Myth of Five E-Book

Dixon Reuel

• Herausgeber: Thunderloft Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Vampire angst in a zombie apocalypse! The penultimate installment of The Blood Brute Series grapples with grief, survival, and the painful journey towards a found family.

Set 20 years after Strain of Four, the blood brute Rise has given up.
He doesn’t care if the Warwolves overthrow humanity. He doesn’t care that Iskar has returned to his walls, again and again, begging for entry.

If Rise doesn’t allow outsiders into his hidden Owl Court, he can remain living in peace. By not sheltering others, he can remain in blissful solitude. If the world forgets about Rise of Owl Court, the Invoker, then all the better.
Let the tale of the world’s only living blood brute finally end.
When an obnoxious stranger blithely crosses Owl Court’s sacred boundary, Rise is stunned and finds himself caught between deep isolation and the world invading his sanctuary once again. Rise must decide whether Owl Court is ready for a new coven, and whether he is ready to lead.

Author’s Note: Be prepared! These supernatural dark fantasies for adults might begin with a slow-burn gay romance, but the series has a soul-crushing love triangle among fated mates! It has morally gray characters, post-apocalyptic and ominous vibes. If you like brooding Dark Fantasy Horror with gay MM romance and occult elements, you can expect that, and a lot more, during this eerie zombie apocalypse adventure!
This is Book 5 in a 6-book series and ends in a cliffhanger.

Leseprobe

First published by Thunderloft Press 2022

www.ThunderloftPress.com

Copyright © 2022 by Dixon Reuel

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the

publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or

distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters

and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s

imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or

dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Dixon Reuel asserts the moral right to be identified as the

author of this work.

Dixon Reuel has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet

Websites referred to in this publication and does not

guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will

remain, accurate or appropriate.

First edition

ISBN: B09PKD1RJ2

This book is dedicated to the ten years between ages 30 and 40.

A lot can happen. A whole lifetime, indeed.

“Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake.”

–Walter de la Mare, The Listeners

Contents

PART 1 - SUMMER

Chapter 1Unfinished Business

Chapter 2Never an Answer

Chapter 3Desolation Loves Company

Chapter 4The Unexpected Party

Chapter 5Knowledge with Salt

Chapter 6Scrupulously Scientific

Chapter 7Colt of a Child

PART 2 - Autumn

Chapter 8The Grand Tour

Chapter 9Root Vegetables

Chapter 10Many Hands

Chapter 11Potent Hearing

Chapter 12Stars and Stripes

Chapter 13A Knot of Concentric Lines

Chapter 14Upon the Shore

PART 3 - WINTER

Chapter 15Lonely Deaths

Chapter 16Doubly Undead

Chapter 17Desolate Green

Chapter 18Wolves and Scythes

Chapter 19Dread Torment

Chapter 20Eternal Refuge

Chapter 21On the Edge of Salt

PART 1 - SUMMER

“It is said that time heals all ills and I hoped for that. I think, we very much wish to believe that. To wait, to breathe, to give matters enough time to fall into silence after the great keys of an organ’s song have finished. Then, all will be well, right?

I believe in giving things time, where once I would have brindled. I believe in just waiting things out. Inaction as a salve, not as an act of cowardice. Do nothing, and therein save yourself.

That is what I have learned, inside this ring of holly trees.”

-The Blood Brute, The Chronicle of Owl Court (Addendum).

Chapter 1

Unfinished Business

Rise stood in the ramshackle gate set into Owl Court’s walls. He watched the bright summer grasses beyond, with their attending butterflies and bees. The space between the redbrick walls of his home and the towering circle of holly trees lay overgrown and wild. It hummed with tempting life.

Still, although lazing in the grasses between his home’s walls and the protective ring of grey trunks would feel amazing, Rise would not step outside. He would not leave his home ever again.

“I could if I wanted to,” he said over his shoulder to Tom cat, whose kittens—now full-size cats—lolled on the courtyard’s sun-warmed stones. Although Rise had just swept it clean, Tom’s many sons scooted their backs and shoulders through the swept-up leaves, scattering dirt all over again and caking themselves in the process.

“I just don’t want to go outside” Rise mumbled on, eyeing the back of his hand. His Blaschko stripes stood in stark contrast against his skin, permanent. Those stripes would never not define that he was … other.

He sighed and shut the gate, leaving behind all thoughts of bees and flowers and the world beyond. He pressed his hand hard against the dry and splintered wood to make extra sure it clicked closed.

“I could do many things,” he said to no one.

The sun shone too hot upon his scalp. His too-long hair stuck with sweat behind his ears and clung down his neck. Rise squinted at the closed door, the butterflies outside still dancing in his mind’s eye—what had he just been talking about?

After a time of jumbled thoughts, it came back to him: “I could sight walk abroad at any time,” he told Tom, who sat on the wall of the nearby pigpen, tail patiently wrapped around his little white toes as he listened. “If I wanted to, I could hear what everyone’s saying, about me, about this place …” Rise gazed up at the red bricks. Even though they were in a state of severe disrepair, they always gleamed so stunning in the summer sun, like an exotic palace standing tall against the daylight star. “If anyone remembers me at all …”

His head felt too hot. He wandered across the courtyard and joined Missy in a shady spot where she curled up, a ball of white fur.

“But do I want for anything?”

Rise had every single thing he wanted. He nodded. He gazed around, a hand lazily fluffing through Missy’s fur.

“You want to talk about shelter?” he asked no one at all. “Well!” Rise gestured grandly to what was left of Owl Court and how he’d made the best of the place, repaired as much as he could since returning inside the smallholding’s walls.

“Not isolated,” he corrected his thoughts. “Interred.”

Although that word should have dark connotations, his life inside Owl Court had been nothing but a peaceful, pastoral existence.

“And I have blood,” he gestured to the pig pen which now housed a tidy flock of wild sheep that Rise had guided inside. Their milk, with the occasional letting of blood, kept Rise alive.

“It’s no different to my time at …” he paused, hesitated, almost named that prison across the sea, where so much was taken from him. Rise’s mouth tried to work, to form words. Something inside of him prevented the naming of that place. All Rise had was inside Owl Court. Naming other things, other places, would only conjure memories of his time before this peace.

“And this peace right now, it’s all I want,” Rise murmured, although Missy lazily opened one of her brilliant blue eyes.

Still, even sitting under the shade, his head felt too hot. Rise absently rubbed his stomach, as if remembering an old dream.

“And at least the owls have returned,” he told Barnabas, largest of Tom’s sons, a right bruiser of a cat when it came to hunting any birds that landed inside Owl Court. Rise pointed at a dust-covered Barnabas, who seemed offended at having even been spoken to. “That’s important. Owls for Owl Court.” He pointed over at the stables where his repair work had made the most impact. The stables looked almost whole again. Sturdy. They had stood against many a storm.

Almost.

Even though twenty years had passed since he’d first crossed inside these hallowed walls, his horse Yarrow hadn’t aged a day. Neither had Tom nor Missy. Their kittens had grown up and attained adulthood, but then time seemed to stop for all of them. As he watched Yarrow, taking in the muscled lines and long neck of his old friend, Rise felt desperately glad for this quirk of time. So much loss plagued his life, right up until he’d decided to hide away. For age to be held at arm’s length within Owl Court, that was a true blessing, as if something about this place knew, at its core, that he could not endure any more loss.

“The man who gave you to me …” Rise began to tell Yarrow, but then his throat threatened to close. A blond Superman, someone had once called him. He shut his mouth and named no one from the past.

Rise’s fingers traced through Missy’s soft fur as he tried to solve old puzzles. He sighed and gazed up at the brilliant blue sky. Why did his head still feel hot? Rise frowned and received a well-deserved kick from Missy when his hand tightened over her belly curls. She unfurled herself, walked a few steps away, then flopped onto a fresh cold spot in the shade.

“What were the sailors aboard The Chariot,” Rise turned his attention back to Yarrow. They’d all grown used to their little quirks over the past two decades. By dinnertime, Missy would hop onto the table and butt his hand until he gave her some of his meal, then they would be best friends all over again. Wasn’t that the best way to live? Rise’s thoughts interrupted and led him down the familiar, well-trodden path that he was wholly correct in living his life this way. Inside. Alone, with familiars. This was right.

“Aboard The Chariot,” he tried again, at least able to say that ship’s name aloud. “Before the three, no, four of us dived from the deck, the sailors were all huddled around something. What was it?” he asked Yarrow, as if the horse could know or answer.

“What was it?” he repeated, thoughts merging, tripping over each other, until The Chariot sailed away in his mind, leaving only more unanswered questions.

He gazed at the sky and ran his fingertips through the nearby weeds poking through cracks in the once perfect cobblestone.

“I’m not lonely,” he told himself, looking at Missy, then at her kittens—cats now, cats, he reminded himself—and pushed aside all this nonsense of loneliness.

“If I were human, wholly human,” he told her, but the mother cat was not listening. Rise shifted his legs and turned towards her. Still, the cat dozed on. “If I were entirely human then, yes, I’d waffle on about, I mean, feel the urge to … I’d have to …” Sweat broke out across Rise’s Blaschko-lined forehead, even though he sat in the shade. “If I were human, I would still crave love and company. But I’m not.” He took in the lines that branded his skin, even when out of direct sunlight, down to the tips of his fingers, beneath his fingernails. “I’m … not.”

“So, I don’t need such things,” he told the fluffy curve of Missy’s spine.

From his perch atop the pigpen’s walls, Tom’s tail flicked.

Rise broke into a barking laugh. “I have you guys.”

A silence fell over the remains of Owl Court, a silence soon consumed by crickets and birdsong from the world beyond its walls. With twenty years alone here, time ran around itself with muddied footprints.

If time passed, Rise didn’t notice. That happened so often here. That life.

“It’s hard to know what’s when and what’s gone,” Rise murmured. He lifted his aching shoulders from the wall, but if this was the same day, or a whole week had passed, he couldn’t tell. The cats were nowhere to be seen. The sheep and other critters of Owl Court needed tending to. Carefully, Rise hefted himself to his feet. He winced at the general complaints of his back and shoulders, and the loud cracking of his knees.

“If I were a ghost, I could press myself into these walls,” Rise spoke to his hand against the brickwork. He spoke some more, to his worn, scabbed-over knuckles: “I wonder if anyone would ever disturb me? Is that how hauntings happen?” Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Tom still watching him. The scent of horse, of Yarrow, came from the stables. Oh yes, he would need tending to, too. Thank the stars that-

“What was I saying?” he asked the ground.

No answer came.

It began in Rise’s veins. They sparked into life as if he had touched an electric outlet. Blood pounded through him, rushing like a broken dam, concentrating at his heart. Captain Simit’s drug lay dormant in Rise until Iskar approached. Then, it seemed, his body went haywire. Rise clutched his chest. It wasn’t so much that he was in pain, but the pure dread that filled him, the recognition of who approaches made Rise clutch at his heart.

“I told him to go away! So many times over the years!” Rise snarled. He had speed now, goaded on by his rushing pulse. He hurled himself across the courtyard, scattering several cats. Before he even made it to the wooden gate, Rise heard slow, meandering hoofbeats, two horses, coming up the lane, climbing Holly Hill. He plunged his sight into who approached:

Iskar.

“Not this again!” Rise wheezed as he pressed his back against the wooden side gate. Color drained from his face. “Why’d he have to bring Salter, too?”

Blackness threatened the corners of his vision. Rise sagged to the ground, keeping his back and shoulders against the gate, as if that was what really kept people out.

He couldn’t help himself. As he struggled to remain conscious, Rise turned his head and peered through a crack in the wood. He wrinkled his nose at the sight of his—once?—blood match sitting astride a horse, the stout and proud animal obviously a descendant from the Warwolf stock left abandoned during that business at the mine, so many years ago. It seemed, though, that age had not touched Iskar. Oh sure, he’d matured into a swarthy man, Rise noted with an envious curl of his lip. Iskar sat upon his horse with ease, with such confidence, like a well-loved emperor genially stepping into public.

Their blood drinking had extended his life. Iskar’s face still unchanged compared to the youthful hiker that had once stumbled inside Owl Court and turned the coven’s life upside down.

At the sight of him, tears of longing, regret, pain stung Rise’s eyes. He carefully got to his feet. The boundary around Owl Court stood so strongly salted and invoked that it rendered the whole smallholding entirely invisible. Its salt hummed in his mind. His palm against the wood focused the illusion, that neither Iskar nor Salter could see what really stood atop Holly Hill. Not anymore. Not ever again.

“So, you still keep this place shielded, Rise?” Iskar’s voice raised above the ruins. “Over twenty years I have come here, when I can, as often as I can. Twenty years-” Iskar’s voice broke. His shoulders drew back, and he tossed his shoulder-length sandy hair.

He’s let it grow out. Rise spied through the planks. A brown-red scarf or shawl draped around his neck, broadening Iskar’s shoulders. A flash of tears in those brightest of blue eyes.

For a moment, he and Iskar stood together, back in Salter’s mine. For a moment, their last discussion replayed. Their first and only passions in the bathhouse replayed.

“You cannot stay like this, Rise,” Iskar bunched his fist, either out of annoyance at Rise hiding away, concealing Owl Court from them, or through frustration at his own tears. “Although, you’d think, I’d learn my lesson and stop coming here. That I’d stop dragging Salter along with me—can you feel anything?” he abruptly turned and asked her. “Can you feel anything of the boundary here? Where it might be the weakest or-?”

Salter shook her head, sadly. She still wore her layers and layers of heavy veils. Her hands gloved against the sun, even though it was summer.

So, she never learned to walk abroad in daylight. Rise snarled this thought every time Iskar brought Salter along. As if her presence would convince Rise to remove the boundary! Still, he took in the Blaschko lines permanent upon his own skin. Was he grateful to walk in the sun, unshielded and unveiled? Was it a nicer life to conceal one’s person, like Salter?

His thoughts slid away as Iskar spoke on. The usual begging. The usual arguing. For Rise to open this place up again. To at least let Iskar inside for a one-to-one discussion. Or, for Rise to give them some small hint at all that he was okay.

“The only way that I even know you’re alive is because of the boundary. If you were already dead, Rise, I would assume it would fade away or instantly dissolve, right? Am I right? But I don’t know these things for sure. I don’t know anything about you anymore.” Angst rose in Iskar’s voice as he dismounted, flinging aside his long reins for Salter to catch. He strode forward, obviously determined to walk right up to the red brick walls that he couldn’t even see, but remembered being there.

Rise’s pulse hammered in his throat at Iskar’s approach. He kept his palm pressed to the gate, confident in the work he’d done over the years to ensure this place stayed shielded from the world. He didn’t need anyone, anything, least of all anything from the past that Iskar would bring.

Iskar didn’t realize that he stood so close to Rise. Only this rickety wooden side door and a few feet of distance. Alive with Simit’s drug, Rise’s pulse pounded, in his ears, in his throat, drowning out other thoughts. Iskar stood so close, Rise could open the door, reach out …

“It’s no use, Iskar,” came Salter’s voice from beneath her veils. She rechecked her grip on the reins, steadied Iskar’s horse when it wanted to go to its master. “He’s not coming out. I don’t think he ever is.”

“But he’s in here! I know he is!” Iskar spat. He squinted and tried to take another step. “He just has to be,” he murmured.

The boundary worked. He could not approach even an inch further. A deep growl of frustration left Iskar’s throat.

Rise, a shuddering, weeping mess behind the door, jumped his sight into Iskar’s blue eyes. The top of Holly Hill looked like a bare patch of long grasses in the middle of the tree circle. No ruins at all remained for Iskar or Salter or for anyone to see.

I may have gone a little too far, Rise scolded himself. I should have left some ruins for people to see. When they come here and only see grass, with no hint of the great brickwork that once stood, no wonder they’re suspicious.

“Just show yourself.” Iskar’s fists bunched and trembled. “You self-centered, egotistical curmudgeon!”

“Yes,” Salter agreed, sightly louder for Rise to hear. “He is that. And more.”

The shine of tears in Iskar’s eyes, the whiteness of his teeth. Iskar must be living well in the mines. He cut such a dashing, tempting figure. The memory—the taste!—of feeding upon him shuddered through Rise: Iskar’s blood told of the great outdoors, nature and hiking, friendship, his grandmother’s Yorkshire puddings.

The pair stood outside for what felt like hours. Sometimes in silence, sometimes with Iskar railing against Rise’s stubbornness.

I’ve rid this countryside of brutes for you, how about a little gratitude and leave me in peace?

“Gillon had written in the chronicle, did you know that, Rise? There was a poem she’d transcribed. It’s rather fitting as I’m standing here: ‘Tell them I came,’” Iskar suddenly barked. “’And no one answered, that I kept my word,’ he said.”

This almost broke Rise. He kept his sight deep within Iskar’s as he remounted. The two horses plodded away and returned to the mine. Although it was tempting to see if anyone ran out to greet Iskar, if anyone lovely and smiling pressed themselves against him for a welcome-home kiss, Rise had never sight walked or turned his great hearing towards the mine. That place felt like a black hole, an unknown void in the earth that was Iskar’s home. And Rise had nothing to do with that.

Time passed. The day grew cold and dark. Rise startled when Tom cat brushed against his legs, then he winced, having kept his body hunched against the gate for many hours.

“I must tend to Yarrow.” He worked out the tight kinks that pinched his shoulders and cracked the great bones of his back.

Tell them I came, and no one answered.

“Ah yes,” Rise inhaled deeply of the dusk that’d fallen over Owl Court. The summer night would be brisk and still. Stars shone overhead as the sun finally put itself to bed.

“I’ve made the best of things, the best that I could,” he resumed his conversation with no one—with the walls themselves, perhaps? With the ground or hill or foundations that kept Owl Court standing?

Your home is in ruin.

You spend your days tending to animals, so you may drink their blood.

How long has it been without conversing with another?

“Shut up!” Rise snarled at the old, mocking voices from his bones, startling Yarrow as he mucked out the stable. His strength gripped the broom handle, until the wood threatened to splinter. Not having a replacement, Rise sucked in a hard breath to calm himself down. He couldn’t go around destroying tools he couldn’t replace.

“It’s not lost on me, either,” he told the night as he forked Yarrow’s dung through the compost pile. Where was Cypriot to advise on such gardening things? He would have to ask him, the next time Cypriot joined his dreams.

But that was the thing. When finally together during the hours of sleep, Rise delighted so much in Cypriot’s company, in the reality of the dream, that they never spoke, not really. There were always … fleshly matters to attend to.

A blush reddened Rise’s cheeks as he stomped into the room that he had made for himself in the barn. A gentle swoosh of wings and flight and dappling shadow overhead as some of the owls left for their night-hunt.

“I must ask him about … about gardening things, the next time I see him,” Rise mumbled as he curled up on his makeshift bed. Then, Rise jumped in surprise when Tom came and nestled against his chest.

“You’re the only company I need,” he told the cat as he scratched behind its ears.

In the deep, desolate silence that followed, when Rise tried to sleep, only burning tears came and heart wrenching sobs. In his mind’s eye, his hand pressed against the wooden gate all through the night, keeping the world at bay.

Chapter 2

Never an Answer

Rise blinked away tears as he brushed dust and bits of leaves out of Barnabas’ coat and that of his brother, Maka’s, too. He didn’t even know why he was crying; all Rise was trying to do was groom his cats. Nothing else was put upon him. He had nothing else to do with his days. It wasn’t yet time to drain a bowl of blood and milk from one of the sheep to feed on. Even that wasn’t terribly distressing, neither for Rise nor the sheep. He sniffled, tears spilling as he smiled when Maka batted away the brush. Sure, the everyday mundanities of being alive kept him distracted, but even now, only brushing his cats, he wept.

As he worked, a deep craving that he’d always pushed away clawed at his heart. He craved to be nothing more than a forgotten thing, left behind on a shelf, roosting his time away.

“And I am forgotten,” he told Barnabas, but then didn’t speak aloud the question that naturally followed: So, why am I crying, then?

“Because I already know the answer,” Rise whispered, unable to name aloud his unrelenting loneliness. The days running into one another, with nothing to do than keep himself and these cats alive, that would—should—surely soothe any soul. But company—it didn’t have to be human, even the presence of another vampire would be enough—Rise recognized its dread absence. At the same time, he deeply feared its return. When had he last held a proper conversation? When had all his shields dropped and he walked abroad as himself in the world? He couldn’t remember. He hoped such days were well past, and yet, he also hoped that his days abroad weren’t over. Stuck between a desire for solitude and hope for atonement, Rise just continued to merely exist and weep.

His pulse quickened. Simit’s old drug awoke within Rise, making him cry out in alarm, dreading the heartrending arrival of those who approached. His great hearing picked up returning riders once again. He brushed away his tears.

“Am I never allowed any peace?” Rise snarled, scattering Barnabas and Maka with the ferocity of his tone. “Why are you coming back here the very next day, Iskar? You’ve never done that before. Can’t I be left alone?”

Mad at people, so very, very mad at Iskar, perhaps even Salter most of all, Rise flung aside the grooming brush and stalked across the courtyard. He ignored the heavy concentration of blood pounding around his heart. He ignored the temptation to clutch at his chest. This old, tortuous drug would never leave him, it seemed.

Visitors! His thoughts spat in annoyance. Visitors! Again!

“You need to finally show us your face, Rise,” Iskar called to the surely vacant circle of grass that stood before his eyes. Today, his raiment was of navy-blue knit. It, again, suited him.

In reply, Rise said nothing, only hid in his usual spot behind the courtyard’s wooden gate. He peeked out at Iskar and Salter through the cracks, a taught blend of excitement and dread trembling through him.

Iskar dismounted, shrugged out of his shirt and shawl, scowling in deep temper.

Rise tried not to marvel at Iskar’s growth. His hiker’s body had always been fit, not lithe and fleshy like Cypriot’s though, but instead deep with sinew and finely-honed muscles. However, now bare-chested and unwrapping his scarf-shawl, Rise’s eyes widened. He’d never known Iskar to have such large muscles before. Whatever he was up to, however he spent his days, Iskar’s arms bulged. Pits and hollows of flesh and bone flexed across his toned shoulders, his collarbones and chest. Iskar approached Owl Court, musclebound and radiant, cracking his knuckles.

What, had Iskar come to fistfight him?

“I’m back again today, Rise, because I can’t take much more of this. I told you once that I’m not going to stop coming here until you finally show your face and I mean it, but also at the same time, I feel that this all has gone too far-”

“He’s crazy, Rise,” Salter finally spoke from where she sat upon her horse, a veiled shadow against the holly trees. She seemed far more on edge than yesterday. “I tried to stop him, we all did, but he’s not going to listen.”

A glint of metal as Iskar drew something from his belt. At the sight of a sharp hunting knife, Rise’s hands clapped over his mouth. What on earth was Iskar about to do?

Blood! Half of him called out for the spilling of that precious taste, the other half of Rise cowered in fear that Iskar might be about to do something—as Salter called it—crazy.

“I really can’t take much more of this, Rise. You need to come out and show yourself. Let me see you.” Desperation hung heavy in his every word. He brought the knife to his left arm’s bulging bicep. In one slow, agonizing motion, he drew the blade across his tanned skin.

NO!

Iskar hesitated, as if hearing something. His blood dripped into the wild grasses.

Rise was sure—absolutely positive—that he hadn’t spoken out loud just now. He stared through the split in the door’s planks, hands still pressed over his mouth. Then the intoxicating scent came to him, like the descent of a godly perfume onto mere mortals.

Blood on the air! Human blood! His blood!

His! Blood!

Rise blinked. Dark spots exploded across his gaze. Beyond the door, there stood his blood match: hale, hardy, pulsing with life, brimming with blood. Its scent held the air, seizing Rise’s mind like the first step down into a walled garden and its sea of flowers. He slumped to the ground. He nearly wept. Iskar beyond the gate, his blood so close.

So very close.

Rise, mouth watering furiously, fangs threatening to curl down over his bottom lip, pressed his eye against the nearest crack in the wood, just in time to see how Iskar glanced back at Salter. She shook her head, sadly, as if there was no energy for arguing left between them, either for or against Iskar’s actions.

“He has to come out!” Iskar hissed at her, his venomous tone surprising Rise. “Owl Court still has to be standing here, even though nobody can see it!”

Don’t do this, you silly idiot! Don’t hurt yourself for me!

“Rise?” he whipped his head around again, addressing the blankness of green grass, the illusion that Rise invoked around Owl Court. “I’m not moving. I’m going to keep doing this—” Another swipe across his arm. He hissed and sucked air back through his teeth: a gesture very much like their old friend and traitor, Hudd.

“Either sensing my fresh blood will drive you crazy, Rise, or you won’t be able to stand me hurting myself. You’ll have to show yourself either way. I’m your blood match. I’m … cursedly drawn to find you, over and over, again and again. The fact that we’re not together, haven’t been together, nor I fed upon by you for so long. Decades! I will have no more of it! It is a maddening, torturous separation, Rise—worse than what I do to myself right now!”

Iskar drew the knife a third time, deep across his hip bone. He winced and hissed again, but didn’t stop, even as blood wound down his arm, down his torso, seeped into his trousers, plopped into the wild summer green around him.

Rise did not realize that he sobbed until no more air would come into his lungs. He gasped a deep breath, still keeping his hands over his mouth, tears stinging his eyes.

I want him! his mind cried out. I want him! Warm tears rolled over his knuckles, the door’s wood pressed hard against his forehead. It would be such an easy thing to call out to the riders, to his blood match, make a noise, any noise, drag himself to his feet and, well, one easy kick would surely destroy this door. Then he and Iskar would be together again. He could drink his blood again.

But Salter was also there. She would witness this reunion, see Rise as he was now, with overgrown, scraggly hair. When was the last time he bathed? Or ate? Cleaned his teeth? Rise was fine with Iskar witnessing his filth. It might even make Iskar realize that Rise meant no offence by hiding away for so long, make him realize the depths of Rise’s wish to be utterly unperceived by anything and everyone, save his cats and owls. Salter, though, and no doubt others … no, Rise didn’t want their eyes on him, as if by seeing how he was now, it would give all onlookers some great power or knowledge over him. Eyes on him, that meant people held expectations—you had to keep yourself clean and sane and whole and do it every, every day until your last breath. The thought of Salter seeing him like this, so filthy and bestial, made Rise’s skin crawl. He would remain as lord and master of cats and owls, Cat Court, Owl Court, Rise would do that before he allowed anyone, bar Iskar, to see him like this.

Why bring Salter along? Iskar had never done that before yesterday. Maybe Iskar didn’t know him that well if he thought that Rise seeing Salter might be what would make him finally leave his safe protection.

“I can’t move on with my life. I can’t move forward at all. I’m stuck. If I don’t see you, Rise,” Iskar began, voice high and tense, filled with pain. His blood thrummed on the air, tantalizing Rise with every breath. “If you don’t come out and drop this charade, mark these words: I will never return to these walls again. Twenty years have passed. The world is a very different place these days. I know you don’t care for others, for people, or even anything past the end of your nose, but I did think … always thought … that you and I were closer.” Iskar’s voice crackled. His feet shuffled in the grasses as his blood loss continued.

“That day? In the mine?” he went on. “I was wrong, so very wrong, to let you run off like that, all alone. I should have followed you. I should have put aside our differences. You were only explaining to me that you didn’t understand our blood matching. Anyway, you weren’t opposing me in anything. I … I see that now. I see it Rise. I’ve seen the error of our actions every night in my dreams, every moment my head has leave to pause and think, then the regret comes, Rise. I should have followed you out of the mine that day. Stayed by your side.”

“Iskar, please, at least get back on your horse.”

With the heady scent of blood still tormenting Rise, he peeked through the door crack again. His blood match shone with bright red rivulets trickling down over his limbs and muscles. So many cuts Iskar inflicted upon himself, all just to get Rise’s attention. Not just sorrow or reluctance, but deep guilt clenched across Rise’s innards. All he had to do was step outside, go to someone who genuinely wanted to be with him. Who else approached these walls with such a motive? Nobody. Rise knew, from the deepest pit of his stomach, that Salter wouldn’t be here unless Iskar had dragged her along.

“Did you hear me?” Iskar’s voice rose, loud and demanding, as his blood dripped into the earth. He shook his bloodied fist at the sky, the spiderweb tattoo upon his cheek stretching and flexing with every word. “I’ll never return, if that’s what you want? I’ll consider you dead and finally move on with my life. Do you want that? Huh? Do you?” Iskar roared into the otherwise peaceful, sunny day. Another shuffle of feet. He dropped his chin.

“It seems that he really does want to be left alone,” Salter murmured after a long time, when no response came. She gathered her reins and shouted too: “Rise, you’re being your usual stubborn self! Has the passage of time taught you nothing? For it has taught Iskar and I a great deal. Drop this boundary and come out here! The world is different.”

In the ringing silence that followed, she just sighed and reached for Iskar’s horse. “Come on, ranger, let’s get you tended to. Rise is never coming out, it seems.”

But Iskar glared at where Owl Court should be.

Rise startled in shock when Iskar’s incredibly blue eyes … did their gaze lock? Could Iskar see him through the crack in the door? Rise blinked. Held his breath. No, it was just an illusion.

“Wishful thinking,” Rise whispered, softer than the air itself.

“He is a fool.” Salter readied to leave.

“He is!” Iskar spat in anger. Yet he did not move. Muscled and bloodied, he stood, glorious in the sunshine, pale hair wild and proud upon his broad shoulders.

“Please, come back with me, Iskar. You’ve tried everything, everything any of us can think of to draw him out, for so long. You’ve done all you can. Come back with me and accept Annette’s offer of marriage. Don’t keep your life on hold for a ghost for any longer.”

Still, Iskar did not move.

Still, Rise didn’t, either. Marriage? To Annette? His head reeled.

“He could still be in there,” Iskar tried to insist. “He could be hurt, or something, Salter.”

“Yes,” she nodded and brought his horse closer. “But our friend Rise could also be gone and Owl Court’s ruins shielded with him forever. If he can hear you, see how you’ve cut yourself to tempt him out, spent decades listening to your pleas and he still won’t show himself?” Salter’s veiled head lifted, as if she could still see the rooftop where the Owl Court coven once invoked its dawn protection. “Then he is not your friend anymore, Iskar. Nor a friend of mine.”

No! Don’t think that! Use your tone of command! Make him change his thoughts!

Yet, Rise could not force himself to move, paralyzed by the idea, by the unadulterated shame, of what Iskar and Salter would see if he opened this door and dropped the boundary. They would know that he had done nothing over the decades, not even kept himself vaguely human.

Chin still dropped, Iskar’s fists relaxed. His bloodied knife slipped from his hand and dropped to the soft earth in defeat.

“You are right, Salter,” he said, eventually, failure heavy upon him. Iskar too lifted his chin and perhaps took in what he remembered of Owl Court’s smallholding. He mounted his horse, drew his shirt on over his wounds. With blood soaking into the pale cotton, Iskar’s chin twitched in sorrow.

“If that’s the case, Salter,” his voice cracked, “then he is no friend of mine anymore.”

In silence, they turned their horses and gingerly guided them along the overgrown lane that wound down Holly Hill. Rise pressed his sight into Iskar’s gaze, heard what the good ranger heard, heard Iskar’s soft sobs that he tried to hide from Salter, for many miles until their sight-bond faded.

An odd, empty sense of relief washed through Rise when they were gone.

Maka and Barnabas rubbed against his legs. Rise blinked back to himself and touched their sun-warmed heads. The pair were again covered in dust from his sweeping. With a sigh, Rise shooed them away.

Should he step outside and retrieve the bloodied knife?

A taste of Iskar! Take it! Drink it! Run your tongue along the cold, sharp blade and savor every drop!