by Eva Chase
Feral Blood
Book 2 in the Bound to the Fae series
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Digital Edition, 2021
Copyright © 2021 Eva Chase
Cover design: Yocla Book Cover Design
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-91-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-92-5
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Next in the Bound to the Fae series
Dragon’s Guard excerpt
About the Author
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Chapter One
Talia
Three men lie sleeping on the red-and-gold rug that stretches the length of the grand entrance room. Their bodies form a loose circle around the spot I recently left. They look totally relaxed now, but vicious claw marks gouge the polished floorboards on either side of them.
I suspect that the floor has seen worse on previous occasions, and that fae magic will heal the wood easily enough. In spite of those signs of violence, the warm midday light beams cheerily down from the windows high above and no sound reaches my ears but the soft, rhythmic rasp of the men’s breaths. The scene should give me a sense of peace.
I braved my deepest fears for these men-who-aren’t-really-men, the three who freed me from years of cruel captivity and offered me a real home. With a taste of my blood, I brought them out of the curse that turns their wolf forms mindlessly violent under the full moon. I watched them bring the chaos of their wild pack into some kind of order, and then I nestled in the middle of the ring of their bodies to sleep in perfect safety.
But that safety was an illusion. They can’t protect me from everything in this strange, savage faerie realm—and I’ve just seen one of the gravest threats this realm poses lurking in sight of the keep.
I hesitate in the doorway, regret twisting through my chest. I don’t want to wake them up to bad news. I’d give anything for a few more hours by their sides, basking in the joy I woke up with. But that joy has vanished. However serious this threat turns out to be, Sylas will want to know about it right away.
It turns out I don’t even have to wake them. With my first uneven steps, the wooden slats of the brace around my warped foot tap against the floor, and Sylas stirs. He pushes himself into a sitting position and rolls his shoulders, his head turning so he can watch me approach.
The fae lord who rules over this keep and the pack that lives alongside it looks every inch the stalwart commander even in the simple shirt and slacks he wore for last night’s transformation. He studies me with one darkly penetrating eye and one gone white with the scar that bisects his tawny skin from eyebrow to cheekbone. The purple-brown waves of his shoulder-length hair part around the high points of the ears that mark him as one of the few “true-blooded” fae, a status that gives him his authority over his cadre and his pack.
Even sitting, his tall, well-muscled frame exudes authority. So do the multitude of arcing black lines supernaturally tattooed on his body, everywhere from his temples to his neck to his forearms and, I know from past experience, the sculpted planes of his chest beneath that shirt. Each one of those marks represents the true name of some plant or animal or material he’s learned, that he can bend to his will through his powers.
As recently as a few days ago, I found him intimidating. Now, the warm welcome I can recognize in his gaze and the reserved smile that curves the corners of his lips offset his imposing aura. Sylas was a little frustrated that I ignored his instructions to stay locked in my room to release them out of their wild state, but he also appreciated the dedication I showed with the gesture. The greatest thank you he gave me wasn’t those words themselves but when he referred to me to the others as “our lady.”
I don’t belong to these men, but I belong with them, standing beside them. I proved it last night, to all of us.
And now I might be bringing a new threat down on their heads, after everything they’ve already risked for me.
That last thought must show on my face, because Sylas’s smile fades. As I reach the edge of the rug, he stands, looming more than a foot taller than my slim—not long ago half-starved—figure. The movement rouses his cadre. Whitt rolls onto his back with a muffled groan and a stretch of his brawny arms; August swipes his hand over his broad, boyish face and aims a bright if slightly groggy grin at me.
Sylas’s attention stays focused on me. “What is it?” No “Good morning” or inquiries about how I slept. How does he see so much with only the one working eye? Sometimes I feel like he looks straight into my head.
I come to a stop a few feet away from him, the news I have to deliver forming a lump in my throat. I force it out. “I think I saw one of the men from Aerik’s cadre on the hills past the houses, watching the keep.”
Sylas’s lips pull back from his gleaming teeth with a restrained snarl. I thought of him as a grizzly when I first met him, and he’s never fit that impression better than right now. August leaps to his feet with surprising nimbleness given his strong but stocky frame, his gaze darting to the door, his posture tensed as if ready to lunge straight into a fight. Whitt draws himself up at his typical languid pace, as if he’s not particularly concerned despite the others’ reactions, but his ocean-blue eyes have turned stormy.
“He left,” I add quickly. “A few seconds after I saw him, he took off. He was in his wolf form—I’m not completely sure it was him. But the color of his fur was just like his hair, this blueish white, and the way he moved…”
Just remembering the cock of the wolf’s head so like the cruelest of my former captors, I find myself wrapping my arms around my chest. Sylas takes a step toward me and sets a firm hand on my shoulder. Ferocity still smolders in his unscarred eye, but it’s for me, not at me.
“He will not touch one hair on your body,” he says, so emphatically I can hear the vow in the words. “Not him nor his cadre-fellows nor that pissant Aerik.” He looks at his cadre. “From her description, it’d be Cole.”
Whitt nods, his mouth slanting at a displeased angle. August runs his fingers through the short strands of his dark auburn hair, his golden eyes more unearthly than ever with a protective fury burning in them. His voice, normally buoyant with its enthusiasm, contains the edge of a growl. “He was trespassing on our territory.”
Sylas looks at me. “Did he see you?”
I think back to my frozen moment by the up
stairs window just minutes ago. “I’m not sure. But he was far enough away that even if he noticed me at the window, I don’t think he could have made out much other than the shape of me and the color of my hair.”
One of my hands rises to finger the strands that trail over my shoulders. In an offering of kindness when I first arrived here, August used magic and faerie fruit pulp to dye my natural dusky brown a deep pink that wouldn’t be unnatural on a fae woman.
At the time, the change seemed frivolous, a superficial way of moving beyond the abused captive I’d been for the past nine years and reclaiming something of my real self. Now, it’s also a line of defense—my former jailors aren’t searching for a pink-haired woman.
Cole. I have a real name for the man with the blue-white hair and sharply jointed limbs who took such pleasure in using the pointed edges of his body to draw pain from mine. A memory flickers up of my cheek being mashed into the hard metal floor of my cage, a harsh chuckle in my ears. Fingers digging into my cheek and an elbow ramming against my ribs as Aerik’s other cadre-chosen sliced my wrist to steal my blood…
I don’t realize I’m shaking until Sylas’s grip on my shoulder tightens and I feel myself shudder against his hand. My lungs have clenched up, my throat straining to draw breath into them. I hug myself again, tighter, fighting to get a hold of myself.
It’s over now. It’s over, and I’m not going back to that filthy cage or the horrible monsters that look like men.
“Not one hair,” Sylas repeats, his deep baritone managing to be both fierce and soothing. “I’ll tear their throats out if they so much as try.”
August steps toward me as if he can shield me from the horrors inside my head, his teeth bared. “If I don’t get to them first.”
I take gulps of air, focusing on the solid warmth of Sylas’s hand, the determined blaze in August’s eyes. The tremors subside. My chest still aches, but the panicked tension releases enough that I can inhale fully.
Whitt has stayed where he was, a little apart from our cluster of three. In the past, he’s defended me—but he’s also accused me of threatening the cohesion between the cadre and their lord. I’m still not totally sure where I stand with him.
As long as Sylas wants me here, Whitt will follow his lord’s orders—I’m sure of that. But will this new development change his mind about whether my presence here does them more good than harm?
Even if it does, I wouldn’t expect him to show it. Whitt rarely lets much obvious emotion slip from behind his nonchalant front. He rubs his jaw, the storminess in his eyes retreating but not vanishing as his expression turns pensive.
“Whatever he was doing here and however unwelcome his visit, Cole can’t have observed anything damning,” he says in his dryly melodic voice. “Without the benefit of our mite here, Aerik and his pack will have lost themselves to the wildness of the curse last night as much as every other Seelie. He wouldn’t have been in any state to observe that the three of us appeared to have kept our heads.”
An idea that chills me rises up in my head. “What if they saved some of their ‘tonic’ and didn’t go wild at all?”
Sylas shakes his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. We tried that once, on the rare occasion when Aerik deigned to share portions of the tonic with us. Only some of the pack took it, so they could shepherd the others, and we set aside the rest in anticipation of being skipped over later. The next month, they didn’t bother with us, so we took some of the remainder—and it had no effect at all. It appears it’s not only necessary to get a taste of your blood but for it to be fresh as well.”
I guess that’s a small comfort.
Whitt makes a vague motion with his hand. “It is a concern that Cole was snooping on our lands at all. I’ve gathered that they’ve been traveling around asking questions all over the realm, but for them to have been here specifically on the night of the full moon doesn’t bode well.”
August frowns. “Yes. Why us? You don’t think Kellan let more slip than we realized…?”
He glances at Sylas in question. Kellan was the third member of Sylas’s cadre, but he wasn’t satisfied with that honor. From what the others have said, he’d been challenging Sylas’s authority and generally making trouble for a long time before I came into their midst. He particularly hated humans, and when he took that animosity to the point of attacking me, Sylas was forced to kill him to save me.
I didn’t like the man any more than he liked me, but the thought of him still sends a pang of guilt through my gut, knowing how it wrenched at Sylas to have to go to such extreme measures against one of his own.
Kellan made his unhappiness known to at least a few fae from other packs, but it’d sounded as if he’d been vague about the latest developments in the situation here. If it turns out he mentioned that Sylas had brought a human girl into the keep, one with some sort of special power—it wouldn’t take long for Aerik to put the pieces together.
Sylas stays silent for a moment, his thumb running up and down my shoulder in a steadying caress. “It seems unlikely that he could have said enough to alert Aerik without our recent guests also having some idea. Tristan didn’t raise any questions that had anything to do with Talia. But we were in and around Aerik’s fortress for some time. It’s possible we didn’t cover our tracks quite as thoroughly as we would have hoped.”
“If he had definite proof, he’d challenge you about it,” August says. “If they’re just skulking around, they might suspect, but they don’t know for sure.”
“That would be my conclusion as well.” Whitt swivels toward me. “What exactly did you see? Every detail from when you first spotted him.”
I drag in a breath, letting myself lean into Sylas’s touch as I dredge up the images. “Less than half an hour ago, I went to the window upstairs that faces south, wondering how the rest of the pack was doing. Cole—his wolf—was at the top of one of the nearest hills to the east of the forest. I couldn’t see him all that well either, that far away, but the color of his fur was obvious. When I noticed him, he was just standing there, staring at the keep. It couldn’t have been more than a minute. He didn’t move except tipping his head like—like I’ve seen him do as a man. Then he ran off down the far side of the hill, out of view.”
Whitt taps his lips, his face still solemn but a glint lighting in his eyes. “I’ll speak to the sentries and send a few to make discreet inquiries farther abroad. He was acting boldly, showing himself like that—they may be preparing for some kind of overt move. I’ll find out whatever I can so we can be ready for that.”
Sylas nods to him. “Good. Let me know as soon as you discover anything at all.” He turns me to face him with a gentle squeeze of my shoulder, his gaze catching mine with all that lordly intensity. In spite of my anxiety, my heart skips a beat with the memory of that dark eye smoldering as he touched me in his bed several days ago, of his mouth claiming mine just last night.
Both he and August have become something more than protectors to me. I’m not sure what, or where it’ll lead, but the thought makes my pulse thump faster all the same.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to delay your introduction to the rest of the pack by at least a couple more days,” he says with obvious regret. “We should wait until we have a better idea of what Aerik’s next move will be—and it’d be best if no one associated your arrival too closely with the full moon. It’s not my wish to keep you trapped in the keep. As soon as we can—”
I set my hand over his much larger one, giving him the bravest smile I have in me. “It’s all right. I don’t want to leave the keep if it might mean Aerik finds me. And I don’t want to put you at risk either.”
The affection that darkens his gaze sends another flutter of heat through my chest. “Our lady indeed.” He raises his hand to stroke it over my hair. “I swore you’d be safe here, Talia, and I mean to make good on that promise—come what may.”
Chapter Two
August
The day after a full moon, I’m
always ravenous. Even though I was only in the feral state of the curse for a short part of last night, today’s no different. So, when my older half-brothers set off to deal with the potential threat of Aerik, a business that Sylas doesn’t seem to have any use for me in yet, it’s only natural that my first impulse is to head to the kitchen, which is my favorite room in the keep anyway.
No matter what my lord and my cadre-fellow are doing that I can’t fully contribute to, they’ll always need to eat.
Talia drifts with me toward the hall, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. At least she’s not still hugging herself as if that’s the only thing keeping her from shaking to bits. Still, the shadow of worry that lingers on her pale, pretty face makes my body itch to let loose fangs and fur and go racing across the realm until I can maul Aerik and his cadre beyond recovery.
It was horrifying enough seeing the state she was in when we came across her in that cage. Imagining her having to endure that treatment for nearly a decade, from when she was little more than a child…
I catch my growl before it creeps from my throat. My temper is rising on her behalf, but letting it out in front of her will only make her more anxious. We can’t deal with Aerik yet. The best thing I can do for her is offer a way to keep her mind off those worries.
I give her hair a playful rumple, reveling in the softness of it, in the way she brightens at my touch. “We could all use some breakfast—or I suppose lunch at this point. Can I get the help of my favorite kitchen assistant?”
