Page 188 of Curse of Darkness
The Horned One.
Wearing a cloak of black feathers, he could almost be fae—if not for the horns that peer through his raven-dark hair. His face is horrifically beautiful, his eyes like the void between stars, and his mouth so full and lush and fucking familiar that my heart plummets to my feet.
I stare the truth in his face as our eyes meet.
“Daughter of Darkness,” the Mother of Night called me. Those words have been whispering in my dreams ever since, as if my subconscious knew the truth I wouldn’t let myself admit.
I remember the Black Keep.
I remember Thiago’s death.
And the Horned One’s rebirth.
But I was so focused on rescuing Amaya and trying not to let that raw bloody scream that was trapped in my throat escape that I didn’t get a chance to work my way through the truth that was standing right in front of me.
“Vi.” Thiago appears at my side, his voice rough with shock.
“Samhain is the one night of the year when the veil between worlds thins and the Old Ones walk free,” I whisper, forcing myself not to quake, forcing my throat to swallow its lump of gorge. “It is the night I was conceived. I always thought….”
I’d almost suspected the Dream Thief, to be honest, because the images of him in my books are quite similar to the Horned One before me.
Just not similar enough.
I squeeze his hand, desperate for the anchoring weight of his touch.
My mother is an evil queen. My father an ancient, violent god.
I searched all the books for the name of my father—Arion.
And it was never there.
There were only torn pages where the Horned One should have stood. And when I did stumble across a story containing him, he was always “the Horned One.”
They wrote him from history.
They stole his name, thinking it would steal his power.
My heart skips a beat. The Mother of Night said she conjured my birth, whispering in the ear of my mother. But did she whisper in his ear too? Did she drive him toward my mother, dreaming of the child they could create?
“Did you do this?” I send to her. He was her enemy. There was no way he would fall in line with her plots, would he? “Did you trick this evil monster into siring me?”
Every inch of me feels filthy.
I sense her touch; a feather-light stroke through my hair. “What is evil, Vi? It is nothing more than a choice, and we all face that choice each and every day. Once upon a time Arion was the hope of our people—the shining king who was going to rescue us from the invaders. There was a prophecy—from his line would come redemption. We worshiped him. We fought for him. We let him lead us against the fae. But he forgot the rules. So deep was his desire for vengeance against the fae that he drank ofala, the sacred power of the lands. He drained the Hallows and forgot what he was. War twisted him. The power went to his head. I argued against him—this war was destroying us, I said. We stood against each other, but it was clear that to fight each other would only bring about the destruction I was so desperate to prevent. I had to use other means.
“By then it was too late. The fae struck us a blow.I was so angry at first, so furious.But as I lay trapped in my prison world, I began to dream. ‘From his line,’ all the prophets said. They never said Arion himself would be the key to peace.I plucked the strings of destiny, I read every star in the night sky, sometimes a thousand times over. And then I saw it. A monstrous fae queen, hungry for power. And a child in her arms, a child who shone like a star. A child who shone like Arion once had. A child who could sing to the Hallows.
“So yes, I began to plot. I could never confront him, not without tearing the world apart, but every Samhain when we walked the world again, I could whisper in the night. I appealed to his pride, to his arrogance. I worked with the Dream Thief to plant dreams in his head. Dreams of a beautiful young fae queen, and what a jest it would be to steal into her masquerade and seduce her. And then we waited for that long-ago Samhain.”
I’d spent years wondering what Connall of Saltmist—the mysterious fae nobleman who’d lain with my mother once—looked like.
I built a warrior in my head who owned the same almond-shaped dark eyes that I did, the same olive skin, the same dark hair…. And I would yearn for the day he would come for me, steal me away from court, and love me the way my mother didn’t.
He didn’t know of my birth.
He couldn’t have known.
But one day he would hear those rumors and he would save me.
