by Sara Thorn
“If we can’t get to them,” he said, “we’ll take the tunnel up to the surface. Not many people know about that passage. From there, we can head to my castle beyond the hillside. It’s far enough away that the vampires won’t be able to get to it during the daylight, and the fae will be too busy fighting off the vampires to chase us down there. If Quinn and Sen want to come with us, they can. But if they choose to stay with the rebellion, we’ll have to leave them behind. I need your word that you’ll follow my lead on this.”
I nodded. “I promise.”
“Okay,” he said as he kissed my temple and then reached for my hand. “Let’s go.”
Cassius pulled the door of the bedroom open, prepared to knock down a few fae on our way to find Quinn and Sen if necessary, but instead of seeing any fae outside the door, it was Athan who stood before us.
Chapter Twenty
Cassius moved his body to stand squarely between Athan and me. He didn’t even need to ask what Athan was doing here; he already knew. Chaos seeped everywhere as two battles were being fought at once. The fae were revolting against the rule of vampires, and Athan was here to kill all of Cassius’s household and assassinate his half-brother once and for all.
“I’m disappointed that you didn’t send Dregon to do your work for you,” Cassius sneered at Athan.
“Oh, Dregon is still here,” Athan said as he waved a hand toward his side and Dregon’s cruel face appeared next to him. “I’m just saving him for what will be done to your girlfriend.”
Cassius hollered and lunged at Athan as he drew a dagger from the belt at his waist. I screamed as I watched Athan nearly stab him in the eye, but just as Cassius had said, he was a better fighter than Athan and darted out of the way before Athan’s blade had a chance to make contact. The two men fought like rabid beasts, showing their fangs and gleaning a look of murderous intent. It would not have disturbed the sleep of either one of them to have killed the other. I watched them fighting until Dregon began to creep toward me. I stepped back into the room to try to put space between us, but I didn’t want to close the door and leave Cassius outside.
“Come here,” Dregon hissed as he reached in to grab me.
“Not a chance in hell,” I said. I used every fighting technique that Cassius had been teaching me in order to try to fend off Dregon, but we had only had a few training sessions, and I was still no match against a vampiric warrior.
Dregon caught my hair in his hand and yanked me so hard that I fell onto my knees beside him. I glared up at him and tried to kick his legs out from beneath him, but he was solid like a tree trunk and didn’t budge.
“Those blue eyes of yours are so pretty,” he sneered at me. “Maybe I’ll let you keep one.”
I felt something cold and hard against my ankle, and when I reached my hand into one of the boots that Cassius had given me, I felt the dagger. I pulled it out and sliced the back of Dregon’s calves before he knew what I was doing. The blade was so sharp that it cut straight through the muscle and made his legs buckle until he was down on the floor at my level. Then I grabbed his thick neck and held the dagger to it.
“I don’t think I’ll be letting you keep either of your eyes,” I said vehemently.
Before I could slice his throat, Athan called out to me.
“Well, Mara, we could both lose the people that are important to us, or we could just agree to end the bloodshed now. What do you think?”
I whipped my head around and saw Cassius on his knees with his outstretched arms strung between Athan’s infantry of vampires. Cassius was a better warrior than all of them, but he couldn’t fight them off when they were all against him at once. Four vampires were pulling each of his arms out to either side. Athan stood behind Cassius with a fistful of his hair in his hand as he pulled up Cassius’s head and pressed a blade to his neck.
“Do it,” Cassius said. “Kill Dregon.”
Athan pushed the blade closer against his throat.
“Somehow, I have a feeling that my worthless half-brother means more to you than Dregon means to me. So please, by all means, go ahead, and let’s see which one of us grieves more.”
“Kill him, Mara, please,” Cassius pleaded again. “You don’t know what he’ll do to you if I—”
Athan gave his half-brother a solid kick in the spine, which made Cassius lurch forward and spit out a mouthful of blood.
I held the dagger firmly against Dregon’s throat as I tried to figure out what to do. If I killed him, Athan would kill Cassius, which he was planning to do anyway. If I didn’t kill him, then Dregon and Athan would capture us both. It was an impossible situation, but there was no choice in my mind. I dropped the dagger and started to beg pathetically for Athan to spare Cassius.
As Athan looked at me with the most evil smirk I had ever seen, memories of the years I spent dancing under his tutelage flooded my mind.
I should have seen him for what he is. This is my fault. If only I would have been less naïve and stronger.
Athan’s knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip around the blade and leveraged his arm to deliver a fatal blow. I screamed and pulled against Dregon’s arms that were rooting me in place as I tried desperately to reach Cassius and felt everything start to collapse around me as if my world were imploding in upon itself. But when Athan’s hand lifted into the air, it was quickly sliced from his arm by a small ax thrown from behind him. The fae had found us in the hallway, and they sought Athan’s suffering much more then they cared about Cassius.
Athan hollered with pain and grabbed his wounded arm against his chest, and Cassius used the distraction to pull free and run toward me as the other vampires turned to fight against the fae. He had almost reached my outstretched hand when arrows began flying from over my shoulder. More of Athan’s forces had come to extract him. Several of the arrows stuck into the meat of Cassius’s thighs and the sides of his torso, and as much as he struggled to continue toward me, he couldn’t. The last thing I saw, before Athan’s men carried Dregon to safety and pulled me away, was the raw rage steaming from Cassius’s eyes and the stunned and terrified look on Quinn’s face as they both watched me being taken away, unable to get to me in time to stop it from happening.
I screamed and clawed and bit every piece of flesh that I could sink my teeth into as my captors pulled me farther and farther through the tunnels. They had managed to overwhelm the fae enough to rescue Athan, too, who was trudging along beside me. At least I had the satisfaction of seeing his mutilated arm bleeding out onto the cavern ground as we got farther and farther away from what I now felt was home.
When we reached Athan’s dwelling, the two vampires who had been half-carrying, half-dragging me, threw me into a prison cell where I sat in the dark and thought about all the horrible things that would happen now. I only gave a few minutes of thought to the possibilities of what Athan’s henchmen would do, or what Athan himself might do in his enraged state over losing his hand. I knew for sure that I could count on Dregon living up to his promise of gauging out an eye, although I wasn’t sure he would find me pretty enough to be his concubine if he actually did it.
Then my thoughts went to Quinn and Cassius, and those were the thoughts that hurt the most. Cassius would be torturing himself about not having saved me, and I wouldn’t be there to stop him from spiraling down into darkness again. And Quinn would be blaming himself for the fae uprising having been a distraction while Athan’s vampires infiltrated the caverns. None of this was either of their faults.
Athan was to blame, and no one else. He was to blame for all of it, even the uprising of the fae. If he weren’t in control of such an awful reign over Mystreuce, none of this would have needed to happen. I sat on the cold stone floor and started to think about ways that I could manage some sort of covert mutiny from within Athan’s own little kingdom. Maybe there were vampires within his service who would want to go up against him. Surely, they couldn’t all like being his puppets. The fae here would almost definitely want to ge
t rid of him, although they would probably be too scared to attempt anything. I knew it was hopeless for me to even consider doing anything like that here, alone, and confined inside a small, stone room with iron bars. But I tried to remember what Cassius had said—I didn’t need to be stronger, or faster, or have the most people behind me. Sometimes you only needed to be the cleverest.
Cassius burst into the fae quarters like a hurricane with fangs.
“Where is he?” he shouted at Sen as soon as he saw her. “Where is Quinn?”
The rest of the fae surrounded Sen and raised their weapons in defense. One of the men even tried to run at Cassius with his handheld ax drawn, but Cassius simply knocked it out of his hand with one swipe and pushed the man backward, sending him toppling onto the ground.
“Put your weapons down,” Cassius said to them. “I’m not here to fight you, and I’m no longer your enemy. Athan and his infantry are the ones you should be fighting against, not me. Now, where is Quinn?”
“I’m here,” Quinn said as he stepped out from the corridor. “What happened to Mara?”
“Athan and his men have taken her. Dregon has her.” The look of rage mixed with fear on Cassius’s face.
“We have to get her back,” Quinn said.
“Obviously. You should have told us this would happen,” Cassius said angrily. “You should have informed me about the uprising of the fae instead of sliding a useless and cryptic note containing your pathetic apology to Mara underneath the door. This could have all been prevented, and she wouldn’t now be sitting in Athan’s dungeon, rotting as his prisoner. Do you remember what it was like to be one of Athan’s prisoners?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then, you know exactly how much pain and suffering he is willing to inflict on her.” Even saying the words made Cassius’s face contort in pain. “Mara sat by your side every single day while you recovered, and now you have doomed her to the same fate that you narrowly escaped yourself, had it not been for my intervention.”
“Cassius, I understand how upset you are,” Sen said. “But this is not Quinn’s fault.”
“Oh, trust me,” Cassius snarled at her. “You can’t possibly understand how upset I am.”
Sen walked toward him and met his eyes. “You love her,” she said. “Whether you want to admit you do or not. And your pain is immeasurable. But that does not change the fact that this wasn’t Quinn’s fault. How could he have told you that the fae were going to revolt tonight? You were the one they were revolting against. He had no choice but to do what was right for his people and to hope that you and Mara would stay out of the way.”
“Well, that didn’t work out very well, did it?” Cassius said vehemently.
“No, it didn’t, and Quinn and I are both terrified for Mara and determined to rescue her, too.”
Cassius looked around the room at all of the faces of his fae servants. He had known most of them for years. “Then this ends now,” he said as he looked at each of the fae in turn, landing his eyes on Quinn and his sister last. “I am no longer your enemy, and you are no longer in servitude to me. The fae and I are on the same side in this battle against my half-brother, Athan. He is the true evil here, and he is the one who must be stopped.
“Together, we will stand more of a chance of reaching Mara and saving her from his clutches before it is too late. If you agree to stand with me, then I will agree never to try to enslave any fae ever again.” Then Cassius turned to Quinn. “You and I have known each other for longer than most of those standing here,” Cassius said. “And as of late, you and I haven’t exactly seen eye to eye. But I know that you care for Mara, as do I, and the only way we will be able to get her back is to work together for the singular purpose of saving her.
“Afterward, if you want to try to kill me, then be my guest. The same will hold true for me. But Mara is human, and she will not last nearly a fraction as long in Athan’s prison as you did. If we don’t get to her now, she will die.” Cassius extended his hand to Quinn.
For the first time, Quinn saw him as a man, with all the same weaknesses and passions as any other man, instead of a vampire. He reached out his hand in return, and the allegiance was struck.
“We fight together as one now,” Quinn said as he addressed the rest of the fae. “Until Mara is safe and until Athan is no longer a threat to us and until all of the fae are freed from bondage and we can once again emerge from beneath this ground and see the surface of Mystreuce once more—until these things happen, Cassius is one of us. Anyone who disagrees with that should feel free to leave now.”
Quinn and Sen looked around the room at their friends. Cassius looked at the sea of fae eyes staring back at him. Not one of them left.
“That settles it then,” Sen said. “I need only a few moments to gather some tinctures and supplies for treating wounds.” She saw once again, the pained look that Cassius wore. “Not just for Mara,” she said as she put her hand on his shoulder. “I suspect that several of us will require my healing if we intend to go up against Athan.”
“Thank you,” Cassius said to her. “And I’m sorry for what I have done to your people in the past.”
“You can make it up to us after this is all over.” She smiled.
The rest of the fae gathered their weapons and supplies as Quinn spoke to some of them about the best way to sneak onto Athan’s territory.
“We’re ready,” Quinn said as Sen returned to the group. “What are you planning to do?”
Cassius stared back at him with a feverish look of purpose. “Take back my throne.”
Thank You For Reading!
Thank you for reading the first book in the Marked by Night Saga. It’s amazing that you were willing to even pick up my book when you don’t know me!
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Sara
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About the Author
Sara Thorn writes dark paranormal romances filled with all her favorite supernaturals. Her series, Marked by Night, is planned for over 30 books. Sara loves all things “geeky fantasy” and spends her free time playing RPG’s and browsing the shelves of used bookstores.
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