Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 25

  Her instincts heightened the more Murial took away her reason; Asha was accustomed to that state as well.

  “You underestimate my desire for your destruction,” Asha whispered back. She adjusted her teeth in Murial’s neck.

  “I will kill you before you kill me.”

  “We shall see.”

  Murial reacted with delight rather than fear at Asha’s challenge, casting the dragons away from them to keep Asha all to herself.

  Asha and Murial spun in the air again, twisting, turning, refusing to release the other but continuing to split the flesh they could, even as they drew thick blood into their mouths and down their throats. The blood attempted to heal the damage, but it was dead blood and not designed for sustenance, restoration, or satisfaction. Nor could it fill their veins fast enough to make up for the speed of the losses. Pleasure, too, moved their blood faster despite no heartbeat to pump it.

  There was nothing but their increasingly languorous pleasure and the pain of the other woman attempting to tear them apart even as they held each other closer.

  Asha’s knife reached the ribs. It took extra effort to break through each.

  Murial’s claws used what her dragons had rent and widened the wounds, attempting to tear flesh completely from bone.

  Asha flung them against the castle walls, pinning Murial there while Asha shuddered through climbing orgasm. Murial’s bite loosened its grip as she tasted Asha’s heightened pleasure and Asha forced hers to follow. It wracked through both of them, Asha’s toes curling between the castle’s stones as she came.

  Warmth seeped from her toes, up her legs, suffusing her bleeding abdomen, then filling her all the way up to the top of her head. Raging fever brought sweat to Asha’s skin. She gasped with the new pleasure that followed the heat.

  Murial broke away, screaming, but not in pain. Red blood like that of a human dripped down her chin. She stared at Asha’s neck in shock, eyes wild and mad and reflecting with blood and fire. Her tongue crept out to meet the blood.

  Even after whole nights of plundering the kingdom’s hearts, with her own blood failing to replenish fast enough to recover from their mutual feeding, both she and Asha were as good as starving.

  The only thing that kept Asha from losing her mind at the sight and scent of her own blood was the pain in her chest, not from Murial but from her heart at the deepening heat—a heart heated to life and remembering it should beat. But she was dead.

  Murial reared back, surprise falling away in favor of satisfying desperate starvation, but Asha had the moment—the split second that the castle had given her.

  At the same time her knife reached the woman’s heart, Asha plunged her hand in and grasped the organ. Murial did not need it to live, but without it, blood flow would be thwarted all the more, and she would be unable to grow another one in time.

  Then Asha caught her under the chin with her claws, drawing lines from ear to ear almost to the spine. Black blood spilled over and down Asha’s arm like an overflowing apothecarist’s cauldron.

  Murial could no longer lunge, but Asha did, sinking teeth into Murial’s cheek and launching them from the castle wall down to the garden gravel. Murial’s bones cracked underneath her from the force of the landing.

  Asha pulled Murial’s heart from her chest and held it above her face, black blood mingling with the redder blood that still pattered from Asha. She tore a bite from it before flinging it into the flames of the rose garden.

  Murial struggled to rip at Asha’s face, but a few superficial cuts meant little as Asha brought her heart-slick hand to join the one at Murial’s neck. She dug into the cuts that had taken Murial’s ability to speak as well as move her head without opening the wound further.

  “You little nothing whore. You will never be more to him. One day you will wish I had killed you.” Murial’s voice and the scrabbling of her thrall was all she could manage to slow Asha’s movements, but not enough to stop her.

  Asha found the firm, smooth bones of the woman’s spine at the base of her skull. “I would rather be his whore,” she said, her lips brushing against Murial’s snapping teeth, “than your victim.”

  With a soft moan, Asha broke Murial’s spine, severing it entirely. From there, it was short work for Asha to take Murial’s head and pull the rest of it from her neck, nothing to stop her but easy flesh.

  She flung it into the fire to join the heart.

  Chaos reigned around her, animal screams of pain echoing all around, but Asha slumped over Murial’s beheaded body. She gasped for air. She did not need air, so why did it come to her so poorly?

  Asha fell to the side, but she slowly rolled to her back to gaze at the sky. Fire framed her vision. Angels fell in brimstone. Teeth gleamed like silver. The clouds that blocked the moon glowed red.

  Now that she no longer focused on destroying her enemy, she could assess how that enemy had destroyed her. The fever faded fast, seeping from the multitude of cuts, shallow and deep, that the dragons and Murial had rendered upon her. When she moved her fingers over her body, they passed over dead organs, bone, places where whole cuts of flesh had been removed, and that was just where she could reach—her back must have been even worse. Gravel found its way into places rocks should not have touched.

  “Asha.” The weak voice was like a lullaby to Asha’s ears as her consciousness faded.

  A slashed wrist pressed to her mouth. Blood—not human, but not of her own kind either—flowed hot down her throat.

  Callina tucked herself closer to Asha, wincing and whimpering. “It is over. The dragons turned to ash with their sire. You will not die. Drink of me.”

  The blood roused Asha from her daze. When she realized what Callina was doing, she shook her head and pushed Callina’s wrist away, though to do so was like pushing a boulder up a mountain.

  “No. You need to heal yourself,” Asha said. “You cannot survive if I…if I drink…”

  “I will not survive either way,” Callina whispered. “But I can ensure you will.”

  “No.”

  “The blood is already offered. Would you waste it?” Callina grunted as she brought her wrist back to Asha’s mouth, this time forcing it between her teeth, where Asha could not resist. “This is my duty. This is my choice.”

  No, Asha pleaded inside her mind, but if Callina could hear her, she did not withdraw, and Asha could not open her teeth now that they had closed over the willing offering. Starvation stripped her of will.

  “Someone save her.”

  “Let me save you.” Callina rested her head against Asha’s shoulder. “I am your warrior. I am made for death. Drink from me, love. I have no use for it anymore.”

  Asha could not help but obey, no matter how she tried to loosen her jaw, no matter how still Callina became next to her.

  Someone removed Callina’s wrist from Asha’s mouth and immediately replaced it with a neck. A warm, pulsing neck. Not wolf. Human.

  “Drink,” the king commanded, wrapping his thrall around Asha like one of her quilts. His voice rasped, but he stood above her, which was more than she could manage. “I will ensure that each of my servants lives, though they owe you their lives. They trust me. Drink until the sleep takes you.”

  “Callina…”

  At first there was silence. Asha could not see the king with the servant’s red hood in her way. The woman gasped when Asha’s fangs pierced her. Her red-gloved hands clenched in the gravel the way they might grasp at sheets.

  “She still breathes,” the king finally said. “The wolves tend to their own now. And I tend to you. Drink.”

  12

  When Asha opened her eyes, she rested in the middle of the king’s bed, nestled among sheets, quilts, pillows, the mattress beneath her simply a mattress. Human blood still lingered in her mouth, but her body had been scrubbed clean and swathed in the same red that lined the master’s room—a simple gown, nothing more, thin and cool and soft.

  She sat up. When last she had assessed her cond
ition, too much of her had been missing, but now it was as though the battle had never happened. No wounds to sting or new, too-tight skin. No scars but the ones she had carried with her from her human body. Asha pressed her fingers against her abdomen, over the blades and lines of her shoulders. Tough but smooth skin, nothing more.

  “Like new,” the king said from the doorway. “As though newly risen from the dead.”

  Her bewilderment must have shown in her expression, because he lowered his eyes with a humorless smile. “Oh yes, everything you remember happened, Asha. The woman is gone, and she put too much of herself in her dragons, ensuring that they were destroyed with her. I have watched children die with their sire before, when the children are new and the sire’s blood still fresh within them.”

  “Would I die if you died?” Asha asked.

  The king entered the room, closing the doors behind him.

  “Likely, but not guaranteed. The more blood unlike mine that you take, the more your blood becomes your own. I survived my sire’s destruction with little more than a pang when he died in me as well. But you need not fear your death with mine. There are none to challenge me now.”

  Asha crawled cautiously to the edge of the bed, wrapping her fingers around the copper. The iron shackles had been removed, but their phantoms weighed her wrists. “What of those who did not survive?”

  “What remained of the dragons was burned in the rose fire with the rest, as was Murial’s body. The remains of the wolves were used to strengthen the living pack.”

  Asha swallowed. “The wolves eat their dead?”

  “After a battle, the wolves need meat to recover, as we need blood. The dead serve their brothers and sisters, become part of them. And when it comes to meat, we are precious low on supply—most of what we had was slaughtered for preparation. The dragons took others. The rest must be shared among the servants for now. The pack has no other recourse than to feast upon their own, although the wolves see such use of the fallen as the utmost sign of respect.”

  “How many fallen?” Asha asked.

  “Over seventy-five. Far too many, when measured with the loss of the rest of the kingdom.”

  Asha leaped over the metal that caged her in as easily as the time before the battle. She landed on the stone without a sound. The king still did not approach her.

  She would not equivocate any longer. “What of mine?” She cared about the warriors that the king had lost. She cared about his pain. But hers pierced through her chest as though it were her own heart she had removed.

  “Both Lysan and Callina suffered terrible injuries. Lysan recovers, but death remains at Callina’s threshold. It has been three days. They need more time to heal, if they will.”

  “And the captain?” she asked.

  “He lives. He will not speak to me, but he lives.”

  “Why will he not speak?”

  “For the same reason you will not come to me, Asha. Because the loss hurts him deeply, and I am the cause.”

  “It is you who will not come to me.” Asha cautiously advanced. “Do you finally believe that you should not have saved me from her, that so many of your warriors could have been saved in my stead?”

  “There are two parties guilty of slaughter. You are neither.” He leaned his cheek into her hand when she reached up to his face. “The tyrants alone claim responsibility. Without you, Asha, we would have lost. The dragons had us outnumbered, overpowered, despite the flaming arrows and the catapult reinvention to which you also contributed. Murial was willing to sacrifice more than I or my warriors. They exploited our weaknesses for each other—and they were weaknesses.”

  “Because they were not shared,” Asha finished for him.

  He took her hand and kissed it with almost frightening earnestness.

  “When they chained me like a dog, I realized her intentions. To lose my mind, my memory of all I had created, all I had fought for, all I had lost, all I had loved. She devastated me before she even began starving me with her blood. But though the dragons hurt me every time you hurt her, I could not tear my eyes from you, my vicious beast, my Grayling jewel, the last of my wives.”

  He ran his retracted claws through the thin strands of her streaked hair, stripped of every last bloodstain. “The Gray never deserved you, Asha. Perhaps I never deserved you. Perhaps the pack would have given your ferocity the richer garden it needed to grow. But you are of my kind now, and what a thorny garden has grown, my favorite rose.” His brow furrowed at the memory of his winter roses reduced to the same mingled ash as the woman and her dragons, but he brought his arms around Asha, and she allowed herself to be enveloped, though she did not envelop him in return.

  “The castle saved me,” she murmured. “How did it fare the worst of the fire?”

  “The old rooms of the castle were beyond saving, but not many carpets or tapestries lined its corridors. The fire had less to fuel it. What the castle did not take into itself, the servants were able to stifle. The worst damage was to the rose windows, and I do not know of a glass-smith living who can repair it. The servants have draped them in black for now. It is as though my colors died with the roses and we mourn them as well.”

  “I want to see her. Take me to her.”

  SOME OF THE wolves had hung makeshift curtains over the windows of the den to make the room less harsh for those still recovering. Light stretched across the shadows like mist, needles in Asha’s eyes, but as long as she stayed out of the sunset beams from the still undraped windows, she could bear it. When she stepped too close to the light, it was like her worst sunburn, when the executioner had left her out in the open without the shade of wall or awning for days at a time. But the king guided her to the side, to the dark that soothed her skin.

  Such distinction meant little to the wolves still suffering. The dragons were not the only ones who had lost limbs in the raging between them. Asha wondered if what they had sacrificed had been given to them again as nourishment.

  Callina lay on her cot. Her beautiful, scar-marbled skin had been sewn together with needle and thread ill-equipped to tend to flesh. A red-clad servant knelt at her side, cleaning the wound at her neck, which seemed to have healed better than the one on her belly.

  The wound at her belly showed signs of multiple sets of threads, empty healing holes where the previous ones had been. The edges were red woven with purple, with seepage over the threads that gleamed even in dim light. Her face had lost its color—not as the Gray leached its children but as though she had already started forming her ghost. Her eyelids fluttered and she twitched as the servant cleaned her, but she did not wake.

  “She should not have held on as long as she has,” Lysan said. He could stand, but he winced with every step on his remaining foot. Lacerations laced his exposed skin, most of them well on their way to scars now but for where the dragons had reopened the axe wounds and clawed over one of his eyes. The flesh had healed into an amalgam, indistinguishable as eye or eyelid or cheek, the injury less kind to him than the captain’s. “There is promise yet. At first we had to force-feed her, and not all of it stayed down. Now she keeps what we give her without tearing her insides anew, but she remains betwixt.”

  Asha knelt on the other side of Callina, across from the servant. She brushed the sweat-drenched locks of hair from her temple. “I have never seen your kind so ravaged. You bear scars, but none dire.”

  “Were Callina fallen like this on a field of battle in kingdoms beyond, one of the wolves would have snapped her neck.” His remaining eye revealed what he withheld in his deadened reply.

  Asha rested her hands on the cot, tensed as though ready to shield Callina if Lysan thought to implement tradition.

  At her surprise, he offered a half-hearted wry smile. “A warrior wounded as she could not survive on her own. She could not run with us. After a battle, it is mercy to kill those who would die. But we have never fought a battle here, where we have nowhere else to run and where we have the resources to tend to the wounded. We
have also never fought a battle so dire that so many of us were left with more than simple scars.”

  Asha relaxed her grasp on the mattress, but her fingers still quivered as she traced along the worse of the infection. “Is there nothing I can do?”

  “What would help a human woman cannot help a wolf,” the king said quietly. “Your thrall can quiet her mind, but your blood will not cure her.”

  “All we can do is wait and continue to feed her. Human flesh would be best, but not many servants died in the battle. What we have left in the stores are from forest creatures and ourselves.” Lysan held out his hand to her as she made to rise.

  She did not need his help, but she accepted the gesture. He hummed when she sent the blood-red mist of her thrall outward, caressing him by proximity. Callina stilled on the cot. Her breathing calmed, shallow but regular.

  Asha raised her eyes to the king. “We do not lack in human bodies.”

  Revelation glittered in the black. “Bloodless, yes, but in this winter, flesh might not have spoiled.”

  “The survivors might resist if we take from their families.” Rafe stood deep in the shadows, the sentinel peering over his wounded, as unmoving as though he were part of the stone wall.

  “Murial said the dragons would leave no survivors,” Asha said.

  “She also said she would win.”

  “We can begin at the Tapestry square. The men there forfeited their lives when they bid for you.” The king rested a hand on her bare shoulder. “Their deaths would have been mine and yours to deal in the end. And that is where the slaughter began, without warning. Fewer survivors, fewer to protest what we take.”

  Rafe emerged into the dim light, colder in demeanor than Lysan’s dispassion, still refusing to meet the king’s gaze as well as hers. “I will take some of my own. Leave the task to us.”