Four howls.
Four deaths.
There was no guarantee that one of those howls wasn’t for me, but at least three of these assholes were going down with me. Plus I had the weretree, keeping my mission safe in its silvery gnarled branches. If I didn’t survive, he would make sure it was delivered to her safely.
I spat out the bitter taste in my mouth, regret splintering my chest like another knife wound. I had wanted to see the blazing emerald green of her eyes—eyes that everyone whispered about but I never had the pleasure of seeing. I had wanted to touch her soft pale skin—to feel it reverently against my lips and purge it of the invisible scars I knew were there.
My vision blurred, darkness creeping in my periphery. I felt the hot sting of a single tear slide down my face and I closed my eyes. I was not ready for Sheol but it was here for me anyway.
Darkness swirled around me. Then I gasped—a punch in my gut full of golden light spilled into my veins, it thrummed in my body, it blasted my senses.
Was this Sheol?
My eyes snapped open and I inhaled sharply. I was still in Faerie, still in this goddess forsaken camp, still chained to the damn tree but instead of dying…I was healing.
I groaned at the pleasurable tingling of my injured body knitting itself back together, my fractured bones snapping back into place, and the pulsating energy that sent my heart racing.
This power was…reverent, it was euphoric, it was life. It tasted of our long lost goddess—a goddess who had abandoned us to our cursed sterile fate thousands of years ago.
A fate that had driven the Faerie queen mad, destroyed the life of the one destined to save us, and sent me on a one hundred year search to find her again.
And yet…here the goddess power was. Present and alive—and saving me.
“What the Faerie fuck? Who healed him?” Jurin snarled, whirling around and pointing at his comrades. “I told you idiots to not fucking heal him.”
“It wasn’t us.” One of them cried out.
I chuckled, the power of the goddess making me higher than the Red Cap Mountains—I fucking missed those looming peaks of my homeland.
“She’ssssss comingggggg,” I slurred, seeing the shadows darken unnaturally. “Whatsss do you do when the darknessssss comes.” I started singing boisterously at the top of my lungs. “Dooooo you hide or dooooooo you runnnn.” A long slurring laugh escaped me before I shouted. “Nay. Neither…what you neeeddd is the rising ssuuuunnnn.”
“Shut him up. Something is out there.” One of Jurin’s goons whispered, a bear shifter with curly brown hair and dark brown eyes that were almost black. I wanted to rip his traitorous face off.
Almost one hundred years ago, they had joined the queen of Faerie, betrayed our people, and attempted a coup against the shifter throne. Until the queen abandoned them here…a lunatic if I ever saw one, the Faerie queen’s obsession to cure the fae courts of their infertility ultimately led to her own death.
At least that's what most believed. I believed otherwise.
All four of the shifter traitors startled when the furious flapping of a chickadee swooped into the camp.
I could not control the blast of laughter booming deep from my belly at their skittish reaction.
“Doooo youuuu hide or do youuu ruuun.” I whispered, my eyes latching on to the appearance of the sexy silhouette stepping out from the rollingdarkness.
Shadows fell away from her fine figure like a silk dress falling off her bare shoulders.
My mouth went dry, my lips parted with awe.
Bright emerald green eyes, piercing and fierce, striking and gorgeous, connected with my own for the very first time, and I never saw anything more beautiful.
I never would again.
Finally.
On my death’s door, the one I had been searching for, the one I was dying for.
Remnant Ezra Solaire Dark
The last shadow fae.
