Page 32 of Marked By His Hunger
It had changed recently.
It was no longer predictable.
It no longer came in tides.
It came like an omen.
Like something approaching.
Something calling.
I pressed my palm against the stone parapet and inhaled deeply.
Salt.
Rain.
Rune smoke.
And beneath it—something else.
Something new.
Warm.
Alive.
Something I’d been ignoring since I first scented it through the portal.
My stomach clenched violently.
No. Not again.
The first time it happened I nearly tore through two donors before the restraint sigils activated.
Professor Kenna had watched without flinching as chains of runic light wrapped around my wrists and throat.
“Control,” she’d said calmly. “You are here to master it.”
Master it.
As if my curse were a thesis topic.
As if Bloodlust were a research variable.
The Runevald Institute did not fear me.
It studied me.
That was worse.
I pushed off the parapet and paced along the upper battlements, claws scraping stone.
My father’s reign was ending.
Five hundred years.
Each Draugr bears it for five centuries before surrendering the curse.
