Page 45 of Between Sun and Moon

The bottle of bourbon didn’t last through that part.

Later that night, on our way back to Clearwell Castle, I figured out where my old guard ended up. Or, I guess I should say, I figured out wherepartof him ended up.

Surrounding the castle were towering stone walls with sharp wooden pikes sticking out of them. Occupying the pikes were heads—belonging to anyone who went against the crown, I presumed.

That was where I found my old guard.

His head had been severed and shoved grotesquely onto one of the pikes, the flesh picked clean by the ravens circling up above, waiting for their next meal.

And where his eyes used to be, all that was left were bloody, vacant holes.

Von

When the Creator placed the makings of my being on their great anvil, they hammered the power to direct, to command, to dominate into my flesh, forging those traits into my immortal bones. That’s why the Creator made me the first king of kings.

I was built to lead—to control.

But there was a balance to it. With control, one must know its brother—restraint. You could not possess one without the other, despite their similarities.

But when it came to her . . . my control and my restraint were always being tested.

After Kaleb’s death, that day in the woods, she would have happily given herself to me. Creator above, how badly I wanted her. All I could feel was a visceral, raw need to claim her—herbody and her soul. But I didn’t, and it had taken every ounce of my immortal strength to turn her down. I had my reasons.

The first was because I wanted to take my time with her, to give her mortal-acting body time to adjust for mine. The second was because her brother had just died, and I knew my impulsive female and the way she used sex as a tool to feel when she was facing hardships, or when she felt numb. How many times had she slept with another male, only to regret it the next day?

No, I wasn’t like other men, and I would not be something she regretted.

Sage wasn’t just any other female—she was my soul’s other half, my mate,my bonded.

The bond was an ancient magic that tethered two souls together, well past the limits of eternity. When two mates found each other, the bond gave them a connection unlike any other. It made it so we could feel what one another was feeling, while giving us a private channel to speak on. The bond could happen among any species, but it was most prevalent among the Old Gods, while it was almost non-existent among the New Gods.

Some speculated that the Creator chose to get rid of the bond when they created the New Gods. That was because there was a downside to it—it could turn well-mannered gods into rabid animals. It could drive them to insanity, making them obsess over protecting their mates—willing to do anything to keep them safe, even if it meant locking their mates away from the rest of the world, never to be seen again.

I’d be a liar if I said that thought hadn’t crossed my mind—spawned forth by the beast that lived inside. Oh yes, I felt that animal within, the one the Three Spinners called Nockrythiam—the Ender of Realms. But I did everything I could to keep that nasty demon under lock and key. I had warred with that part of me since the dawn of my creation.

When I felt her presence in the manor in Belamour, I had felt her soul calling out for mine. My restraint had snapped like a frayed rope stretched beyond its means, and although I knew it just might kill me . . .

Ineededto see her.

So I’d used my shadows to conjure a phantom version of myself and sent it to her.

For a time, I was able to breathe her in, feel her warm, little body mold so perfectly against my own. I held that form for as long as I could, but the unhealing wound in my stomach was like a black hole, constantly swallowing my power.

Now that my shadows had returned, and my remaining stores of power were depleted even more, I could feel unconsciousness calling for me.

Water was an incredible force. When given time, one persistent little stream could carve through ground and stone, forging itself into a mighty river. Although I considered my sister more blazing inferno than calm water, Saphira, apparently, had taken note of this, because her persistence had strengthened over the past so many months.

Constantly, she was in my ear, in my council’s ear, demanding we go to war against the New Gods and take back the Living and Immortal Realms, using the consistent increase of young women’s deaths to pour a little extra cyanide on thefire she had so carefully stoked. But I knew my sister—she was the last of the divine to care about mortal lives.

She just wanted war.

The worst part of it all? I was starting to entertain the thought.

Which was why I was here, in the realm of the living, standing at the base of Mount Kilangor, its peak hidden above a blanket of clouds. The mountain, forged from bedrock, was too steep for anything to grow on it, rendering it a deathly gray.

My power was useless here, the wards of the Three Spinners making it so, which meant that I couldn’t just shadow walk up the mountainside.

However, I wasn’t about to walk . . .

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