Madness of the Horde King - Zoey Draven Page 0,117
came.
I saw her eyes glowing in the darkness. My own. Her mouth moved but I heard her words as if they had been whispered right into my ear.
As always, seeing her felt like a dagger plunged into my chest. That ache that would always be there throbbed like an open wound, one that had not closed with time, one that had rotted with time.
She was standing at the base of a tree. Nillima’s neck had raised, her head turning towards my sister, as if she sensed a presence there too.
Seeing Devina was a reminder that I had failed her. That I had not protected her. That I had not been there for my family as they were slaughtered in the darkness of the night while I’d been…elsewhere.
“The veil is thin now,” Devina said. “I do not have much time this night. Come. Hurry.”
The veil?
I didn’t hesitate. Devina didn’t walk or run. Her face and body flickered here and there, appearing again when I thought I’d lost her, turning me this way and that way through the endless forest.
“Through here,” she whispered, standing next to a stream that I had never heard nor remembered seeing before. Devina vanished and I urged Nillima to follow the stream down, scanning the darkness in front of us for a sign of my sister.
That was when I saw it. Up ahead, a steady blue glow had begun to lighten the trees.
“Vienne!” I bellowed.
My breathing went even more ragged. Nillima seemed to realize what I did and her pace sped.
The glow grew brighter and brighter the closer we came. And then we were there, bursting through a dark curtain of vines that shielded whatever lay beyond it and I held my hand up to block the flooding of light that made my eyes burn after I had been in darkness for so long.
“Vienne!”
I saw her lying at the base of a weathered tree, its leaves glowing blue. The pyroki that she had taken from the horde was lying at her side and its head popped up to regard us suspiciously when we entered the clearing.
Devina was standing over Vienne but her face seemed blurred. Unfocused. Her mouth moved but I heard no words. Her gaze was frustrated, sad. She touched her heart with two fingers, held them out towards me—a gesture that I knew conveyed her love, one she’d often done—and then she was gone.
“Vienne,” I rasped, jumping down off Nillima and running towards her. “Nik, nik, nik.”
When I dropped to my knees beside her, my heart simply froze in my chest. It went dead cold because my first thought was that I was too late.
But when I saw her eyes flicker behind her closed lids, relief swarmed me so heavily that I got dizzy with it.
“Leikavi,” I said, pressing my forehead to hers. “Wake up. Please. Let me see your eyes. I need to see them.”
Pulling away, I looked down at her. Her veins were darkened and black, making my brows draw together in panicked confusion. I remembered seeing the ones on her wrist, but I’d believed her when she told me they were an after-effect of her gift.
But this?
They traveled up her arms, over her neck, and were slowly building up over her face. When I pulled back her cloak, when I lifted her tunic, I saw they were trailing over her breasts, her abdomen, creeping downwards. I lifted one leg of the trews she’d stolen from my chest and saw those veins circling her ankles like shackles.
“What is this?” I growled to myself, my lungs tight, the air thin. This couldn’t be from her gift alone.
My gaze went to the tree. The tree that Lokkaru had told me grew from her father’s body. The tree that had a heartstone nourishing it, feeding it, making it more and more powerful. More and more dangerous too, I knew.
It couldn’t have done this. Her veins had begun to blacken long before this moment.
“Everything will be all right, leikavi,” I told her, though it also sounded like a reassurance to myself. “I will fix this. I swear it to you.”
I needed to get her back to my horde. And soon. The healer…he could help her. He would know what this was, though I had never seen anything like it. I had to believe—
The Ghertun.
I froze.
The Ghertun scout, from the pack we’d tracked and killed close to the horde, had said, “It will take her quickly once it sets in. You will watch her die.”