Moonlight Prince (Vampire Girl #4)(12)

Seri took my hand, rubbing it gently. "It is not your fault, my lord. You retook this city. You stopped the torture of Fae and Shade. And you saved Kayla from a fate worse than death. Because of you, she still stands a chance."

"Because of me…" I whispered. "It is because of me that this happened at all."

Then I pulled back my hand and left. It was on my way back to my quarters, when I passed the inn at the base of the castle, that I saw him.

Tavian Gray.

He sat at a table outside a tavern, drinking under the bright sun. Drinking. While my sister lay asleep unable to wake.

I stepped forward and knocked the cup from his hands. "How is it that you drink and find pleasure while Kayla suffers? How have you recovered so quickly from the tortures inflicted on you both?"

The Fae sighed, flicking back his thick dark hair. He was a massive man, coiled in muscle, larger than any Fae I'd ever seen, at least as large as me. "Your brother spent more time on her than he did on me," said Tavian. "I wish it were not so. I wish I had stopped him."

At his words, I calmed. It seemed we wished the same. "I heard you were leaving."

"I was," he said, picking his cup back up from the mud and refilling it from the flagon of ale on the table. "But then I heard she'd relapsed, and I couldn't leave her this way."

"Who is she to you?" I asked.

"A friend." He said no more.

"And who are you to her?"

"I do not know. Perhaps I will never know." He raised his cup in a toast. "To Kayla."

I nodded. "To Kayla."

Then I left the man to his drink and sorrows. I did not know him, and that worried me. But he was an enemy to Levi and a friend to Kayla. That would have to be enough.

As I walked back to the castle, I surveyed the repairs on the main hall. Winter had arrived, and that made the gathering of stone and wood harder than ever. Supplies were short and work slow. It would be a long time before Stonehill could be as it once was. Perhaps that was fitting. The place felt wrong without Arianna. Maybe it would only be put right when she returned.

"There." Dean's words pull me back to the present. Back to the cold and snow and search. "Look there." He points down the hill at something.

I follow his gaze down to piles of gray wood one could barely call houses. "A Fae village. So?"

"It's empty," says Dean. "Utterly empty."

I look again, and see that he is right. There is no sign of life, not outside the huts or within. There is not even a hint of prints in the snow. Strange. Like most things these days. But perhaps it is a clue.

We descend the snowy slope and scour the village for people. I find a wooden horse and a doll made of cloth, but I find no children. I find needle and string and a hammer for building, but I find none to use them. All I find is the smell. Like embers and ash. The smell of burning though there is no fire. The feel of smoke in my chest though the air is clear. Something unnatural happened here. Something dark.

When I come upon the village center, I notice something grey sticking out from the snow. A bone. I dig through ice and sheets of white until I find more. They make a circle. A circle of bones. And in the center, a carcass. A dead goat cut open. Baron howls into the cold wind, disturbed by the power that remains.

"A ritual took place here," I say, further examining the scene.

Dean hears me and jogs to my side. "You think the Fae cast a spell?"

"Perhaps," I say, finding strings and beads.

"They must have done something wrong. Conjured something that turned on them."

I shake my head. "This was a dark ritual. A blood sacrifice. Whatever these people conjured, they intended to do so."

Dean looks around, his eyes spooked. "So you mean, these Fae… these Fae are gone… because they sacrificed themselves?"

"I believe they knew the cost, yes." I stand, brushing my hands clean of snow.

"But why do it then? Why give your own life?"

I shrug. "Perhaps Metsi told them to. Perhaps she convinced them the sacrifice would win the war."

Dean scans the nearby houses. "So you think Metsi started this ritual. Why? For power?"

"Or knowledge." I walk around, searching for anything else unusual. "I have seen such rituals before, at the base of the Grey Mountain. Shamans would call for wisdom of the future. Sometimes, for the strength to defeat rival tribes. The Outlanders would always make a sacrifice to summon the power. The power they called the Darkness."

"And yet," says Dean, "in all my centuries of ruling, I have never seen this dark power."

"Your realm isn't on the outskirts," I say.

And then I see it.

Footprints.

Someone survived.

They ran.

I follow the tracks, Dean and Baron at my heels, until I reach a shack at the back of the village. I try the door and find it barred from within. So I smash it open. Inside, there is nothing but darkness. Nothing but shadow.

"Hello?"

A whimper. Weak. Fading.

"Hello?" I run in, looking, looking for the sound. "We mean you no harm. We only want to—"

Baron sniffs the air and runs forward. I follow, and I find her. I find the little girl crying in the corner, clutching a doll to her chest. I reach out to her. "We only want to help."