Lord of the Abyss & Desert Warrior

by Nalini Singh

  Water.

  Her throat suddenly felt as if it was lined with broken glass. Sheer need gave her the strength to pull herself up onto her knees and cup her hands, drink her fill. The water was cool and crisp and sweet, the droplets trailing down her wrists. It was beyond tempting to gorge, but she stopped herself after a bare few mouthfuls, aware her empty stomach would revolt if she overindulged.

  Her eyes more accustomed to the shadows now, she glimpsed something else beside the pail. A steel container. Opening it, she found a small loaf of bread. Hunger a clawing beast in her stomach after days without food, she ripped off a piece and chewed. The bread wasn’t moldy or stale but simply lumpy and hard—as if the baker had been given instructions to make it as unpalatable as possible.

  A skittering to her left, the sound of tiny paws on stone.

  She turned her head, found her eyes meeting two shiny ones that gleamed in the dark. The sight may have incited fear in another woman, but Liliana had long made pets of such creatures in her father’s home. Still, she examined her roommate carefully. It was a small, quivering thing, its bones showing through its skin. Hardly a threat. Tearing off a piece of bread, she held it out. “Come, little friend.”

  The mouse froze.

  She continued to hold the bread, almost able to see the way the tiny creature was torn between lunging for the food and protecting itself. Hunger won and it darted to grab the bread from her grasp. An instant later and it was gone. It would return, she thought, when its belly forced it to.

  Closing the container with half the loaf still inside, she placed it beside the water and made her way to the straw. For a dungeon, she thought drowsily as her body began to shut down, this place was not so terrible. The monster clearly needed to take lessons from her father in how to make it a filthy pit full of screams and endless despair.

  THE DREAM ALWAYS BEGAN THE same way.

  “No, Bitty, no.” She was small, maybe five, and on her knees, shaking a finger at the long-haired white rabbit who was her best friend. “You have to fetch.”

  Since Bitty was a rabbit more enamored with eating and sunning himself, he didn’t so much as twitch when she threw the ball. Sighing, she got up and fetched it herself, but she wasn’t really sad. Bitty was a good pet. He let her stroke his long silky ears as much as she wanted, and sometimes he made enough of an effort to move to follow her around the room.

  “Come on, slugapuss,” she said, pulling him into her lap. “Oomph, you’re heavy. No more lettuce for you.”

  Under her hands, his heart beat in a fast rhythm, his body warm and snuggly. She struggled to her feet under the burden. “Let’s go in the garden. If you’re really good, I’ll steal some strawberries for you.”

  That was when the door opened.

  And the dream changed.

  The man in the doorway with his black hair brushed back from a severe widow’s peak, chill slate-gray eyes and cadaverous frame, was her father. For a frozen moment, she thought he’d heard what she’d been planning for the strawberries, but then he smiled and her fear lessened a fraction. Just a fraction. Because even at five years of age, she knew nothing good ever came of her father seeking her out. “Father?”

  He strolled into the room, his eyes on Bitty. “You’ve looked after him well.”

  She nodded. “I take care of him really good.” Bitty was the only kind thing her father had ever done for her.

  “I can see that.” He smiled again, but those eyes, they were wrong in a way that made her stomach hurt. “Come with me, Liliana. No,” he said when she would have bent to place Bitty on the floor, “bring your pet. I have a use for him.”

  The words scared her, but she was only five. Cuddling Bitty close to her chest, she toddled along after her father, and then up…and up…and up.

  “How thoughtless of me,” he said when they were halfway. “It must be difficult for you, all these stairs. Let me take the creature.”

  Certain she felt the rabbit flinch, Liliana tightened her hold on Bitty. “No, I’m okay,” she said, trying not to huff.

  Eyes of dirty ice stared at her for a long moment before her father turned, continued to climb the twisting, winding staircase to the tower room. The magic room. Where she was never, ever supposed to go.

  However, today he opened the door and said, “It’s time you learned about your heritage.”

  There was nowhere else to go, nowhere he wouldn’t find her. So she walked into that room full of strange scents and books. It wasn’t as gloomy as she’d expected, and there was no blood. Relief had her smiling in tremulous hope. Everyone always said her father was a blood sorcerer, but there was no blood here, so they had to be wrong.

  Looking up, she met his gaze as he loomed over to take Bitty from her protesting arms. Her smile died, fear a metallic taste on her tongue.

  “Such a healthy creature,” he murmured, carrying the rabbit over to something that looked like a stone birdbath set in the middle of the circular room. Switching his hold, he suspended Bitty by his silky ears.

  “No!” Liliana said, able to hear Bitty squeaking in distress. “That hurts him.”

  “It won’t be for long.” And then her father pulled a long, sharp knife from his cloak.

  Bitty’s blood turned the silver of the blade a dark, dark crimson before it flowed down to fill the shallow bowl of the horrible thing that wasn’t a birdbath.

  “Come here, Liliana.”

  Shaking her head, sobbing, she backed away.

  “Come here,” he said again in that same calm voice.

  Her feet began to move forward in spite of her terror, in spite of her will, until she was close enough for her father to pick her up by the ruff of her neck and push her face close to the fading warmth of Bitty’s blood, her blinding fear reflected in red. “See,” he said. “See who you are.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  LILIANA JERKED AWAKE ON A soundless scream, her mouth stuffed with cotton wool and her head full of the cold finality of death. It took her long moments to realize that the door to her cell stood open; Bard watched her with those large eyes of liquid black.

  “Hello,” she said, voice strained with the echoes of nightmare.

  He waved her forward.

  She got to her feet, ready to fight dizziness, but her body held her up. Relieved, she stepped out, following Bard’s ponderous steps through the dimly lit passageway until he stopped at another narrow door. When he did nothing else, she pushed through and felt her cheeks color. “I’ll be but a moment.”

  Taking care of her private business, she used the mirror of black glass to tidy herself up as much as possible—there wasn’t anything she could do about her beak of a nose, or the eyes of dirty ice so wrong against her mother’s honey-dark skin, or the strawlike consistency of her matted black hair, much less the slashing gape of her mouth, but she was able to sleek that hair back off her face at least and tuck it behind her ears, wash off the blood that still streaked her wrists.

  “Well,” she said to herself, “you’re here now. You must do what you came to do.” Though she had no idea how.

  She’d grown up hearing the people her father had enslaved whispering of the four royal children, the true heirs to the jewel that was once Elden. The hope in their furtive voices had nurtured her own, fostering dreams of a future in which fear, sharp and acrid, wasn’t her constant companion.

  Then, a month ago, driven by a steadily strengthening belief that something was very, very wrong, she’d stolen away into the putrid stench and clawing branches of the Dead Forest to call a vision as her father could not, his blood too tainted—and seen the tomorrow that was to come.

  The heirs of Elden would return.

  All of them…but one.

  The Guardian of the Abyss would not be there on that fateful day. Without him, the four-sided key of power would remain incomplete. His brothers and sister, their mates, would fight with the fiercest hearts to defeat her father, but they would fail, and Elden would fall forever to the Blo
od Sorcerer’s evil. Horrifying as that was, it wasn’t the worst truth.

  Elden had begun to die a slow death the instant the king and the queen—the blood of Elden—had taken their final breaths. That death would be complete when the clock struck midnight on the twentieth anniversary of her father’s invasion. Not so terrible a thing if it would strip the Blood Sorcerer of power, but Elden’s people were touched by magic, too. Without it, they would simply fall where they stood, never to rise again.

  Her father had spent years seeking to find a solution to what he termed a “disease.” Which is why he would not murder the returned heirs. No, she’d seen the horror in her vision—he’d have them enchained and cut into with extreme care day after day, night after night, their blood dripping to the earth in a continuous flow to fool it into believing the blood of Elden had returned. They were a race that lived for centuries, would not easily die. And so her father would continue on in his heinous—

  Thump!

  Jumping at the booming sound, she realized her guard was whacking on the door to hurry her up. “I’m coming,” she said, and turned away from the mirror.

  Bard began to shuffle off in front of her as soon as she stepped out. It was difficult to keep up with him, for even shuffling, he was a far larger creature than her, each of his feet five times as big as her own. “Master Bard,” she called as she all but ran behind him after reaching the top of the stairs.

  He didn’t stop, but she saw one of those large ears twitch.

  “I do not wish to die,” she said to his back. “What must I do to survive?”

  Bard shook his head in a slight negative.

  There was no way to survive?

  Or he didn’t know how she might?

  Surely, she thought, not giving in to panic, surely her father’s evil hadn’t completely destroyed the soul of the boy who had been Prince Micah. She didn’t know much about the youngest child of King Aelfric and Queen Alvina, but she’d heard enough whispers to realize that he had been a beloved prince, the small heart of the royal family, and of Elden.

  “For who could not love a babe with such a light in his eyes?”

  Words her old nursery maid, Mathilde, had said as she told Liliana a night-tale. It had taken Liliana years to realize that Mathilde’s night-tales had been the true stories of Elden. And then she’d understood why Mathilde had disappeared from the nursery one cold spring night, never to be seen alive again.

  Months later, her father had taken her for a walk, pointed out the gleaming white of bone in the slithering dark of the Dead Forest, a faint smile on his face.

  Pain bloomed in her heart at the memory of the only person who had ever held her when she cried, but she crushed it with a ruthless hand. Mathilde was long dead, but the youngest prince of Elden still lived and, no matter the cost, Liliana would return him to Elden before the final, deadly midnight bell.

  THE LORD OF THE BLACK CASTLE found himself waiting for his prisoner. It had taken longer than he’d anticipated to capture those spirits destined for the Abyss who had somehow managed to halt their journey at the badlands that surrounded the doorway to their ultimate destination. Usually, time had little meaning for him, but this past night he’d known the hours were passing, that the intruder who had dared look him in the eye slept in his dungeon.

  He wasn’t used to such thoughts and they made him curious.

  So he waited on the black stone of the floor beneath his throne, aware of the day servants from the village going about their business in jittering quiet. It had been so as long as he could remember. They feared him, even as they served him. That was the way it should and would always be, for the Guardian of the Abyss must be a monster.

  The thunder of Bard’s footsteps vibrated through the stone just as he was getting impatient, and then came the deep groan of the massive doors at the end of the great hall being opened. The Lord of the Black Castle looked up as Bard walked in. His prisoner was nowhere to be seen—until Bard moved aside to expose the odd creature at his back.

  She was…mismatched, he thought. Though her skin was a smooth golden brown that reminded him of honey from the redblossom tree, her eyes were tiny dots a peculiar sort of nowhere color and her mouth much too big, her hooked nose overwhelming every other feature. Her hair stuck out in a stiff mass akin to the straw in the stables, and she limped when she walked, as if one leg was shorter than the other.

  Truly, she was not a prepossessing thing at all. And yet he remained curious.

  Because she looked him in the eye.

  No one had been unafraid enough to do that for… He could not remember the last time.

  “So, you survived the night,” he said.

  She brushed off a piece of straw from the coarse material of her sacklike brown dress. “The accommodation was lovely, thank you.”

  He blinked at the unexpected response, conscious of the servants freezing where they stood. He didn’t know what they expected him to do. Just as he had no awareness of his actions when the curse came upon him. He just knew that after it passed, parts of the castle lay wrecked, and the servants scuttled away from him like so many insects afraid to be crushed. “I shall have to speak to Bard about that,” he murmured.

  “Oh, don’t blame him for my comfort,” the odd creature said with an airy wave of a bony hand. “You see, I am quite used to a stone floor, so straw is the height of luxury.”

  “Who are you?” Whoever she was, she could not harm him. No one could harm him. No one could even touch him through the black armor that had crept up over his body until it encased him from neck to ankle. He’d felt the tendrils spearing through his hair of late, knew the armor would soon cover his face, too. All for the best. It would make it more difficult for evil to touch him when he went hunting its disciples.

  “Liliana,” his prisoner said, those tiny eyes of no particular color meeting his own with bold confidence. “I am Liliana. Who are you?”

  He angled his head, wondering if she had all her faculties. For surely she wouldn’t dare to speak to him thus otherwise. “I am the Guardian of the Abyss and the Lord of the Black Castle,” he said because it amused him.

  “Do you not have a name?” A quiet whisper.

  It made him go still inside. “The lord does not need a name.” But he had had one once, he thought, a long time ago. So long ago that it made waves of darkness roll through his head to even think of it, the monstrous curse within itching to take form.

  He snapped a hand at Bard. “Take her back!”

  LILIANA COULD HAVE KICKED herself as she was dragged away by a massive hand, her heels scraping along the stone floor. She’d attempted too much, too soon, and the twisted evil of her father’s sorcery had struck back like the most vicious of snakes. “Wait!” she cried out to the retreating back coated in unyielding black armor. “Wait!”

  When her jailor stopped to open the door, she glanced around wildly, trying to find something with which to save herself. There were no weapons on the wall nearby, but even if there had been, she was no warrior. The servants were too afraid to help. Maybe she could throw the bread, she thought with a dark glance at the hunk that sat on a platter on the huge slab of a dining table to her left—it certainly looked hard enough.

  Oh.

  “I can cook!” she yelled as Bard started to drag her through the doorway. “I’ll cook you the most delicious meal you’ve ever had in your life if you—”

  The door began to close on her words.

  “Bard.”

  The big ugly lug stopped at his master’s voice.

  “Take her to the kitchen,” came the order. “If she lies, throw her in the cauldron.”

  Relief had her feeling faint, but she managed to wobble around to walk beside Bard when he released his hold and turned to lead her down a different corridor. “He was jesting about the cauldron, wasn’t he? You cannot have a cauldron big enough for a person?”

  Bard halted, sighed, looked at her with those wide, liquid eyes. When he spoke, the so
und came from the depths of some deep cave, so heavy and thunderous that her eardrums echoed. “We,” he said, “have knives.”

  Liliana couldn’t tell if he, like his master, was making a jest at her expense, so she shut her mouth and said nothing as they wound their way through black hallways free of all ornamentation, down a single wide step and through a heavy wooden door into a warm, sweet-smelling room at one end.

  A startled pixielike creature looked up from where she stood by the large freestanding bench in the center. “Bard!” the woman said, her voice as high and sweet as her face was tiny and wrinkled in the most unexpected way—at the corners of her lips and along the bridge of her nose. The rest of her skin, the color of the earth after rain, was taut and smooth, the crinkled tips of her ears poking out through dark hair she’d pulled back into a thick braid.

  A brownie, Liliana thought in wonder. She wasn’t a pixie at all, but a brownie, a creature her father had hunted to extinction in Elden, for their blood made his magic so very strong.

  Bard pushed Liliana into the room with one big paw. “New cook.” He was gone the next instant.

  The brownie’s face fell.

  Feeling terrible, Liliana walked over to stand on the other side of the bench. “I’m sorry.” She hadn’t even thought when she’d spoken. “I was trying to save myself from being sent back to the dungeon when I said I’d cook.”

  The other woman blinked at her. “Oh, no, oh, no. I’m an awful cook, I am.” Picking up a biscuit from a tray on the bench, she dropped it to the floor. It bounced. “I do not know why the lord has not had me beheaded. Perhaps, oh, yes, perhaps he enjoys that my food matches this place.”

  Startled by her friendliness, Liliana said, “But you looked so disappointed just then.”

  The woman’s ears turned pink at the tips. “Oh, no, that was nothing. Nothing at all. I’m Jissa.”

  “Liliana.”