she stared at him—her cerulean eyes haunting. “Wake up now, Quinn, and do not make me regret this.”
She blinked, a slight pucker forming between her brows. “Regret what?” she began to ask, but almost as soon as the question escaped from between her lips, the clouds beneath her feet gave way and she fell.
Lightning struck. The world dispersed. The water whirlpools. The clouds. The staircase.
All of it vanished and left her falling back into nothingness.
Quinn woke with a start, her hands coming up to defend herself.
There was blood on her fingertips. She stared, waiting for it to fade like it never happened, just like the dream, but it never did. Sitting on her cot, the light of the early morning creeping through, a weight settled on her chest.
And deep down she knew it then … these weren’t dreams or nightmares.
They were real.
The Servalis Stone
“If something survives long enough to be considered ancient, it undoubtedly has a secret that let it become that way.”
— Lazarus Fierté, dark Maji, heir to Norcasta, royally pissed
A cool breeze drifted over his heated skin. Lazarus felt the flame of his burning rage far too close to the surface today as the voices he usually kept at bay crawled through him restlessly. Their incorporeal bodies burrowed beneath his flesh, searching for the dark power that evaded them. They’d only gotten a taste of it last night and were feral in their search for her.
Quinn’s essence still lingered in his mind from her walk through his dream—his continued nightmare. Lazarus had lost himself in the voices last night; in those demons that he never showed anyone, and in the depths of his sleep they came upon him with a vengeance in which they were owed but would never truly have. They ate at him from the inside out, just as he had once eaten them … and then she appeared. In a blaze of dark glory her silver head walked straight into his nightmares without caution or abandon. She disrupted their meal, striding up to him without a clue as to what she’d walked in on and they saw her, sensed her darkness, and went to her.
But unlike him, the man whom they raged at, they wanted her. Almost as much as his own magic did.
He’d have convinced himself it were a dream, if not for the bloody fingerprints on his arm when he woke. There was no other explanation for it. No other reason the voices would be so reckless in pursuit of her. She’d come to him at his darkest and he’d let her fall.
They were both better off for it.
Lazarus brushed off the calling of the voices and strode quickly through Cisea. It was calm in the mid-morning, people striding to and from their next assignments. The Cisean people were as hardworking as they were paranoid of outsiders. Eyes followed him everywhere he went, if it wasn’t the guards that Thorne had trailing him far enough back so he wouldn’t see, it was the women and children keeping tabs on his whereabouts and reporting to their men. They watched him because he was an outsider and a man, despite being a friend. He was also the one who held the leash of a certain young dark Maji that had half the warriors entranced. Draeven had already had to turn away three men who came forward with gifts of courtship. Not that Quinn knew. He liked it better that way.
Lazarus headed towards Thorne’s hut with steady, sure strides. The people watched him, some more curious than others. He heard the whispers of children asking their mothers about his aura, of noting how it looked like a certain woman from his party. They knew what he was, but not what he was truly capable of if pushed. Only one even suspected and that was, perhaps, why Lazarus respected the man so much.
Thorne stood holding several sheaves of parchment as he spoke with two nearly identical red-haired warriors in hushed voices when Lazarus entered his throne room after climbing up the rope ladder. Red eyes glanced up, and Thorne nodded in his direction before he handed the papers back to his warriors and told them to leave.
“Something I should be concerned with?” Lazarus asked, nodding back to the exit the two warriors had taken.
Thorne shook his head. “No. Just some reports from our outer scouts. Likely nothing important, but our men are always vigilant. It’s how we’ve maintained our hold on the mountains.”
Lazarus jerked his chin down