Queen of Blood and Vengeance (Secrets of the Faerie Crown #4)

4. Arran

4

ARRAN

The entire palace reeked of decay. Black bile coated the once shining goldstone floors. It adorned the walls in a ghoulish duet, mingling with the coppery tang of fae blood. How had Gwen borne it in her lioness form, with her senses even more heightened? I did not dare ask. She barked orders at my side, but I recognized a soldier a second from shattering. Even the mighty Guinevere could not hold her composure forever.

“End of the corridor, opposite corner of the courtyard, down the flight of stairs,” she said, each word closely clipped.

I kept my tone equally brusque. “How many dead?”

“In the palace? Hundreds. I don’t have a count on the city. The messages stopped coming a week ago.”

No emotion clotted the blood pounding through me, fueling my muscles and my mind. In this place of violence and bloodshed, I was immune. It was what made me such an effective commander—and had earned me my title of Brutal Prince.

We reached the end of the corridor. Deserted. We made the turn and the courtyard came into view. The wave of shock was palpable as it rolled through the column of soldiers behind me. The courtyard was not just painted in black bile and blood. It had been submerged in it.

Bodies were everywhere, three or four thick in places. Some were clearly fae. But so many were nothing but a ghastly remnant. Elemental males who had been taken by the succubus long enough that their skin had melted away in places, dark bone visible. Half charred, where the elementals had fought with fire.

Yet the grotesque transformation of fae to succubus was nothing to the carnage those monsters had wrought. Females. Children. Dismembered, eyes gouged out, shredded by black fingers worn away to blacker bony nubs.

One of the terrestrials behind me vomited.

“Ancestors help us,” Lyrena breathed from over my shoulder.

“The Ancestors deserted Baylaur weeks ago,” Gwen said from my other side.

She wasn’t wrong.

I tallied the dead—succubus and fae—storing away the ratios for future battle scenarios. But the numbers told a story, and begged a terrifying question. “How have you survived this long?”

From the periphery of my vision, I watched Gwen work her jaw. “Fire slows them. So does beheading. They cannot heal. If you chop them up into small enough pieces, then eventually you can incapacitate them.”

A scream echoed behind us—from one of the offshoot corridors, rather than where Veyka waited at the rift. But the reminder was effective. Our time was dwindling.

“The suite is at the bottom of those stairs,” Gwen said as she strode the length of the courtyard. She did not try to sidestep the gore. “There’s one connecting hallway.”

Two weaknesses to guard. Two possible egresses.

I dispatched three amorite-armed terrestrials to each and led the rest down the stairs into the bowels of the goldstone palace. The walls were thicker here, masking the wails of death. On another day the foot-thick goldstone walls might have felt protective. But all I could feel was their inward press, tighter and tighter. This is what the war would come to—limited amorite weapons deployed strategically. Others left helplessly without it to face the succubus in any way they could, fire or flay. With little more than prayers to the Ancestors who’d left us in this mess.

There was the door, just ahead. Thick, encrusted with diamonds and aquamarines in a jagged pattern of sharp points. Like ice.

Memory flashed through me. These had been Roksana’s quarters. Once, Veyka and I had dined here, eating rich cream-drenched pasta and rolls of spiced, stuffed meat. Another life. Another male.

No time for reflection.

Gwen pounded out a pattern on the door. Three swift strikes with the ball of her fist, followed by two rhythmic slaps with the flat of her hand. A code that promised safety.

For several long heartbeats, there was no response. The door was too thick to hear anything from the other side. Gwen had mentioned children. Male children as well as female, presumably. How long, how old, before a succubus could slip into the mind of an unsuspecting male? When did they become vulnerable?

Lyrena inhaled sharply, but before I could glance to the side to see if her face mirrored the horror I kept staunched within me, the door began to move.

A face I recognized appeared on the other side.

Elora stood in the center of her mother’s repurposed apartments with the graceful menace I’d come to expect from the female Arthur had appointed to lead the elemental fighting forces. Behind her, two dozen palace guards stood between us and the survivors of the elemental court. Ancestors, was that all that remained of the elemental army?

Before I could ask, we were ushered in, the thick door closing protectively behind us.

Elora and her guards—all female—eyed the terrestrials, especially the males, with heavy gazes. They did not shift their protective array an inch.

“All of the males here are protected. They cannot turn to succubus—be taken by the darkness,” I corrected. Darkness, nightwalkers, succubus. We’d been away so long, had learned much, but missed more. Fuck. We’d need a month to sort it all out, once we got back to the safety of Eilean Gayl. A month we did not have.

Elora’s force dispersed, taking up positions near the doors, the balcony, and otherwise strategically throughout the apartments. As they did, the plight of the surviving elementals became even more clear.

At least they were alive.

Little more could be said about their state. The scent of unwashed bodies, overused facilities… and fear. That was the sharpest tang in the air. It hung there, permeating every female, child, piece of furniture, even the walls of the goldstone palace itself.

The healer who had once tended Veyka’s broken bones after she’d come crashing through the void presided over what looked to be a makeshift infirmary through the adjacent archway. A half-dozen children huddled close to their mothers, an abandoned game of ball and hoop in the middle of the balcony. The most vulnerable among us where always the ones with hope. The adults? There was precious little in their eyes. Not after all these weeks of constant attack.

Like the rest of the goldstone palace, there were no doors to separate the balcony from the interior of the apartments. But this one faced out into the valley, rather than into one of the inner palace courtyards which would have made them vulnerable to the succubus swarming the goldstone palace. Elora and Gwen had selected their refuge well.

A white-winged female came to stand beside Elora, arms crossed over her chest and thick braid neat despite the conditions. I would have recognized her even without the streaks of copper nestled amongst the gray of her braid. Cyara’s mother wore a face nearly identical to her daughter’s.

“Have you come to liberate the city or rescue us?” the elemental female said sharply. Sharp, because she knew we could only do one.

“We are getting you out,” I said, then louder— “Take only what you can carry, and only then if it will not slow you. Speed is our greatest ally in escaping the succubus.”

The maternal female’s eyes widened slightly, but she did not argue. She exchanged a look with Gwen, then Elora. An alliance had been forged in mine and Veyka’s absence. These three were the de facto leaders of the elemental court… what remained of it. They’d kept everyone here alive. I would not argue with them now.

Cyara’s mother broke away, going to the healer and then to another knot of upright females. The courtiers began to stand, to ready themselves. She had her talents, it appeared. And I had mine.

I turned to Elora. “The elemental forces?”

“Decimated,” she said without preamble. “Females only in service. Two dozen here. Another two dozen were guarding the doors of the remaining males, along the southern level facing the Effren Valley above the library. But since the nightwalkers—the succubus,” she corrected. “Since the succubus broke out of the dungeons, I have not been able to get an accurate count.”

Fuck. “What about the troops stationed in the mountains?”

Elora straightened. “I sent them away when the outbreak started. We thought the spreading of the darkness might be related to Baylaur specifically.”

They might still be alive. It was possible the succubus’ attack on Baylaur was specific. Related to Veyka, maybe. The way they’d tracked her at Castle Chariot was burned into my nightmares, sleeping and waking.

Gwen said something to Elora, making plans for our escape. But the firelight—a single hearth lit in the center of the adjacent wall—caught my eye. Or rather, the glint of the fire off of the jeweled pattern encrusted on the wall did.

“Amorite.” I raised my voice above the growing din. “Any you have. Dig it out of the walls if you have to. We need every gem.”

Elora frowned. “Amorite? What—”

The entire apartment fell silent. The scent of fear rose again, filling the space, waking my beast from where he slumbered in my chest.

Someone was pounding on the door.

Some thing .

And not in a pattern.

We opened the door to chaos.

Kay stood on the other side, his pick-axe ready on his shoulder, its blade as wickedly curved as one of his tusks when he took his boarish beast form.

He wasted no time. “Three of them, middle of the stairs.”

Soldiers were used to attacking the enemy, not escorting refugees. But Elora’s squad had been protecting the elemental survivors for weeks. I sent three more terrestrials wielding precious amorite blades to join the fight on the stairs.

By the time we reached the place where the corridor branched off, more succubus had joined the fight. Attracted to the sounds of steel and their next meal.

A glance was all I needed to know that the terrestrials were losing. Even with their amorite blades. The truth had been there in the courtyard. Dozens of elementals brought down by only a handful of succubus.

But they held them off. And for now, that was all they needed to do.

Lyrena led the charge around the corner, toward where the three amorite-armed terrestrials I’d posted there minutes before were now scouting ahead. A stream of survivors, interspersed with the terrestrials I’d brought and Elora’s guards, followed at a steady clip. But then they stopped. Just as quickly, they began to move the other way. Faster. They were tripping over each other now.

Fuck, what is happening—

The heat of flames burst overhead. There was only one reason for Lyrena to summon a wall of flame. The succubus had cut off our escape from that direction, too.

Fuck.

The stairs might be our best option. I reached the foot of the staircase in less than a second. In time to hear the scream of death.

Kay shifted, but too late.

The succubus ripped out a chunk of his stomach, his entrails spilling across the goldstone tiles. The monster did not even react to his sharp ivory tusk as it speared through its arm while Kay’s boar writhed in agony.

The terrestrial at his side—Vera, his niece—swiped up his amorite dagger in one hand. But she did not waste the time trying to free him from where the boar had become entangled with the succubus. She used the distraction to drive the amorite blade deep into the center of the succubus’ chest.

It fell. But another came.

Another flash of heat and Lyrena was at my shoulder, Gwen a step behind at hers.

“We need another way out,” I said, even though it was painfully obvious. In the heat of battle, the obvious could get lost too easily.

“These apartments once belonged to a member of the Royal Council. There must be a concealed door somewhere along this corridor,” Lyrena said, her eyes already searching. She braved the first step of the stairwell, a foot closer to the succubus, to get a better view over the heads of the panicked elementals.

“The secret passageways.” Gwen’s voice dropped several octaves, flattened out. It was more than emotionless—those words were barely alive.

But even if Lyrena noticed, she did not soften the reproach in her eyes as they cut to Gwen. “Haven’t you been using them?”

“I haven’t had time to clear them,” Gwen ground out. “I may well have been leading survivors straight into an ambush.”

I cut off my own reaction. Lyrena was right—Gwen had made a mistake. A potentially deadly one. In all the time I’d known her, I’d never seen Guinevere falter. But as she turned away, there were unmistakable tears gleaming in her amber eyes.

“There,” Lyrena yelled. “Behind the drapery.”

I saw what she meant immediately. Layers of blue and white gossamer hung on a rail that framed the entrance to Roksana’s old apartments. With the shuffling and press of bodies, what looked like no more than golden filigree detailing revealed more.

“Do you know the way?” I asked Lyrena.

“Yes.”

“Good. Then lead us.”

Hand held high, flames swirling at her fingertips in a beacon, Lyrena parted the crowd and wrenched open the partially concealed entrance. It was a narrow opening. Even going through one at a time, the adults would have to angle their bodies to pass through. But as soon as it opened, the desperate elementals began surging for escape.

Two lines of terrestrial soldiers fell back to cover our retreat. Before I ducked into the tunnel, I grabbed for Gwen. “Watch the rear.”

A dark lioness snarled back at me.