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A Raeth.
Fear spiraled through her mind, the unfamiliar immortal before her a vision clad in black. He sported a venomous smirk, both predatory and terrifying.
If he hadn’t played his cards as the villain in this picture, the handsomeness of his face would’ve been devastating. His eyes set upon Ava like a hungry lion, and inky black hair complimented his classically sculpted features.
“What’s a Raeth doing aligning himself with the Citizens?”
The words had leapt from her lips before she could stop them, and the anger simmering underneath them was starkly apparent. This was the Raeth who’d poisoned Remmus’ mind.
Ava went for his throat.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Drowning. That’s what it felt like.
Remmus was suffocating under a layer of frozen water. The barrier above him was unbreakable, choking his consciousness. Heavy fog lay beyond his psychic prison, discouraging his attempts to break through. It felt futile, but he continued trying. He brought his fists against the surface, beating against it over and over with no effect.
More than once, he had felt the presence of another, but the ghost never lingered. Occasionally, the fog shifted slightly to allow him a better look at yet more fog.
Nothing had been more painful than when a force had attempted to drag him through the layer of ice. It’d been nothing more than brute force, with none of the empathy he’d sensed before.
Even that had failed, and Remmus still hadn’t gotten out.
He was beginning to believe this would be his perpetual nightmare: suffocating below ice, alone and unable to surface, for the rest of his immortal life.
Until a crack thundered above his head.
A fracture in the ice had his heart hammering, the arctic waters that held him warming considerably. An odd pang of terror twisted in his chest. What was arguably more perplexing was what followed swiftly behind the break: wrath so potent it was malicious.
The alien sensations were not entirely his. It left one question: whose emotions were they?
At first, any movement toward the surface felt like shifting through sand, his limbs weighted. As he struggled, Remmus found it progressively easier to fight, the stranglehold constricting him finally loosening.
He didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth.
Above him, the frosty surface was rapidly dissolving, a spiderweb of cracks networking across the ice. When his fist finally broke through, his world righted.
Remmus woke up.
Eyes opening to assess his surroundings, he sat bolt upright, then immediately wished he hadn’t. Cutting pain seared through his mind, blazing his vision white. He froze while the room spun around him. The pain was temporary, the fleeting sensation withering to nothing in the span of seconds.
As his vision cleared, the traces of tension ebbed from his shoulders. He was in Nina’s home; her guest bedroom on the first floor was immediately recognizable. Though he’d wandered by the room thousands of times, even used it every so often for a stray telepathic conversation, he’d never spent any decent amount of time here. He’d certainly never slept here.
Frowning, he shifted slightly to assess his condition. While his mind was a bit fuzzy, his body felt perfectly normal.
Remmus wasn’t sure he wanted the answers. Searching for the truth, he attempted to recall the last memories he had before waking up. What his mind offered only frustrated him: it was currently winter. He’d been on a mission. He’d come home.
Otherwise, it was like hitting a brick wall. A block seemed to have solidified between his consciousness and any memories that’d recently formed, and the results of his attempts to clear it were startlingly deficient.
Failure.
Flinching, Remmus’ blade teleported into his hand, and he cut a line across the opposite arm without any resistance. Just as quickly, he teleported it back to his armory.
Setting his jaw, he threw off the covers and summoned a sweater onto his naked upper half without looking. When his feet hit the floor, his balance wavered, but he shrugged it off as being too long without food. He immediately went in search of his sovereign.
On instinct, he shielded his mind when raised voices assaulted his ears, the instinct to protect himself far outweighing his need to announce his presence.
He knew that the room contained Nina and the majority of her lieutenants, Kaien, Zeke, and several werewolf minds.
