Page 82 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion (Tales of a Monstrous Heart, #2)

Thick green blades of grass tangled around my knees. The wind was warm and fragrant with the wildflowers that covered the meadow before us. It was spring.

It couldn’t be spring.

The long grass was covered in blood. Only my hands remained tangled in Emrys’s hair, feeling the desperate breath from his lips brush my cheek.

‘Emrys.’ My fingers curled into his damp hair. My palm kept pressing against the wound. His blood slipping too easily through my fingers.

A shadow cut across us, making me bare my teeth. My blade ready for battle as I hunched my body over Emrys’s. No matter how darkness bit into the corner of my vision.

I looked up to see a man.

No. Not a man – a skeleton wearing a farmer’s hat, with a wheelbarrow in its bony fingers. Fingers held together with wire. Its head tilting in contemplation of us.

I’d lost my mind.

‘Back to work, Fergus,’ a feminine voice called. Heavily accented. Then she appeared behind the skeleton, her gloved hand curling over its bony shoulder before she pushed it away in dismissal.

The skeleton went obediently, abandoning its wheelbarrow.

Dirt clung to the woman’s breeches, a rag tied in her white hair to keep it off her face.

White hair despite the youth in her features.

A warning in the old language. A being touched by death held a mark like that.

Her eyes were dark and ringed with silver, possessing a reflective quality like a cat.

‘You’d better have a good reason for ruining my vegetable patch,’ she enquired, pulling off her muddy gloves to reveal pale tattooed fingers marked with black runes.

It was then I noticed a spatter of scarring under her left eye. Like pink tear drops that spilled onto the side of her face, burnt skin long healed. A vicious web that disappeared down the collar of her shirt.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Gideon sneered, aether crackling in his palms where he crouched on Emrys’s other side as if ready for attack.

‘Where is Thean Page?’ she demanded. A distant concern burning in those strange silver eyes as she took us in.

This woman knew Thean. Her white hair catching the breeze. Reminding me of the mark of a death on her.

Necromancer. Thean’s necromancer.

‘Necromancer,’ Gideon spat, his aether snapping in the air between us. The necromancer in question just crossed her arms.

‘Clever little witch,’ she goaded.

Then a clatter of commotion came from behind her. A crunching as if someone was running up a gravel path. Emrys let out a groan, twisting slightly, his hand curling around my wrist in a soundless warning.

‘Emrys,’ I begged, more of his blood seeping between my trembling fingers.

A girl came to a skidding halt next to the necromancer.

Her blonde hair braided neatly back from her face, a white ribbon tied at its end.

Skin sun-kissed and eyes a strange swirling of grey as they went wide with surprise.

Her hands running down her pale cotton dress, as if self-conscious it was creased.

She couldn’t be any older than eight, maybe nine.

‘Isabella,’ the necromancer cautioned, but the child was focused on the prone form of Emrys on the ground.

‘You’re here.’ There was a shyness to her grin but an expectation as if she knew we’d arrive, unfazed. Something shifted inside of me. That sense clawing at my skin. Not in warning … but recognition.

Then I saw it, the barest shadow of darkness beneath the little girl’s skin as she beamed down at Emrys.

There is a demon that knows all the twists of time. That sees all the moments never lived and commands the fates to meddle. That childish rhyme sang into my mind. Something from my memory mocking me as Emrys groaned. Darkness curling between his fingers.

‘Stop,’ I warned. Panicked at what trap we’d tumbled into. How defenceless I was against it.

The girl’s wide eyes met my own, now full black with the loveliest smile on her lips. ‘Please don’t cry, Tauria.’

I heard talk of another in the wind. That croaking misty voice of that fate came back to me. Mocking me with all the things I’d forgotten. Can you not hear her, Serus?

The last.

‘Hello, brother,’ the little girl smiled down shyly at the prone form of Emrys between myself and Gideon. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

I know there is another. Montagor’s words bit sharply into my mind. The madness in them. The blood he’d spilt to make those words true.

Emrys said he’d sensed something. An awakening … nine years go.

There were two princes of the Old Gods who fought into the night. Serus and Varin. I knew that story. Yet Serus was the only one to have loyalty in the realm of darkness.

A twin moon. A sister that shared the demon’s might.

This was what Emrys had felt. A threat that could have made Varin rise in Montagor to do battle as they had before.

Because Varin was outnumbered.

Another child of the Old God had awakened.

She was here. Waiting for us.

Acara .

The seer.

Queen of the Damned.