Page 54 of Claimed By Fangs and Darkness

My stomach flipped, but I didn’t show my nervousness.

“She can do it. She has already started prepping, and I’ll be assisting her. She’ll just need to rest before and after, and we will need to create a window of time around the new moon where there’s minimal clan activity.”

“We can’t predict what the born will do,” Blade said, stating the obvious.

I sighed. “Whatever is happening, we can’t drain her. Just as with Princeton, any big ritual will come at a cost. She won’t be able to pour her magick and strength into anything else during that time.”

Blade’s lips tugged down, and he scratched his head as he looked at the floor. “Does she talk to him?”

An image of our maker and friend overtook my mind’s eye. I saw those wise, mischievous features and long, wild curls of hair.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “She says it isn’t the same as talking to the living. Princeton won’t answer questions about his deathor speak in plain language, usually. It’s mostly metaphor and symbols when it comes to spirits.”

Blade nodded. “I bet he loves being cryptic and difficult as a ghost as much as he enjoyed it in the flesh.”

I smiled. “Me too.”

After a beat of shared grief and love, we began going over my current draft of the war plans. I spread out the pages of notes and charts in an intuitive order across my long, mahogany desk.

Blade was always my first pair of eyes on any plan or scheme. His appearance often led people to underestimate him. Underneath his meaty, hulky exterior lay a sharp mind built for keen strategy.

He was a crucial part of my creative process. I was a madman when it came to my obsessions and ideas—I followed my intuition recklessly, mapping out future possibilities and synthesizing data from the past and present as I worked it all out. My intuition was solid, but I needed someone who could put my wealth of meticulously cataloged information together in a digestible format.

Blade was made to understandmyvisions, and he made sense of my madness with ease.

I explained each step, bouncing ideas off him as we moved.

“Do you really think Rune would help us?” Blade asked as we neared the end. “I know you’ve read everything you can about him and Valentin. But these are all secondhand accounts. We don’t actually know him, you know? I’m not sure if anyone truly does. He’s made himself into more myth or god than a man.”

“He wouldn’t help usyet,” I agreed. “But I think he would once we prove ourselves. Once we take Etherdale, push the born out, and create a hub for the revolution. We need a story for him to truly believe in, for the whole realm to believe in. We will go to him only when it would be impossible for us to be denied.”

“Youwant to go to him,” Blade said with a slowly growing grin. “Would you even be able to handle the excitement?”

I rolled my eyes. “Fuck off.”

After one more round of teasing and retaliative banter, we found our groove again.

So far, our tactics were working about half as well as I’d hoped. Our mortal allies and supporters’ patience wasn’t infinite. While some rallied around our small-scale assassinations and guardianship, helping us to defy the born at every opportunity, others felt disappointed and betrayed that we’d allowed the born to take the city and university.

They were unable to see through their fear and anger to the other side, where a vast, powerful army awaited King Earle’s direction.

The born were only showing a fraction of their capacities. While they attempted to provoke us, we succeeded in provoking them. As we infuriated them with our unpredictability and formlessness, we gathered information just as they had hoped to do with us.

We were mapping out exactly who was in charge, their precise numbers here in the city and where other born cells were stationed beyond Etherdale’s mountains.

Lord Conrad was here. He’d rarely deigned to grace Etherdale with his presence, preferring to rule this region from his remote estate, surrounded by his court of elites and their human slaves.

He was despised by all non-loyalists. He was the reason for the uprising centuries ago, the stacks and stacks of mortal skeletons beneath our feet.

And nothing had changed. He’d squashed the rebellion, pretended to make concessions until that generation had mostly died off, then he’d gone right back to not giving a single fuck about what his people thought of him.

Now he was here, no longer scared of being assassinated. He boldly took up residence in an estate in the center of the city that resembled a small castle, where he gave orders on who to round up, which oppressive laws to enforce and books to burn.

“We will all need to move as one,” I murmured. “No clan can get cold feet. When King Earle declares war, all turned clans’ fates will be intrinsically bound.”

Blade opened his mouth to speak, but Harmony burst into the room without so much as a knock.

“Something’s happened,” she rushed out. She gulped in air, her brows drawn and her frown deep. “Where’s Evie?”