Rage--A Stormheart Novel

by Cora Carmack

  She did not want this soul inside her, to become part of her. It would rot her from the inside out. But what choice did she have? If she refused, the Stormlord would know she had no intention of helping him and he would have no reason to keep her alive. He might even send the storm he had already created toward Pavan. If she managed to take it, and that was a big if considering how weak and cold she was at this point, that would mean one less dark soul for the Stormlord to put to use in his war against Stormlings. Though she knew he had many more.

  As the gleaming heart approached—swirls of luminous light mimicking the larger storm that raged around her—she knew what she had to do.

  In the desert, she had been able to control the skyfire storm to some extent. When a hunter took the heart of a storm, it was an all-out battle to see which heart was stronger—that of the human or the tempest. But with her first soul, she had ordered it to submit, and it had listened.

  She did not know if the same would be true today. She had a feeling this soul would put up a much stronger fight. But all the same, she took a step forward, her bare feet sinking painfully into the drifts of snow.

  “Come to me,” she commanded, drawing on that indefinable otherness inside that she used to communicate with spirits.

  The storm’s heart moved even closer, hovering just an arm’s reach above her head now.

  “Closer,” she demanded, pushing her will outside herself and toward the twisted, poisonous soul that controlled the still-falling snow.

  As soon as the orb dipped low enough, Aurora used her last reserve of strength to jump, shoving her hand directly into the storm’s heart.

  Her first thought was that the cold she had felt before was nothing to the icy frost surging through her now. Last time, the heart she had taken had been shocked and sad, even afraid. This time, the other soul was nothing short of ravenous. It wanted everything she had—life and power and freedom—and it would do whatever it took to get them.

  Strongest heart, Aurora reminded herself. It did not matter if she was cold and tired and weak. She did not need the strongest body to win this fight. She only needed the strongest heart. And the other soul might be hungry for victory, but it was only fighting for its own greed.

  She was fighting for so much more.

  Aurora had to win so that she could get back to Kiran and tell him she loved him. She had not said those words enough. She needed to see her mother and Duke again. She had so many questions she wanted to ask them about their time together when they were young. She wanted to know everything that Duke would tell her about his life as Finneus. She had to survive to save Jinx and Nova. It was her fault that her friends were in such danger, and she absolutely could not die here and leave them alone. She wanted to hear Ransom and Bait bicker some more, and she wanted to finally get to know Sly better. The wary hunter had been her rock in the palace after Jinx and Nova had been captured, and she had never properly thanked her. She had to do that.

  Crying out under the strain, Aurora pushed her hand deeper into that pernicious soul and demanded, “Submit to me. I control spirits, and you will obey.”

  The world ruptured with light, and the fierce pressure from her opponent disappeared. Aurora had a moment of wild relief before something new and wrong slid into place inside her. She tried to scream, but her legs gave out, and the world fragmented into darkness around her.

  A new type of magic emerged with the coming of the tempests, and its users called themselves Stormlings. But as decades passed in this changed world, the original magics that disappeared did not stay gone forever. Rumors began to circulate of young children with gifts over the elements. The question was whether those powers came from the goddess or if some of the original magic users had survived the Time of Tempests after all. Because the storm seasons did not ease, many believed it was the latter, and that the storms would never truly end until every witch was eliminated. Stormling cities outlawed the use of elemental magics, and those born with the gifts learned to live their lives in secret.

  —An Examination of the Original Magics

  21

  Upon waking, Aurora’s hands and wrists were once again bound in the manacles, and there was no remaining evidence of the snow that had blanketed this entire area before. Her throat was parched, and her stomach had that hollow empty feeling that went deeper than hunger. The last time she had taken a soul, she had slept for days afterward.

  She looked around, trying to find some way to gauge how much time had passed. The Stormlord was nowhere to be seen, and the fire was long out. She did not smell even a hint of smoke or ash.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the usual lightning flash of the storm in her chest, only now the pattern had changed. Between flickers of skyfire, there were billowing spirals of pearlescent, snowy flecks that looked as if they were caught up in the wind.

  Hesitating, she searched inside her for that new addition, and jerked back when she felt that same voracious, seething presence that she had sensed in the storm. It was weaker now, but it was there all the same, woven inside her own soul.

  She squeezed her eyes tightly closed, tears chasing each other down her temples as she lay prone and shackled and forever changed in the dirt.

  Eventually she became aware of someone approaching—two someones, in fact. Her heart leaped into her throat and for a moment she dared to hope.

  Please, please, please.

  But as they drew nearer, she felt the mass of dark spirits that could only be following the Stormlord. She was too weak to ascertain who the other person was, not without making herself vulnerable to all those spirits. Her heart hammered, fearing the worst. If he had captured Kiran too … She swallowed, trying not to be swept away by panic, and failing miserably.

  When the Stormlord ducked out of the trees, dragging another half-conscious man with him, it was not Kiran he brought. But she did recognize the man. He had dark curly hair and bronze skin. Blood marred his nose and mouth, and the last she had heard, he had been captured by her friends.

  Casimir.

  The Stormlord had made contact with the rebellion. The question now was whether that contact had been amicable. He hauled Casimir closer, the man’s legs struggling and failing to keep up with his pace. He kept pulling until he drew even with Aurora, then he threw Casimir to the ground.

  “Stay or you die,” the Stormlord growled, holding up a hand crackling with skyfire in threat.

  Casimir’s jaw was locked tight, and his eyes shone with disdain, but he made no move to get up from the ground as the Stormlord crossed to Aurora, bent over, and began to unlock her manacles. Her heart faltered, then bounded off into a sprint as one leg came free, then the other. Without a word, he crossed to her hands. Hard breaths sawed in and out of her mouth as he released her, and gingerly, she pushed herself upright, her muscles protesting at the change after such a long time in one position. She looked warily between the Stormlord and the Locke prince. Her captor squared off between them, his arms crossed over his chest, and he stared at her.

  His scarred eye narrowed slightly, and he said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?” she asked, her voice a barely-there husk.

  “You said you support the goddess’s will. It is time to prove yourself.” He stretched out his hand, and in his palm lay a knife.

  Aurora’s hands trembled, and the days of dehydration made her mouth so dry she felt as if her throat were closing up. Or maybe that was just her unwillingness to speak.

  “You want to be free,” the Stormlord continued. “You want to earn my trust and defeat the Lockes. Do this, and you will have taken a step toward all three.”

  “You want me to kill him? Now?” She searched frantically for a way out of this, some escape.

  The Stormlord shrugged. “If you want me to continue to teach you the ways of the goddess, I need to know you are on the right side.”

  He offered the knife again, and this time she took it, wondering if she could use it against the Stormlord instead
before he called a legion of tempests against her. She stood, her knees shaky from disuse. And she knew if she tried to run, she would probably fall. She was so weak.

  Aurora looked at Casimir. He had been jovial when she first met him, but that had all been an act. She had heard him talk with Cassius behind her back, and he did not seem nearly so good-natured then. She’d seen the cruelty with which he treated the remnants, and knew he had been behind the burning of the Eye, but was that enough for her to justify harming him, potentially taking his life? What did she expect when she was queen? She would have to make these kinds of decisions—the hardest kind, of who was guilty and what they deserved—but she would not be the one to mete out the punishment. Did that make the blood any less on her hands?

  Casimir lifted his chin and stared at her, blinking rapidly.

  Aurora saw the moment he recognized her, his narrowed gaze going wide with shock.

  She tried to convey with her eyes that she did not plan to hurt him.

  Not like this. She thought she had accepted the rebellion’s plan to hand Casimir over, but now that she had spent goddess knew how many days in the madman’s company, she knew there was no justice in that kind of fate, only cruelty.

  She opened her mouth to tell the Stormlord no, but his attention broke abruptly away from her to the way he had come. He cursed, and a moment later the sky ruptured. From a clear blue sky an explosion of wind spread in every direction. A pinhole of darkness grew into a vortex of thick dark clouds that pulled at the universe around it, dragging in clouds and trees and everything nearby. A twister began to form as darker clouds bulked up in the sky, and the roar of it on the wind drowned out everything.

  She did not even hear the Stormlord move. Everything happened so fast. She only felt him jerk the knife from her hand, saw the glint of the blade in the sun, and looked up just in time to see him drag it across Casimir’s throat. She watched the prince’s eyes go wide, felt the spray of blood across her face and the front of her body.

  She did not know when she had started screaming, only that she was. But it, like everything else, was lost to the monstrous twister that was sucking up everything in its path not far away.

  The Stormlord tucked the knife away at his belt, and then crossed toward her. She scrambled backward, her hands scraping over dirt and rocks. She managed to push herself to her feet, and then she ran. Impossible as it was … she ran toward the twister. She only made it a few paces before a hand caught her wrist, hauling her back.

  She sent out a scream for help—audible and inaudible—and jerked hard, the socket of her shoulder twisting painfully. In the distance she saw that the twister had expanded in size, and for a moment, she could have sworn she saw a person caught up in its vicious winds, but then the shadow rotated beyond her view, and she could not be sure.

  Something rumbled ominously in the distance, and the Stormlord growled in frustration behind her. As she watched, the rotation of the twister began to slow. The winds screamed as if in protest. In the moment of distraction, Aurora used her free hand to grab the still-bloody knife from the holster on the Stormlord’s belt. And with unflinching surety, she plunged the blade into his chest.

  His fingers loosened around her wrist and she broke free, running for the trees. She did not stop until she made it to the edge of the clearing, and only then did she glance back briefly to see how close her captor was.

  The clearing where he had kept her was empty, except for the prone body of the dead Casimir Locke.

  She clung to a nearby tree, unsure whether she should keep running, or whether she should turn now and run in the other direction, considering the twister tearing through the forest ahead. She had her answer a few moments later when she felt a burst of magic, and the forest went quiet—no more howling winds, no more whirlwind of debris. Only the calm after the chaos.

  Someone had dismantled the storm and come to rescue her. And even though every muscle in her body wanted to give up and slide to the forest floor, she pushed herself off of her current tree and toward the next. She did that again and again, stumbling over tree roots and past shrub bushes, determined to set eyes on the loved ones she had missed so dearly.

  Soon, she heard the crack of a twig up ahead, and her breath caught, tears preemptively falling down her face. She searched the trees, waiting for the moment Kiran would appear between them, praying to the goddess that no one had been hurt in the fight with the storm.

  There were a thousand other things that shadowed form could have been besides a person caught up in the twister’s winds. She had to believe that. It had to be true.

  Another crunch of boots, and then a tall form appeared. Aurora clutched at the nearest tree, giving up on walking the rest of the way.

  But for the second time that day, the person who walked out from the trees was not who she expected. He was tall, with dark hair and eyes and light brown skin not unlike Kiran’s. And the moment he laid eyes on her, he started running, yelling commands at someone she could not see. She lost her grip on the tree, sinking to her knees, but he was there to catch her before she hit the ground.

  “Aurora. Gods, Aurora, are you all right?”

  She looked up into the face of Cassius Locke, and she told the truth. “No. I am not.”

  * * *

  Cassius fell to his knees, dropping his sword completely to cradle Aurora Pavan’s thin, bloody form as she crumpled into unconsciousness. He felt as if his mind had been swept away by the twister they had encountered moments before, because he could not seem to grasp what he was seeing. She was here, in front of him, after all this time.

  Her clothes were ragged and muddy, and she was splattered with blood. Her hair was shorter—tangled and dirty. Her cheeks looked hollow, like they had long forgotten their last meal. He searched furiously for any injuries that could be the source for all the blood, but after a few moments determined it was not hers.

  The neck of her shirt was torn open, and he could see mud-streaked skin and what looked like flashes of light. He stared, entranced and confused, as displays of magic he had only ever seen in the sky moved where her heart should be. It was impossible; only the Stormlord bore those kinds of marks. It was him they had come seeking, after all. One of the remnants had reported seeing a suspicious man with someone she was certain was Casimir Locke. Considering his brother had made it his mission to torture the remnants into leaving, he did not know why anyone would want to help, but it was the first real lead they had had on his brother.

  And now he found Aurora here instead? It made no sense.

  Someone called out ahead of him. Then more shouts followed. He hefted Aurora into his arms and went toward the noise. She was too light in his arms, her skin too cold, but a warmth he had not known in a long time began to spread through him at the certainty of having her safe in his hold.

  Then he came into the clearing and saw what had drawn his soldiers’ attention, and what little warmth he had gained left him.

  His brother lay strewn across the grass, his neck open, a crimson puddle forming below him. He looked away, blinking hard to rid himself of the sight. But that red pool lingered on the black of his eyelids.

  He had never been particularly close to his brother. That was not how his family worked. But gods damn it, he was so tired. Violence lived beneath his very skin, it was part of who he was, but that did not mean he did not want to claw it out sometimes. He wanted to turn that violence inward and burn it all away until there was nothing left but ash and he could finally rest.

  He forced his eyes open and scanned the rest of the area around him. His eyes landed on a pair of manacles staked in the grass, about two strides apart. He looked down where Aurora’s arms lay limply in her lap and saw the raw abrasions around her wrists. He tilted one arm up and saw the same was true of her ankles.

  Then that violence he knew so well came screaming back—black and burning.

  If she had been held captive out here too, then the bastard still had to be out here somewhere
.

  “Search the woods,” he demanded. “Search every bleeding tree if you have to. Find him.”

  He took a deep breath, his thoughts torn in too many directions—wanting to be in on the hunt, knowing he needed to get Aurora to a nurse, and dreading facing his brother’s lifeless body again.

  He turned to two soldiers who were still kneeling by his brother and gave them instructions. “Wrap the body, and return it to the palace. Somewhere discreet until I can break the news to my family.”

  The men nodded their assent and set about fulfilling his orders.

  Then there was only the girl left in his arms, who was entirely too still.

  She, he would be seeing to himself. He set her down for a moment, shucked off his coat, and settled it over her, taking great care to hide the slim slice of flesh that glowed with inexplicable light. Then he lifted her back into his arms and began the walk back toward home.

  He wanted to run, to get her to safety and help as soon as possible, but he knew the distance was too far—he might hurt her more by jostling her. So he held her with as much care as he possibly could as he walked back through the area where he had defeated the twister that had come out of nowhere. He would have to send more men back to search here too, for he was certain men had been swept up in the winds.

  For now though, he ignored the twisted and downed trees and the mangled mess that the storm had left behind. He was having trouble tearing his eyes away from the thin bones of Aurora’s arms. Had she always been so frail? In his memories, she was strong and confident, but the girl in his arms now looked withered and so very breakable.