feared Stolas was. Those glassy eyes shifted to Haven. “Please, Goddess-Born. Not him.”
“So it’s Goddess-Born now? What was it you called her before?” Stolas’s voice came out in a low, rumbling snarl more beast than human. “A mortal whore?”
“No. I will carry your message to the Sun Sovereign—”
“I have my own message for the Sun Lord, but you may not like what it says.”
Even Haven had the good sense to still as Stolas quietly glided toward the Asgardian.
The male began to pray. Stolas was silent, wholly focused on the hunt. The low, purring growl he made reminded Haven of the feral stable cats in Penryth after they’d been thrown leftover pheasant legs.
How long can I play with him? Stolas drawled into her mind.
As long as you want. Just . . . keep him alive enough to relay my message. Is that . . . possible?
Possible, yes. With the right amount of control. Although he will be ruined for anything beyond that simple task.
Haven didn’t even want to know what that entailed.
A pause and then Stolas murmured, Thank you.
She nearly laughed at the façade. As if she could deign to give him permission for anything. He could take what he wanted, when he wanted. Especially here, in his own lands, where his powers thrived so strongly that sometimes she felt his roiling magick all the way on the other side of the castle, a living, breathing creature.
His insistence that she command him was for ceremony, to convince the world—or herself—that she was a descendant of the Goddess.
But his gratitude wasn’t for her permission. In the Netherworld, he’d had a steady supply of souls to meet his needs, and she was never confronted with his dark hunger or the actual act.
He thanked her because she had recognized his hunger and hadn’t cringed from it.
Truthfully, a part of her was curious how the draining of light magick worked. What it looked like. Felt like.
She knew from previous conversations that Stolas could make the act pleasurable, almost euphoric—if he wanted.
But when he didn’t . . .
She made it barely twenty feet before the first scream began. And it continued until she was out of earshot.
4
By the time Haven trudged to the dining hall for a quick, tasteless meal of tepid oats, washed down by a scalding cup of ale, her weariness ran soul deep.
The hours after the attack raced past in a numb blur. There was so much to do before the approach of night and threat of new attacks. The wards inside the towers had to be checked, the weakened ones reinforced. Centuries before, during the Darkshade reign, the towers drew their power from the eternal demon fires that had been gifted by the Demon Lords.
But the fires had long since guttered out, and the ancient runes carved into the dark stone towers were eroded, worn away by the battering waves and ferocious storms surrounding the island.
The few rune scholars on the island spent their days and nights in the subterranean libraries below the city, scouring every ancient tome for the proper spells to fortify the wards once more—but less than half had been discovered.
Which meant every night when the silvery, ethereal light that blanketed Shadoria drained behind the Ravenite Mountains, fresh horrors followed.
And every morning in that magickal hour of dawn when the Goddess’s light spilled over the mist-shrouded city, Haven forced her tired body through the streets to visit the families of the dead.
There was the cobbler’s son, newly married with a baby on the way. The elderly couple who had been together for nearly sixty years. The family of six, slaughtered before they could leave the bed they all shared. They were still wrapped around each other as if sleeping, legs and arms entwined around the woolen covers.
Haven had rushed from the stone dwelling overlooking a dilapidated courtyard, disturbed not just by their tragic deaths, but by the way they had lived. The easy love that was evident in the way the mother held the eldest daughter close to her chest, the two youngest boys clinging to their father’s legs.
A warm, familial love Haven would never know.
It was in that moment, surrounded by the leftover carnage from the night, the crush of citizens who’d come out to see her, their eyes still somehow, somehow adoring despite her utter failure to protect them, that Haven felt more alone than she ever had before.
Every offering they’d tried to press into her bloodstained hands, every precious herb or beloved trinket or bit of