Page 4 of The Prophecy
Chapter Two
Be strong, Raven. Do not give in to despair.
Raven woke to the utter darkness of her underground cell with the words lingering in her head. A woman’s voice, a stranger’s voice, soft and low, and Raven gritted her teeth against the fury it stirred.
“Piss off,” she muttered under her breath.
She wasn’t strong. And she was tired of pretending she was when her whole body was racked with pain and her first feeling on realizing she was still alive was despair so intense it twisted her guts.
She had long ago learned to deal with the pain of the frequent beatings, and she’d come to accept the idea of her death as inevitable. Raven even believed in some shadowy place, deep within her soul, that she deserved to die for the innocent blood she had taken.
No, it wasn’t the pain or the thought of death that tore her apart, it was the knowledge that Sorien would benefit from her death. If Sorien won a final victory, she had no doubt there would be a reign of terror on the earth beyond all imagining.
And it would be her fault. She’d been cursed from the moment of her birth.
Gritting her teeth, she tugged at the chains that shackled her to the wall. She wasn’t going anywhere, and she hated the sense of powerlessness. However much she taunted Sorien, pissed him off, he wouldn’t kill her before the time of the sacrifice.
And if all that weren’t enough, for the last two months she’d had to put up with a stupid voice telling her to be strong.
Seriously?
It was advice she could do without.
Her throat was parched, but she could scent water nearby. She scrambled to her feet, reaching blindly for the bucket only to find it had been placed just out of range. Obviously, Sorien had decided to punish her further, and suddenly her rage rose up inside her like a living thing. She threw her head back and screamed, then hurled the whole weight of her body against the chains, over and over, until at last she sank down, exhausted, her ragged breathing thundering in her ears.
Something moved. A flutter of tiny wings stirred the chill air of the cell, and she went instantly still, listening. A moment later the room was flooded with light.
A man stood in the center of the cell, and her breath caught in her throat. He appeared to have materialized out of nothing, and her first thought was that he must be another vision. But this was no vision; it was a flesh-and-blood man. She could feel the warmth radiating from his body, and she drew the scent of him into her nostrils, the warm muskiness of animal overlying the sweetness of fresh blood.
He was huge, almost as tall as Sorien but with the lithe leanness of a jungle cat. Muscles bulged beneath the black T-shirt he wore over black jeans. He carried a torch, the source of the light, which he tucked into the waistband of his pants, and there was a gun holstered at his shoulder and a knife in a sheath at his thigh. She dragged her gaze upward. His face held a savage, masculine beauty: broad, flat cheekbones, a sharp blade of a nose, and slanted, catlike eyes, the color of the summer sky she remembered but would never see again. His hair was blond, a hundred shades of sunlight.
He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen; it was like staring into the sun she could never look upon, and Raven realized, with a sense of awe, that she knew him. She’d seen him in her waking visions. Had once, long ago, dreamed that this man would someday come and set her free. For a brief moment her pain faded, replaced by a sense of wonder.
It didn’t last long. She no longer believed anyone would save her.
Yet here he was.
Their gazes locked, and an unexpected expression softened those startling blue eyes. It took her only seconds to identify—goddamn pity. Hepitiedher, and her anger flared again, fierce and hot.
How dare he pity me?
As she searched his face, it came to her who he likely was—or at least who he worked for—and the reason for that pity. It appeared that the Council had caught up with her at last. At the realization, her anger flared brighter. If she had to blame anyone for the fucked-up mess that was her life, then that blame would land squarely on the Council.
It was the Council who had ordered her death when she was a baby. They would have killed her to prevent the prophecy if her father hadn’t escaped with her before the order could be carried out. Because of the Council, she had spent the first fourteen years of her life on the run. Because of them, her father had been killed, and she had been captured by the fire-demons.
She’d always wondered if they were aware of her capture. If so, they must have been hunting desperately for her as her twenty-first birthday approached, knowing that she would be sacrificed, and the fire-demons would gain the great victory promised by the prophecy.
Now it looked as though the Council had finally found her and sent someone to carry out the sentence of death they had passed so long ago.
She was only twenty; it wasn’t fair that she should die before she had even had a chance to live. Then she shook her head in disgust; only children believed that life was fair, and she was no child.
At least this way she would get her greatest wish; Sorien would never fulfill the prophecy, would never win that final victory. With that knowledge, a warm wave of relief flooded her. A feeling of peace and acceptance suffused her mind. He had come to set her free after all, in the only way still possible. He had come to kill her.
She relaxed then, closed her eyes.
And nothing happened.
Total silence.
