by Aja James
Ishtar blanched.
She knew that he didn’t refer to what she’d whispered in his ear while he’d been unconscious. He was remembering her words and actions from the night before:
This is how a Blood Slave is Claimed. This is how a whore is made. This is all you have ever been to me, and when I’m finished, there will be nothing left of you.
“I-I-”
Her bravado slipped as she grasped desperately for the right words, even though she knew there were none to atone for the depth of her cruelty, the blindness of her vengeance.
“If not,” he ruthlessly cut her off, “then leave.”
She shook her head, thickening her skin.
She deserved whatever he did in retribution for her savagery before, but she wasn’t letting him out of her sights.
“I’m not leaving you,” she stated firmly, focusing on what she had to do rather than what she’d done.
“If you try to leave my presence, I will just track you again and follow you.”
Tal could barely hold himself together.
Why was she doing this?! He knew she hated him. What did she want from him? More punishment?
He wouldn’t survive it. He’d die if she—
It didn’t matter.
He didn’t matter. More than his own pain, he had to protect her while there was breath left in his body.
He never should have succumbed to her blood’s call for his. He should have resisted to the end. But he’d wanted to hold her so badly, so wretchedly, he’d felt as if he’d been roasting in the fires of Hell for lack of her. He’d needed her like he needed to breathe.
And now, for that thoughtless instance of selfishness, he’d put her in grave danger.
He had to push her away for good.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked in a deceptively mild tone.
“Repeat the words I said to you that day on the mountain? Did you not understand my meaning the first time?”
Ishtar flinched, recalling his words.
I have never, nor ever will, love you. Everything between us has been pretense. I only let you have me because I needed to help my people defeat yours.
How else can I release into the body of a Dark One? If I loved you, I would suffer the Decline, for a Dark One can never provide the Sustenance a Pure One needs.
“I have nothing else to say to you,” he said now with finality.
“Then I will talk and you can listen,” she replied with a calmness she didn’t feel.
Tal considered getting up and walking away, but he had a feeling she didn’t make idle threats. She’d just follow him if he did.
Unless Ishtar did something of her own volition, no one was going to make her.
“I was wrong to hurt you,” she began, and Tal clenched his jaw tightly against the flood of memories from the night before.
“I had no right—”
“You have every right,” he interrupted, trying to remind her of her hatred for him, because that was the only way he could push her away.
“You’re the Mistress and I’m the Blood Slave. You can say whatever you want. Fuck me however you like.”
Ishtar’s head went back as if he’d struck her.
If the terrible words alone made her reel from pain, how he must have felt last night?
She took a few, shuddering breaths, her heart clenching and twisting from the acid that seemed to have filled it instead of air. Stubbornly, she continued, determined to tell him how she felt.
“I don’t regret loving you, Tal,” she said softly. “I truly did love you.”
An indefinable emotion streaked across his face like ice cracking over a frozen lake.
“It was the most wonderful feeling in the world, to give my heart to such a worthy male. But I was wrong to expect you to love me back. I demanded and I pushed and in the end I hated you for telling me the truth that I never wanted to hear.”
“Stop,” Tal whispered, shutting his eyes.
“And then I let that hatred fester and build over the millennia that I had to live without you,” she plunged on, ignoring his plea. “‘Hell hath no fury’ as they say…”
“Stop,” he rasped, his breaths quickening with increased agitation.
“And I hated myself for wanting you still. The more I wanted you, the more I hated myself, and the more I hated you because of it. And I…and I…”
“Don’t—”
“I hurt you.”
His chest was heaving now, his jaw clenched, his eyes squeezed shut. And she knew that she was hurting him even now, with these awful words, making him relive the pain.
But she needed to say them; she needed him to understand.
“I’m sorry I hurt you. I never will again,” she said finally.
He opened his eyes and stared sightlessly at her.
“Then leave me alone,” he uttered in a hollow voice, as if the words had been forced through his lips against his own will.
She inhaled a deep breath and nodded.
“I will. If that’s what you want.”
He was flooded with both staggering relief and unbelievable pain at her acquiescence.
“But not until I find a way to heal you,” she added, the determined steel in her voice familiar to his ears.
“You must come back with me so the healers can work their magic,” she insisted.
“Else, I will stay with you and see this through, wherever you are going, wherever this will lead.”
“What you think you know is merely conjecture. What you know you know is certainty. For, it is the mind that thinks a convincing picture. But it is the heart that knows fidelity.”
—From the Ecliptic Prophesies, buried and forgotten
Chapter Eleven
Mercifully, she didn’t say anything else after that, and neither did he. They could have been stone statues for the stillness and silence that encapsulated them.
Tal knew there was no persuading her to leave him, so he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, trying to think of other ways to lose her while resting for a few hours while he could.
He hated to admit it, but having her there comforted him, and despite the danger he’d put her in, her presence lessened the threat to both of them, for two warriors against Anunit’s forces were definitely better than one.
Even so, he had to ensure her safety before the end, and that meant leaving her behind.
That she could track him through his blood in hers was something he couldn’t change or mask. They would forever be bonded in this way; only death could come between them.
Anunit had tried her twisted best over thousands of years to break that bond, cutting into his every vein, every inch of flesh, infusing her venom, blood, and whatever other witchery she used, into his tissues and bones. Pushing him ever closer to death, but never fully across the divide.
It hadn’t worked. Ishtar’s Claim on him stubbornly refused to let go, though it seemed to go into a form of dormancy.
On the night after her twentieth name day, after he’d left her on that mountain top, shattered and defeated, he’d barely managed to stumble down the path to the awaiting steed and climb atop it before passing out stone cold into oblivion.
The horse had known exactly where to go, sent to him by Ninti, and carried him many miles to the Pure Ones’ makeshift stronghold in the Silver Mountains to the North. He had no memory of arriving, and when he’d finally regained consciousness, he was informed that he’d been writhing in agony for three whole days.
Since then, he’d carried a constant pain deep inside of him, gnawing at his organs, muscles and sinew like a slow-acting acid. He’d assumed it was the Decline, and made sure to gain as much ground with the Pure forces as he could within the next thirty days, before the Goddess saw fit to take him.
But at the end of thirty days, Tal’s condition remained the same.
The pain was ever present, but he’d become so used to it that it receded into a throbbing ache, no worse than the f
resh wounds he received in battle. The difference was that, while new wounds eventually healed, the gnawing pain inside never went away.
Under his leadership and Ninti’s inspiration, many more Pure Ones joined them. Slowly and carefully they built their numbers, trained their warriors, stocked supplies. Over ten years, and then twenty, they steadily ramped up networks across the empire, making alliances, negotiating truces.
Tal’s time in the Palace had been invaluable. He could see it in the fighting skills of the warriors he trained. His political strategies kept the Provincial Ensis from actively participating in the War, though they sometimes sent supplies to the Queen’s forces, which he quickly cut off with surgical strikes.
For the most part he maintained a cold war with the Dark Ones, sometimes retreating, sometimes gaining ground. Over two decades, the Resistance grew into a widespread Rebellion, and a few skirmishes eventually swept the land like wildfire into what became known as the Great War.
He never knew what triggered it, but finally, after twenty years of uneasy stalemate, the Dark Queen launched a full-scale, ruthless attack, deploying the might of her armies against them. The Pure Ones who hadn’t joined their ranks were hunted down in their Masters’ homes and executed en masse. Those Dark Masters who sought to protect their slaves were executed as well.
Those were the darkest days when Tal often questioned the wisdom of the choices he made. Thankfully, he didn’t have much time to dwell on it, his body and mind engaged day and night in planning, negotiating, maneuvering and fighting.
The only part he couldn’t distract was his heart.
It yearned so badly for her that he was surprised it remained beating in his chest whenever he awoke from a brisk doze, and not bleeding somewhere on the mountainside where he’d torn it out just as surely as he’d done to hers.
It happened too often—his awaking to darkness and pain, naked and alone, calling her name.
At that critical juncture, when the Dark Queen’s forces had loomed on the verge of crushing them into oblivion, he invoked his agreement with the Serpent. True to her word, Anunit kept Enlil and his shadow warriors out of the most critical battles, giving the Pure Ones a fighting chance.
And then, at the agreed time, she’d come to collect her payment—
Him.
“Who is the other female in your blood?”
Ishtar’s question exploded at Tal’s feet like a fire bomb, the ones that were used to destroy the Pure Ones’ fort during the Great Siege.
Outwardly, he gave no reaction, save the muscle that involuntarily ticked near his left eyebrow.
How did she know? Who told her?
“Ava and Rain said that it’s possible you’re going through an accelerated version of the Decline because of her,” she continued, a hitch in her breath.
“Because you love her. Is she the Pure Queen from long ago? The one with you in the Silver Mountains?”
What?!
Tal couldn’t help the confounded expression on his face. She was no longer making sense.
“I saw you with her,” she said, her voice low. “I was desperate to see you when…when I first found out I was with child. I just wanted to talk with you. Not that I expected anything, but I just…”
Tal’s heart ripped in two. Goddess above, he couldn’t take much more of this. She needed to leave!
“I missed you so,” she ended on a whisper.
Tal considered letting her believe this simple lie she’d somehow woven in her own head, but he was so tired of lies.
The worst of which were untold truths.
He was tired of hurting her and hurting himself in turn. If he was heading toward the ultimate end—he had no expectation to come out alive from a battle with Anunit and her soldiers, but perhaps he could take a few of them with him to the other side—he needed her to understand a few things before he left this world.
“If you are referring to Ninti, the first Pure Queen, then you are mistaken,” he told her firmly, matter-of-factly.
“She and I were comrades, nothing more.”
“But—”
He heard her shifting in her seat, likely leaning over the narrow table between them to be closer to him.
“But I saw you with her,” she emphasized the word, “I saw you making love to her.”
Tal simply stared blindly back at her.
He shook his head, as much at himself as at her.
All this time, it didn’t matter what he did, she always chose to believe the worst of him. The lies that he’d told to save her. Events that never happened.
She never believed in him.
Perhaps it was some form of the Decline that ravaged him. For he wondered whether she ever really loved him.
But even if it had only been the shadow of love she’d felt, it was infinitely more affirmative than whatever she might feel now. She’d shown him exactly what she felt for him last night.
He hardened his heart, willing it to stop bleeding for her, though it was a lost cause. As much as he’d had to lie to her, he’d never been able to lie to himself.
“Believe what you want,” he finally uttered. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But it does!” she said, and came to sit on the seat beside him, corralling him in between the train window and the table divider.
“I need to know who she is,” she said urgently.
Though she didn’t touch him, he could feel her body vibrating with tension beside his.
“I need to find the female you love and…and maybe we can convince her, maybe—”
He huffed humorlessly, cutting her off.
“Maybe what? Convince her to love me back? Is that your plan to save me? Do you know what love means?”
Ishtar searched his impassive face for answers.
He was facing toward the opposite seat, his profile to her. Though his countenance seemed stone cold and emotionless, she saw the tightness of his jaw, the tensed muscles of his neck.
She was hurting him again. She shouldn’t have brought up the female he loved. But why did he deny what she saw?
She’d been so confused and unhappy after he’d gone.
At first she wallowed in the misery of what Anunit had told her—that he’d been using her all along to gather information to help the Resistance and overthrow the Queen. Now that he’d gotten what he needed, he executed his escape. She hadn’t believed Anunit at first; she’d gone out to find him.
Confront him.
And find him she did, on top of the mountain cliffs where they used to meet. He told her everything, confirming her sister’s words. He’d dared her to keep him back, using her command of his blood, dared her to keep him as her Blood Slave against his will.
She couldn’t. She loved him too much to force him to stay with her when he obviously didn’t want to. So she watched him, dry-eyed and numb, disappear down the mountain.
The Queen had commanded an immediate assault on the Pure Ones’ base in retaliation for his escape, but Ishtar had convinced her that it was better with him gone. For, now there was no one to distract her from her duties.
She’d used her mother’s desire for her to formally and seriously take up the succession mantle as a bargaining chip to secure the Pure Ones’ safety. But she insisted that she choose her own Mate. It would not be Enlil, who belonged to her sister.
But most of all, she couldn’t betray her heart by taking another male into her body, or betraying the male by loving another. For blood, she continued to use Pure slaves, and only females as she’d always done.
She was yet very young, she reasoned with the Queen. She needed time to catch up to her sister’s knowledge of the Dark laws, their history, the tenets of being an effective ruler.
The Queen had seen the advantages of what she said, reluctantly agreeing to her terms.
It had worked for two decades. The Queen turned a blind eye to the Pure Ones’ gathering strength and alliances.
Until one day, because Ishtar couldn’t
keep her temper, the Queen finally issued the order to wipe out the entire Rebellion.
Ishtar had thanked the Dark Goddess in private that Anunit had been away with Enlil and his shadow forces in a faraway land beyond the border of the Akkadian empire, ostensibly trying to scope out new territories and make new treaties. Ishtar remained at the palace to defend it while Queen Ashlu herself led the Dark legions into battle.
She wondered often whether she should have taken her mother’s place, for it was during one of the battles that the Queen perished. No one knew exactly how, and Ishtar never had a chance to find out, for she’d had all she could handle defending the palace from a coalition assault by Pure Ones and their human allies.
There were vampires in the mix too, and she could have sworn some of Enlil’s shadows were fighting for the other side.
But that couldn’t have been possible, could it? Anunit and Enlil had been away. And why would they have fought to destroy the palace rather than defend it?
Ishtar had never discovered the answer to that puzzle, for she’d finally been captured by a massive invasion of humans in the palace courtyard. They’d even prepared a large, iron-threaded net to throw on top of her in her giant leopard form. No matter which form she took, the net simply tightened around her.
Finally, her captors bound and gagged her and dragged her away while her home and everything she knew burned to the ground.
Did she know what love meant?
She thought she did.
She’d let go the one thing she wanted most in life, the one being that gave her undiluted joy, because he wanted to leave. She’d done everything she could to help his cause, or at least to keep her mother from crushing it. While all the time, inside, she’d been drowning, flailing without him, repeatedly reliving his parting words to her.
And then she’d discovered that she was pregnant. She’d been terrified of what her mother would do if she found out. Anunit had helped her hide her form as much as she could, as well as the first few months of sickness and lethargy.
Her resolve had weakened then. She cried for him every night. She could only focus on her own selfish needs and concerns, and not how she could influence the Queen and her Court to help him.
