Page 29 of Bite Bonded Bride

Varkai's temple smells like rot dressed in ceremony. Burning incense that smells sweet and earthy, to honor the mountain's old magic sits thick in the air, coating my throat. Underneath it, the copper tang of old ritual blood, dried into the carved channels running through the obsidian floor and leading to the altar stone at the chamber's center where offerings have been made for centuries.

I have always found this place cold. Tonight it feels like a grave.

"You speak of necessity." Varkai's voice carries the softness of a person who has already decided. He stands at the altar, bent slightly over his staff, white eyes catching the dim glow of dying bioluminescent stone in the walls. The light that was once blue-silver now pulses a sickly gray, flickering at the edges like a candle starved of air. "The mountain does not want rituals, my prince. It wants a price."

"Then I'll find it another."

"You cannot." He turns. No apology in his face. Just the flat certainty of one who believes the gods have already made their choice. "I have read the old texts. All of them. The catalyst must be human. Pure. Unbound by the underground's corruption." A pause that he fills deliberately. "She arrived here untouched by Vrakken blood."

Past tense.

The thought lands like a stone dropping through still water. He knows. About the blood I gave her and he is telling me it doesn't matter.

"I will not say her name," Varkai continues, soft and patient as a man explaining something to a child. "It is unnecessary. You know who the mountain has chosen."

The shadows in the chamber move.

I don't choose to move them. They simply respond, the dark stretching away from the walls, pooling at my feet, crawling toward Varkai's altar with a will of their own. The obsidian beneath my boots gives a single, sharp crack. A fracture line spiders outward from my left heel.

"Chosen." The word tears out of me. Low. Wrong-shaped. "Chosen."

I cross the chamber in four steps and Varkai does not flinch, which tells me he expected this, calculated it, prepared some speech for it. That calculation makes the rage worse.

My fangs are out. I can feel them, the ache in my jaw, the way my hands have gone clawed at my sides without my permission. Blood Hunger runs hot beneath my skin because anger and hunger are the same animal in us.

"You will not touch her." I step near enough to see the ritual scars along his throat, and he has to look up at me. "You will not send anyone to touch her. If I find a single hand laid on her—if I find she has been looked at with this in mind—I will open whoever did it and feed their blood to the very stone you are standing on."

Silence. The incense burns.

"You would doom thousands," he says quietly, "for one."

"I would doom you." I lean in. "Be certain of that."

I leave him standing in his failing temple with its dying light and his ancient conviction that someone else's death is a reasonable price for survival.

Veyrik finds me before I reach the corridor's end. He falls into step beside me without being invited. His armor is dented at the shoulder, a fresh damage, mostly from the lower districts. He smells like smoke and blood that isn't his own.

"You came from Varkai." Not a question.

"Walk away, Veyrik."

"I can't." He keeps pace with me easily, voice low and steady. No heat in it. That is worse. Veyrik angry is manageable. Veyrik measured means he has been thinking about this for a long time. "You know I can't. Someone has to say it plainly."

"Then say it and be done."

"They're watching you." He glances sideways. His scarred face is unreadable but his eyes are not. There is grief in there, buried under years of hardness. "The council. The soldiers. Every Vrakken still breathing watches their prince and wonders what he's choosing. A man can want things, Zareth. Even a prince. But a man who cannot govern his wants—" He stops. Starts again. "They won't follow someone who keeps a pet while his people starve."

The word lands like a blade.

Pet.

"Say that again," I say, "and I will forget you're the closest thing I have to a brother."

"I say it because of that." His cheek tightens. "You think this is cruelty. I'm trying to save you from a choice that gets made for you. A prince who cannot sacrifice for the kingdom⁠—"

"—is no prince at all." I finish it for him. Flatly. "I have heard the lesson."

"Have you? Because from here it looks like⁠—"