Page 5 of Reign of the Talon
The red thread of fate leads into this splash, and Rui knows that if he wished so, he could step into this scene—make his presence known, murmur words that the Prophecy would hear whispered down their bond.
She’s speaking to somebody, her red lips curled in that horrible grin, a rictus on Lina’s face. Fury washes over him as he turns away. It is not the Prophecy that he is trying to find, who he is attempting to follow the red thread toward. No.
It is his wife, his soul-stitched whom he looks for. Shin Lina, with her sparkling laugh and fierce disposition. Shin Lina, his little thief, his assassin whom he loves with every beat of his bleeding heart. Shin Lina, who died with Eunbi—
Rui squeezes his eyes shut, gripping the red thread so hard that his nails dig into his palm, leaving angry red crescents as that terrible night forces its way into his memories.
It was never meant to happen like that. Kang, colorless with shock, had knelt before Rui later that night in Gyeulcheon, swearing upon his life that this—thishad not been his clandestine plot. Eunbi’s presence, combined with his Dokkaebi fire, had only been meant to shock Lina out of the parasitic Prophecy’s grip. Rui swallows sickness as he remembers gripping the collar of Kang’s robes with pale-knuckled fists, shaking his advisor so hard that his eyes rolled into the back of his head. Rui had—Rui had been so close to killing him, his friend, his brother in all but blood.
All that time, Kang had not so much as lifted a hand to defend himself. As Rui’s blue flames crackled, cold as ice, Kang had closed his eyes and nodded. In acceptance.
He had once told Rui he was not the sort to run from his mistakes. He had not lied.
But Rui…Rui had not been able to do it. His fingers had fallen from Kang’s robes, and with a low sob, he’d shoved the other Dokkaebi away, his hands spasming at his sides. Instead, he’d spent the night screaming at the stars, so cruel and cold in the sky of his own creation.
The next morning, he’d staggered through the palace to Hana’s bedroom, falling to his knees beside her deathbed, his head hung in the worst sort of grief: the kind that swirls inside of you at the knowledge of an unavoidable, impending death.
Hana’s bedroom—so typically maddeningly unkept, with hundreds of fine dresses strewn across the marble floor as if she tried on dozens of hanboks before deciding on her favorite for the day—was eerily clean, smelling of harsh soap and lye underneath the more putrid stench of sickness and a seeping wound. The Dokkaebi laid beneath the covers of the bed, her skin pallid and sickly, sweat beading on her damp forehead. Her lips, usually painted in the most fashionable colors, were dry and cracked. Her eyes, when they fluttered open to rest upon him, were dull and glazed with pain.
“Rui?” she rasped. Her voice was no longer the smoky, sensuous thing it once was, now broken and weak. Next to her on the bed, Chan’s eyes snapped open from the shallow sleep he must have found himself in. His general’s emerald eyes reminded Rui of shattered glass: sharp and utterly destroyed.
If eyes truly were the window to the soul, then his were punched in, wrecked beyond repair.
It had happened so fast. Not seconds after that horrible moment in Sunpo’s palace when the Prophecy cleaved Manpasikjeok in two, Hana had screamed, felled by the venomous bite of an Imugi. The serpent had sunk its teeth into her side, so deep that even Kang’s most desperate measures did little to stop the bleeding. As for the poison, running through Park Hana’s veins…
No medicine, no elixir, would take.
And Hana had vehemently resisted attempts to administer her the wongun enhancer. After all, Lina was once poisoned by Imugi venom. Her ingestion of the enhancer afterward had…changedher. Monstrously so. Although the same likely would not happen to Hana—not without an ages-old Prophecy waiting viciously in the wings for her—his friend would not sway.
She’d rather die than be like Lina.
And somewhere, deep down, Rui knew that even the wongun enhancer would not cure Hana. She was already a Gaksi Dokkaebi of his inner court; the enhancer was only used for granting the Gaksi ability of teleportation to standard Dokkaebi. Nothing could help Hana. Not at this stage.
That, ohthat, was the crux of it all.
“Rui?” his friend repeated, blinking slowly. “Is it you?”
“Hana,” he said roughly, the name scraping against his throat. There was little else for him to say. They knew what was coming. “Forgive me.”
A glimmer of that old vindictiveness sparked in Hana’s eyes. “Apologies donothing, Rui,” she snapped, and her voice would have been steely cold if not for the crack running down the middle. “I warned you, did I not? I told you, quite plainly, to kill her. And now this.” Her lips twisted. “There will be more deaths like mine. Many more. The mortal realm will soon run red with blood. I am the first, but I am not the last.”
Rui pressed his trembling lips together. Yes, Hana had urged him to kill his beloved—with what he had thought was spite and malice. Now, he wondered if it was mercy.
If she was trying to save Lina from the cruel hands of fate.
If she was trying to save Rui from watching the girl he loved be consumed by a parasite from the inside out.
Hana reached out and gripped one of his hands in her own. Her other clenched around her lover’s. “Avenge me,” hissed Hana, her curly black hair plastered to her freckled neck by her own sickly sweat. Her white nightdress was stained with it. “Swear it.”
And as Chan swore the oath, his low voice cracking like ice in frigid winter, Hana did not look at him once. She kept her glare, suddenly lucid and furious, on her emperor.
“I swear it,” rasped Rui, again bowing his head. “I swear to do what I must to stop the Prophecy.”
And to avenge Lina, he added silently. For Shin Lina was as much a victim of that insidious parasite as Hana.
“Good,” snapped Hana, and for a moment Rui was a young crown prince again, allowing himself to be bossed around by a mere servant’s daughter in a game of pretend. There was a reason he had chosen her for his Inner Circle. Even now, as she took a shuddering breath, Rui saw it. That fire inside of her. Hungry and burning.
Until it guttered out.
