iron rods barred each of them from floor to the ceiling. From this vantage point, I could only see into the cell across from me, but it was like the darkness was thicker there.
I squinted, trying to understand what I was looking at. In the back of the cell, where a stone bed should have jutted from the wall, pooled inky shadows that my eyes couldn’t penetrate. As I stared, the shadows began to move, coalescing into something denser.
The low growl returned, skimming along the rocks and trembling over my skin. Across from me, the darkness seemed to lengthen into the shape of a man. An enormous man, looming over the back of his cell—six foot five at least, big as a god. What was he?
The hair on the back of my arms rose. Still crouching on the cell floor, I inched back. No wonder the guard had been freaked out.
Without warning, the man shifted so fast that my heart skipped a beat, a flash of movement in his cell. When the smoke around him thinned, my breath caught in my throat. His tattered shirt revealed a thickly muscled chest tattooed with runes gleaming with magic.
But from between the tattoos crawled a stygian darkness, like black ink that was also somehow alive. Shadows writhed around his face, so dark and thick I couldn’t see his features until, for an instant, they flitted away.
In that moment, I saw what lay beneath—a heartbreakingly beautiful face, with cheekbones sharp as blades and eyes the color of a glacial stream. Most of all, his wicked smile made my blood turn to ice.
He was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most terrifying man I had ever seen, like someone