Chapter Four — The Girl with the Burning Blood (1)

The morning after the claiming, the Wolf King of Verath woke up dying, and refused to admit it.

Layla found out at breakfast. Or rather, she found out when she walked into the King's chambers without knocking — because no one had told her the King's chambers had a door that weighed four hundred pounds — and discovered Karen Thorne, terror of three nations, collapsed on the floor with his head between his knees, breathing like he'd run a marathon in full armor.

"Karen!" She dropped the plate she'd been carrying — toast, jam, a peace offering she'd spent an hour on. "What happened? Is it the— is it the thing from last night? The Reaping?"

"I'm fine," said the King of the wolves, into the carpet.

"You're on the floor."

"This is a strategic position."

"The floor is not a strategic position, Karen."

"It is," he insisted, still not looking up, "if one is considering the acoustics of the room. The carpet is very absorbent. I am testing it."

Layla knelt beside him. Her heart was doing something complicated — the thing it had been doing since the garden, since his teeth had grazed her throat, since she'd felt something ancient and asleep begin to wake in her chest. She put a hand on his shoulder, and the King of the wolves — the Butcher of Verath, the man who'd killed four hundred and twelve people — flinched like a kicked dog.

"Don't," he said, low. "The bond. When you touch me, it… it takes."

"Takes what?"

"My strength. The old laws." He finally lifted his head, and Layla's breath caught. His face was gray, sheened with sweat, and his eyes — those eyes that had been gold and honey and everything soft — were flickering, red and gray and gold in rapid, desperate succession. "The Reaping isn't a curse, Layla. It's a bill. Every time I love you, it charges me. Every touch, every heartbeat, every time I look at you and want to die for you, it takes another coin out of my chest."

"Then stop loving me."

The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. The King's eyes went still. All three colors at once, somehow.

"I can't," he said, simply. "I've tried. It's like asking the moon to stop rising."

Layla's eyes burned. "Karen—"

"Don't." He reached up, slowly, and took her hand — the one that had been on his shoulder — and pressed it to his chest, over the place where something was burning under his skin. She could feel it through the silk: a heat, a heartbeat, a knot of living fire. "Don't apologize. Don't cry. I would burn a thousand lifetimes to keep one tear from falling off your face. This—" he gestured at the dying thing inside him, "—is the best bargain I've ever made."

"That's not funny."

"It was slightly funny."

"It was not."

"It was," said the King of the wolves, with immense dignity, and then he fainted.

Layla caught him. It was not graceful. It was a lot of grunting and swearing and a man-shaped mountain of muscle trying to drag her to the floor with him. But she caught him, and for one long moment she held the most dangerous creature in the world in her arms, and he was just a man. A tired, broken, absurdly dramatic man who'd bought her pancakes with his own life.

"Locke!" she yelled. "LOCKE!"

Locke appeared in the doorway with the speed of a man who'd been eavesdropping and badly needed to not look like it. He took in the scene — the King on the floor, the human girl holding him, the four hundred pounds of sofa the King had apparently headbutted on the way down — and his face did a journey.

"Oh," he said. "Oh no. That's the Reaping, isn't it? He told me it was 'a mild inconvenience.' He said it was 'like a bad hangover.' He said—"

"He's a liar," Layla said. "Help me get him on the bed."

Between them, they wrestled the King of the wolves onto the enormous four-poster. Locke, for a man his size, was surprisingly gentle — he arranged the King's head on the pillow, pulled off his boots, and for a second his face went soft in a way that made Layla's chest ache.

"He's been dying by inches," Locke said quietly. "The Reaping started the night you walked into his courtyard. He told me it was nothing. He said—" Locke's voice cracked. "He said you were worth it. He said if loving you cost him every drop of strength he had, he'd spend it all and die happy."

"He can't—" Layla's voice broke. "He can't do that. I won't let him."

"Lady, nobody lets the King of the wolves do anything. He does it, and then he apologizes for forty minutes."

Layla looked at the man on the bed — the monster, the butcher, the boy who'd been caged at nine and never let out. His hand was still wrapped around hers, even in unconsciousness. Holding on like she was the only anchor in a storm.

"Then I'll make him let go," she whispered. "I'll find out what I am. I'll find out why the old laws hate us so much. And I'll break the Reaping — even if it kills me."

Locke looked at her. For once, the cheerfulness in his face was gone.

"You know," he said, "that's the exact kind of stupid, noble, self-destructive thing the King would say. You two are perfect for each other."

"Thanks," Layla said, and meant it.

* * *

The palace library was a cathedral of dust and dead languages.

Layla had bribed Locke into escorting her with the promise of "research" and the threat of telling the King she'd tried to go alone. Locke, being Locke, had interpreted "research" as "romance novels" and led her straight to a shelf labeled, unironically, THE HISTORY OF BAD DECISIONS.

"Great section," he said proudly. "Covers the vampire-civil-war, the elf-civil-war, and that one time a dragon tried to file taxes."

"I need something older," Layla said. "Something about bloodlines. About—" she hesitated, then pulled the crumpled photo from her jacket. It was the only thing she'd kept from the orphanage: a picture of herself as a toddler, a man and woman she barely remembered, and behind them, carved into the orphanage's stone archway, the symbol she'd seen on the wax seal. "—about this."

Locke squinted at the photo. "That's the Blood Court's mark. The crescent in the thorns. It's the sigil of their inner circle — the Revenants, they call themselves. They're the vampires who've been alive so long they've forgotten what it feels like to be anything else."

"How do you know that?"

"I read." Locke looked offended. "I read a lot. The King thinks I'm a himbo, but I've read literally every book in this palace. That's why I'm the only one who can tell him 'no, Your Majesty, you cannot execute the ambassador, that would start a war.' I'm the librarian of consequences."