Page 85 of Wolf Caged (Bound to the Shadow King #1)

KAELERON

I could not get my mind off what Saphira had told me. Rage simmered in my veins, barely leashed and in danger of stealing control from me as we trekked through the Wastes, teleporting ahead a few miles whenever the magical field that coated the land here allowed me to use that power.

Her own mate had humiliated and sold her.

A male she had clearly loved.

No wonder she had been in so much pain when I had met her, and had been lost to darkness at times, grappling with a hunger I could name.

Vengeance.

No wonder she had grown withdrawn at Beltane, on edge and tormented by the festivities.

I catalogued every moment I had glimpsed her pain, her darkness, and her trauma, filing them away because for every second she had suffered, I would make Lucas suffer a lunar cycle when I found him and dragged him to the Shadow Court.

I would make him weep. Beg. I would make him so desperate for death he would plead me for it rather than his life.

The stars blurred above me and I reined in the darkness howling within me like a storm, pulling it back under my control before I did something reckless, like teleporting to the nearest waygate to the human world and hunting this male down, leaving Saphira undefended.

I still could not believe that someone, especially a shifter who were known for being so possessive and protective of their fated one and felt strongly about their mate bonds, would do this to her.

To someone so pure and kind, so loving and beautiful.

Someone who deserved a male who would worship her, would strive to take care of her every need, and would destroy the world to defend her.

I could only imagine how deeply the betrayal had cut her, and how that wound festered.

And how she must have despised me for buying her.

I had saved her from a far worse fate than she would have had if another at the auction had bought her. That was my only consolation as she continued to walk beside me, lost in her own thoughts.

Her fated one was unworthy of her, and destiny had been cruel to bind her to a male who had not only treated her so abominably, but did the same to other females.

I had done my research as best I could in the limited time I had to act between Neve’s vision and the auction.

Saphira had not been the first female Lucas had sold.

He had been making a name for himself in the seedy underground as the place to go for virgin females.

My gaze strayed to her, that distant look in her eyes unsettling me and making me want to find a way to bring her back to me.

She needed time. Patience. I could be patient while she fought through the mire of her thoughts and her feelings for this male, while she clawed her way back to me and vanquished the wolf, banishing him from her mind.

And her heart.

I was not sure how I could make things better for her. I wracked my brain as I sensed the magic around me weaken and gripped her hand and teleported us again, landing us barely a mile deeper into the Wastes this time, and hitting upon a way I could help her.

“When we return, we shall resume our training, and I shall school you in the art of war.”

Her dull eyes brightened as they lifted to me.

The thought of her seeking vengeance upset the balance of something within me, igniting a war between a need to shelter her and a need to teach her.

I knew the price you paid for treading that path, and I did not want Saphira to lose the woman she was—her warmth and her kindness—by bloodying her hands.

I wanted to help her.

I wanted to be her sword and her shield, if she would let me, even as I recalled how angry she had been when I had stepped in last time, acting as her weapon against the fae female who had hurt her.

“I’d like that,” she murmured and surveyed the glittering sands stretching around us. “It’s strangely pretty here.”

“It was more beautiful once.” I looked at the ashy land punctured by spiny shards of lifeless trees—a barren land where only the strongest and most violent creatures could survive now.

Saphira’s gaze landed on me, curiosity shining in it, no trace of her pain or her doubts now as she waited for me to tell her more.

I obeyed her silent command.

“It was once a verdant, green kingdom, ruled by beasts and nature. A land no fae had a right to and one that was greatly sought after. Fae courts do so enjoy expanding their lands, equating the size of them with their power and wealth.”

She frowned. “But you don’t?”

I shook my head. “My court is among the smaller, and yet there are few fae as feared or as powerful as I am.”

“Or so modest.” She smiled slightly.

I chuckled. “I speak only the truth. That truth is that a court is only as powerful as its king.”

“And that means the Shadow Court is ranked number one.”

It was my turn to shake my head. “There are others more powerful than I in this world, but I am one of the strongest.”

“What happened to this place then? Was it war?” She looked at the lands that stretched as far as the eye could see and the magic thickening the air faded again, allowing me to teleport us another mile or two deeper into the Wastes.

“It happened long before I was born.” I flexed my fingers against her hand, enjoying the feel of it in mine. “It was a magical cataclysm, but not like the one that caused the Wrathborn Scar in the south lands.”

“Wrathborn Scar. That sounds delightfully ominous. What happened there?” She looked south, as if she might spy it, but it was hundreds of miles away.

“A war that went too far.”

“What were they fighting over?” Her eyebrows rose high on her forehead.

She was going to love the answer to that question, I knew it before it left my lips.

“A female.”

“I’m beginning to think fae males are worse than shifters.

So ready to destroy everything for a female.

” Her little smile warmed the space in my chest that had grown cold the moment Morden had shown up in that storm and for the first time since he had arrived, I felt she would not leave the Shadow Court.

Or at least, she would come back.

If I asked it of her.

“I need to know more about that. When we’re back at Falkyr, I’m going straight to the library to look it up.

” She was partly teasing, but it pleased me that she placed learning more about my world above running to Morden.

“But you were telling me about this place and what happened here. A magical cataclysm doesn’t sound like a good thing. Is that why the air reeks of it?”

I nodded. “It is in the sand… the remains of everything that was here when the explosion happened and obliterated it all.”

She shivered and cast a nervous glance at the sands. “And we’re safe here? It’s not going to go kaboom again?”

“You are safe, little wolf.” I would never take her anywhere I felt she was in real danger, where I felt I could not handle whatever came at us. “The residual magic in the sand simply dampens my abilities at times.”

“Hence the short teleports.”

I nodded.

She looked over her shoulder. “So how did the Shadow Court survive unscathed? If this explosion was big enough to be called a cataclysm and wiped out everything, how did it not affect the surrounding courts?”

I glanced back in the direction of my court too, my voice growing softer as I thought about the stories I had been told, and the one responsible for saving that court.

“My father… he took measures to protect the border of the Shadow Court using magic—at great expense to himself—and so the mountains only bear scars.”

She looked at those scars, great curving cuts into the faces of the mountains that formed sheer walls of rock.

“What happened to him?” she said quietly, as if sensing my shift in mood, the sombreness that welled up in me as I thought about him.

“I am told he was unconscious for weeks, that the court feared he would not recover. He had no heir at the time. It was before he met my mother. My uncle was poised to take the throne and had been acting as steward, closing in on it. The day before he was due to be crowned king, my father awoke. My uncle went back to the legions, returning to acting as his general.”

I teleported with her again.

When we landed, she said, “Was your uncle a good man? Would he have made a good king?”

“No.” It was easy to answer that question as I thought of the days following my parents’ deaths, as I recalled him closing in on my throne, challenging my fragile hold on it as I grieved.

“What happened to him?” That question was cautious, as if she already knew the answer.

“He is dead.”

She did not press me to expand on that, to tell her the bitter truth—that my first act as king had been to order his death as punishment for failing to protect my parents.

I should have executed myself for the same reason.

But Vyr had needed me.

And so I had moulded myself into a blade sheathed in shadow, one strong enough to cut down anyone who sought to hurt her again.

I teleported with Saphira, managing to shift us further this time, and stilled as we landed, immediately drawing her closer to me and down into a crouch behind the thick bleached trunk of a fallen tree. She peered over it at the tower that loomed ahead of us.

A tower of bones.

It looked as if some dark power had raised all the bones buried in the sands and drawn them here, constructing this grim monument to death.

Bones as big as dragon femurs formed columns on each level, smaller bones laid horizontally between them to fill the gaps.

Around the windows, skulls had been placed, fae mostly around the curved sides, but at the peak of the arches, they were the skulls of horned beasts.

At the top of the three-storey tower sat a crown of huge fangs, each taller than I was.

“That looks inviting,” Saphira muttered beside me. “You should be taking notes. You could make some serious improvements on how formidable your castle looks if you cherry picked aspects of this tower. Wouldn’t want to be outdone by a lich.”

I chuckled low at her humour, a weapon she often employed when nervous, and studied the tower, covering all the angles and looking for a sign of life. Power radiated from it, one unfamiliar to me, but it was strong, coming in waves.

Like a beating heart.

A cold sense of dread spilled through my veins as I felt that beat, as I looked at the tower, and felt the warmth of Saphira beside me.

This was too dangerous, and not only for myself and Saphira.

Neve and this dragon stone were connected somehow, in a way she refused to tell me, and taking this crystal to her might place her in danger, might change everything in a way I did not want, drawing the gaze of the one who hunted her towards my court.

Exposing her again.

But I had to take it.

Neve herself had asked me to go through with it and bring her the stone. If she was prepared to face whatever happened when it was back in her hands, then I could be too.

I just needed to get my hands on it.

A breeze kicked the sand up around me as I studied the tower, cataloguing the entrance and the piles of bones that encircled it. Guards. This lich was strong enough to command a creature to rise and do its bidding even when it was only bones.

That was not good.

The lich in my court were powerful, but even they were limited to reanimating corpses whose deaths had been less than a lunar cycle ago.

I stared at the bone piles. Their forms were not that of someone who had died and then their flesh had rotted or had been picked off the bones.

These things had been nothing more than bones when they had been released from the lich’s hold, falling into a crumpled heap until the lich summoned them again.

“Kael.” Saphira tugged at my arm, her grip firm. “What’s that?”

My head whipped towards her, adrenaline shooting through my veins as I instantly readied for battle, but it was not an enemy she stared at across the sea of sand.

It was a storm.

The great whirling wall of sand was travelling at speed, heading straight for us.

I gripped her hand and pulled her to her feet as I quickly scanned our surroundings, my pulse kicking up a notch and the urge to get her somewhere safe before the storm hit us at the helm, driving me to move with her, to protect her.

“There.” I pointed to a cavemouth barely visible beyond a crag of black rock at the base of one of the mountains that surrounded the western flank of the Forgotten Wastes and began running in that direction with her.

I could not risk a teleport, not with Saphira in tow.

Already the magic in the air was thickening, a cloying blanket that dampened my power, whipped up by the wind that tore at the sand and unleashed the magic buried deep within it.

It would be a while before I could use magic again.

Not good.

I pulled her along with me as I ran, heart thundering at the thought of Saphira being caught out in the storm.

She stumbled on the sand, losing her footing, and I tugged my arm upwards, stopping her from falling.

Rather than running with her, I swept her up into my arms, carrying her tucked against me like the precious load she was as I set off again.

She wrapped her arms around my neck and breathed urgently against my ear.

“Faster! It’s closing in on us.”