Chapter 52: Eclipse Court Can Kiss My Flame

She turned to Nicholas. "Shift and run. You can come back for me."

Her emotions had tapped out and this was just pure logic. She’d accepted it and planned on fully giving these fae hell, but that was that.

Something cold moved behind Nicholas’s eyes. "No."

"Your window is closing. You can’t help me if you’re dead or captured."

Nicholas ignored it.

Fifteen more fae materialized at his flanks, one with a blade to Damon’s neck. Another dropped in front of Guinevere, dark steel pressing against the junction of her throat and shoulder, the exact spot where a marking bite would go.

A blade pressed against Nicholas’s throat from behind. He went still.

"Knees. All three."

Nicholas calculated. Three blades. Three throats. Zero angles. His Beta’s eyes found his across the clearing, and the look that passed between them was the look of men who had been in impossible positions before and had never been in one this impossible.

He knelt. His Beta followed. Guinevere’s legs gave out on their own, her knees hitting the moss with a sound that was equal parts obedience and collapse.

The jungle went quiet. The clicking stopped. The chanting faded. Every fae in the clearing oriented toward the eastern treeline.

A figure stepped through the undergrowth, taller than the rest.

Every fae in the clearing dropped to one knee. Heads bowed.

His obsidian eyes settled on Guinevere.

"Well, well. What do we have here?"

Guinevere, half-delirious, her vision swimming, looked up at the fae lord standing in front of her with his wings spread and his mouth shaped around the most predictable villain entrance line in recorded history.

She rolled her eyes. Of course he would say that.

"You’re the fourth fae today who’s used that line."

"I am not fae." His voice was silk over gravel. "I am their lord."

"Congratulations," she said flatly.

He smiled. It was the kind of smile that had no warmth and too many teeth. "And you are the first person today who has spoken to me without kneeling first."

"I am kneeling."

He looked down. She was, in fact, on her knees.

For one full second, Lord Mordyn did not know what to do with that information. The silence was beautiful. Guinevere collected it like a trophy.

Nicholas, next to her, closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose, caught somewhere between a laugh and a lunge. She was brilliant. She was also mouthing off to a dark fae lord with a blade at her throat.

The fae holding a sword to her neck spoke. "My Lord Mordyn, the vessel is impure. We should dispose of her."

Lord Mordyn did not glance at the fae holding the blade to her throat. He did not raise his hand or change his expression or shift his weight in any direction that communicated effort.

"Kill him."

Two fae moved in unison, and the screams that followed carried across the jungle in layers. Wet. Prolonged. The sound of a body being taken apart by creatures who understood anatomy well enough to keep the lungs working while the rest failed.

It echoed off the canopy and bounced through the undergrowth and reached a distance that guaranteed every living thing within a mile knew exactly what had produced it.

Guinevere did not flinch. She had used up her flinches and had arrived at a place past fear where nothing surprised her anymore and very few things impressed.

Lord Mordyn stepped over the spreading pool of black blood and approached her.

He knelt in front of her. The motion was fluid, unhurried, the descent of a creature who knelt because he chose to and could un-choose at any moment. His hand reached forward and lifted a strand of her white hair between two fingers, turning it in the bioluminescent light, watching the gold shimmer that lived in the strands the way fire lived in embers.

"The old flame," he said. "Alive."

His fingers released her hair and rose to her forehead. Two fingertips pressed against the space between her brows.

The pain was instantaneous and total.

It bypassed her nervous system and went straight to the center of everything. The merging had been agony, volcanic, a body being rebuilt around fire it was never designed to hold. This was worse. This reached deeper, into the architecture beneath the flame, into the parts of her that were wolf and woman and something older than both, and it pulled.

The scream that came from her mouth was a sound she had never made before. High-pitched, sustained, the frequency of a body encountering a pain threshold it did not know existed and discovering that the threshold had a basement.

Nicholas grunted beside her. Then the grunt became a scream of his own, raw and involuntary, his body falling sideways as the matebond delivered her agony into his system. His amber eyes went wide, unfocused, seeing nothing except the inside of a pain that was hers and his simultaneously.

His Beta lunged towards them. Three fae intercepted him before he made it two steps, driving him back to his knees with blades at his throat.

Guinevere’s back hit the ground. The world tilted, the canopy spinning above her, and Lord Mordyn hovered over her with his obsidian eyes reflecting the gold light pouring from her skin. His fangs were bared, fully extended, the points catching the bioluminescent glow in a way that made them look wet.

"You will speak when I permit it, Vessel." His voice carried the texture of absolute authority, the register of a creature who had been obeyed for centuries and had forgotten what disobedience looked like. "Your flame belongs to the Eclipse Court."

His head lowered toward her throat. His fangs hovered over the marking point, close enough that she could feel the cold radiating from the venom on their tips. His wings spread wider, blocking the canopy, blocking the light, turning her world into the underside of a creature who intended to claim her in a way that would make every other claim irrelevant.

Her vision was going dark at the edges. The pain from his touch was still resonating through her body in aftershocks that made her muscles seize. She could hear Nicholas gasping beside her, fighting the matebond’s echo, fighting the fae holding him, fighting the biology that forced him to experience every second of her suffering in real time.

Lord Mordyn’s mouth opened wider.

"Lord Mordyn." The casual voice came from the eastern treeline. "You found her. I’ve been looking everywhere."

Mordyn’s descent stopped. His eyes lifted from Guinevere’s throat and found the figure stepping through the undergrowth with the unbothered stride of someone who had walked into worse situations.

Kael Ashenvale emerged from the jungle in a state that suggested he had murdered his way through approximately ten miles of hostile terrain and had strong opinions about the experience. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead. His blade was wet. His iron eyes swept the clearing with the calculation of a man who was already six moves ahead and had allocated exactly zero of those moves to panic.

Guinevere’s head turned toward him on the ground. The relief she felt lasted precisely two seconds before it collapsed into the realization that the man who had promised to take her back to Maddox was standing in the same clearing as a fae lord, addressing him by name, and the familiarity between them suggested a relationship that predated this jungle and this rescue and her.

The relief died. In its place, a cold certainty settled: he was never going to take her back.

"The vessel belongs to the Eclipse Court, Kael Ashenvale." Mordyn rose from his kneeling position over Guinevere, his wings folding against his back with the deliberate precision of a predator sheathing its primary weapons. "The old accords are clear."

"She belongs to me, actually." Kael stepped into the clearing. His boots found dry ground between the pools of black blood with a path-finding instinct that spoke to practice. "Well. I kidnapped her. But that is beside the point. She has come around to the arrangement. Haven’t you, sweetheart?"

Guinevere stared at him from the ground with an expression that communicated, with perfect clarity, that she had come around to nothing and would be discussing the matter with her fists at the earliest opportunity.

"She’s warming up to it," Kael said.

"The accords state that any vessel carrying the old flame falls under Eclipse jurisdiction upon discovery." Mordyn’s voice had lost the silk. What remained was gravel, cold and precise. "You do not have standing to supersede the accords, Ashenvale. You are a renegade king with three stolen kingdoms and a civil war you are losing."

"Four kingdoms, actually. I picked up a fourth while you were crawling through tunnels chasing a woman who was already mine." Kael circled the clearing’s edge. His movement was lateral, relaxed, as if he was at a garden party. "And I prefer the term ’redistributive monarch.’ Renegade implies a lack of planning."

"The accords are absolute."

"The accords were written by fae who have been dead for six hundred years and were drunk when they wrote them. I have read the original text. There are wine stains on the margins and a signature that appears to be a drawing of a cat." Kael stopped moving. His iron eyes met Mordyn’s obsidian ones across the clearing. "I respect tradition, Lord Mordyn. I also respect the fact that tradition is occasionally stupid."