She dared to loosen one gauntlet to give him a vulgar hand gesture. “Learn this, demon.”
Between gritted teeth, he said, “Call me that again, harlot.”
She detested that word! With all the countless immortal and mortal languages, why was there no male equivalent?
A gust of wind drilled rain against her, sending her into a fit of coughing.
His voice a harsh grate, he said, “A male shouldn’t be heartened to see his mate’s misery. But this pleases me well.”
“Mate? I’ll die first.”
He brought one of his wings closer to her, easing that talon to her face. The silver length was rounded, smooth as ivory on the outside of the curve—but she’d witnessed how sharp the tip was.
“I could have killed you so easily, so many times.” He ran the back of the talon across her throat, letting the threat hang between them.
“Instead, you sent your knights to do it!”
“These lies again?”
Did Lanthe ever lie? Of course. In the noble pursuit of gold, she pulled out all the stops. She also lied to avoid trouble. Those outside her new family might get an earful now and again. But few things irritated her more than disbelief when she was actually telling the truth.
“You foul Sorceri pride yourselves on falsehoods!”
Foul Sorceri . . . Someone like you. “I’m so sick of you! You’d think after five hundred years that you could take a hint. I will never want you like you want me!”
“WANT?” His claw-tipped hand slashed the tree, his fury bubbling over—as if she’d hit an exposed nerve. “Do not ever mistake my interest in you! Fate has saddled me with you, cursing me with a female I find lacking in all ways!” His voice continued rising with every word. “Instinct compels me to pursue you, to protect you. Otherwise I’d take your head myself! I want you like a man with a badly set limb wants his bone rebroken. It’s a bitter necessity. You are the bitterest necessity.”
His words didn’t hurt Lanthe. She’d been scorned by men before. Why would she care what a scarred, maddened Vrekener thought of her?
She didn’t care at all. He mattered not at all.
When she just blinked up at him, he seemed to rein in his fury. “What either of us wants is immaterial. I’ve taken you because that’s what fate decreed. You’re mine by the laws of the Lore, the laws I uphold.”
“And you always follow the laws? You act like Vrekeners are so righteous? I’ve seen more evil in your kind than in most Sorceri I’ve met.”
“Now I know you lie! You resided with Omort!”
With each Accession, a warrior for ultimate good, or ultimate evil, was born. Lanthe’s half brother had been that warrior a few Accessions ago, bringing evil to the Lore for centuries. After her mother, Elisabet, had given birth to him, she’d been cast out in shame by the noble family of Deie Sorceri. By the time Lanthe and Sabine’s father had come into the picture, Elisabet had been . . . troubled.
This Accession, twin girls had been born for ultimate good, daughters of Rydstrom’s brother, Cadeon, and Cadeon’s Valkyrie wife, Holly. Lanthe was a doting auntie to them.
“You remained with Omort,” Thronos grated, “during his reign of child sacrifices, orgies, and incest.”
Omort had hosted orgies and made a willing concubine of his half sister Hettiah, who’d died the same day he had. Toward the end of his reign, when Omort had demanded sacrifices, he’d yelled, “Something young!”
Until that one fantastical day when Lanthe had challenged Omort, she’d been helpless to stop him. She would be haunted forever by the things she’d seen him do. Take it up with management.
“I did remain with him,” Lanthe admitted. “For ages.”
“Then what evils do you think Vrekeners have perpetrated to measure up to that fiend’s?”
“Torture, murder, thievery. Even you know your kind steals Sorceri powers.” The fire scythe his father had wielded wasn’t good only for parent beheadings; it also drained powers from its victims, a process Sorceri derisively termed neutering.
It was rumored that some “benevolent” Vrekener had ordered the knights to siphon sorcery, instead of taking lives. Yet in the last century, the knights had begun doing both—so that those abilities could never be reincarnated. . . .
“We harvest and store them, preventing them from being used for evil.”
“To us, a root power is like a soul. You’re stealing souls!”