Page 3 of Vicious Kings
The temple looms ahead, carved directly into the mountain face. Twin stone angels flank the entrance, their faces shielded by wings, their hands holding giant bronze torches, weathered but no less imposing. Torchlight flickers from the hall inside. The bells are still going.
"Five more minutes and we'd have been late," Vera pants beside me, face flushed. "The Shepherd would have had our hides."
I say nothing. My mind is already through those doors, already holding a blade, already watching Corvinus's head roll across stone.
The meeting space doubles as our temple with its massive chamber carved straight into the mountain. Torches line the walls and make the carved Saints seem to move. Chief among them, at the very top of the chamber in white marble, is Saint Seveline.
The first hunter.
TheMother.
She's wearing servant's robes, a blade in one hand, the severed head of the Fae King in the other. Her face is set in a beatific smile. Blank white eyes. Twenty years old when she turned the tide of her people's fate. The same age all hunters after her have taken their vows.
Her image is reserved for the most sacred of spaces, and the interior of the amulet every hunter receives at initiation. The one we're buried with. The air in her chamber smells of incense and old blood, centuries of ritual soaked into the stone.
The Shepherd stands at the altar below her feet, his white robes pristine against the dark stone. He is ancient and wrinkled, older than any mortal has a right to be, eyes sharp as broken glass. My father stands to his right, tall and broad.
Refusing to meet my gaze.
Typical. He hasn't looked at me directly since my mother died. Sometimes I wonder if it's because my eyes are the same cobalt shade as hers. One of us will probably die without that question being asked.
The rest of the clan fills the chamber. Cousins I haven't seen in years. Aunts and uncles who survived long enough to retire. Younger members still in training. And the gaps are a presence of their own. Uncle Taylor, who went after a vampire nest in Lumus City and never reported back. Cousin Marina, who took a mission in the Capital and vanished into that crystalline hell. Aunt Sarah, who thought she could handle a werewolf pack on her own. She was wrong.
I should probably feel something about those empty spaces.
Instead, I feel nothing. Just hollow where the feeling should be. My mother took it all with her the night before my twelfth birthday. The tears, the grief, and all the most human parts of me, leaving only the hunter behind.
If I'm ever going to be fully human again, it starts with the Prince's death. And if that day never comes, at least I'll die as the weapon built for exactly that.
"Wilhelmina Moreau." The Shepherd's voice fills the chamber, echoing off the walls. "Step forward."
I grimace at the name. A tribute to my great-aunt, a hunter who died and took three members of Fae nobility with her. The name was bestowed at my birth and has barely been spoken since. I'll be glad to never hear it again after tonight.
I walk to the altar, heels echoing on the stone. The gown's train whispers behind me, and I can feel every eye in the chamber tracking my movement.
Twenty years of preparation for this moment.
"Tonight, we witness the unmasking of one of our finest." The Shepherd speaks the ritual words with confidence. He's said them a hundred times before. "Wilhelmina has trainedceaselessly since childhood, mastered the art of every weapon, learned every technique her tutors had to offer. She is ready and worthy to take her place among her ancestors."
He lifts a crystal vial from the altar. The liquid inside is black as pitch, thick as blood. Poison. The kind that separates soul from body just long enough for the resonance inside to manifest visually. Supposedly painless.
I've heard the screams from previous ceremonies too well to believe that.
"Drink," he commands.
I take the vial without hesitation. The crystal, supposedly stolen from the Fae King's own banquet table, is cold against my palm. I tip it back and drain it in one swallow.
Copper and ash. Burns all the way down.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the world tilts sideways.
Pain sears through my chest. Something tears loose from deep inside my ribs, muscle, bone, and something buried beneath all of that. My soul, ripping free from the mortal shell. I can feel myself falling and also watch it happen from somewhere above, watch my body crumple to the stone floor.
The chamber fills with spectral smoke. Silver and blue, writhing with light. Everything I am, pulled out of my body and put on display.
This is where I find out what I'm made of.
