I Can Not Have Her.
I close my hand around the woman’s wrist and draw her down from the platform. She snatches up the trailing chain with the other hand, moving with the quick economy of someone long used to making do. Another woman lunges from the shadows and catches her arm.
“What are you doing?” I hiss, baring fang without thinking.
“Please, my King,” the stranger says in a rush, eyes flashing. “I am one of you and her friend. Please take me with you.”
One of us. A vampire, masked by scent and grime. The wolves caged two birds in the same gilded trap. “Fine. Move.”
We spill into the street and the world is knives again. Wolves are everywhere, men, women, even children with teeth bared and eyes wild, fighting like the ground beneath them has a pulse. My people form a wedge around us and we sprint for the border, but the ring tightens, bodies filling the gaps as fast as we make them.
“What are your orders, my King?” Jeremy asks, back to mine, sword bright with fresh death. He’s gripping the second woman’s arm to keep her with us.
There’s a tug at my hand. My bride, my beloved, meets my gaze, then glances meaningfully at the golden cuffs circling her wrists. A request. An instruction. Later, I almost say, we don’t have time for delicate work.
“Later. I don’t have time right now,” I snap, already scanning the line for a break.
Her fingers flash through a series of swift, precise motions. It’s not random; it’s a language. The other woman translates, breathless. “She says: unchain her. Quickly. If you want to survive.”
I stare at them both. Wolves are closing, a tide with claws. “You’re joking.”
“Just do it!” the translator snaps, steel under the plea.
In another life, I’d discipline anyone who dared order their king in the middle of a battle. In this one, I dive for the cuffs, clamp my hands around them, and pull. The links scream, warp, break. The last of the gold falls away like dead skin.
Her hands move again, faster now. “Get your men,” the translator whispers, voice gone clipped and calm, “everyone who wants to live, inside this circle. Now.”
I don’t know why I listen. Maybe because the hum in my chest is roaring now, a dark star collapsing. I mindlink my army. Form on me. Tight circle. Now. In a blink, they’re here, close enough that I could brush the shoulders to either side if I dared lift my arms. Confusion flickers across their faces, but they lock shields as ordered. Wolves ring us in, panting and hungry.
Her fingers flash one last command. “Tell them to get down.” The translator whispers.
I don’t debate. Down! My horde hits the dirt in one fluid motion, faces to the earth, blades turned sideways. Only three of us remain standing: me, the translator, and the woman whose name I do not yet know but whose gravity is now the law of my body. She steps to my back and presses her shoulder to mine. Heat blooms through the thin space between us. She raises her hands. Fire answers. It doesn’t ooze or stutter; it erupts, roaring from her palms like she’s torn two wounds in the world and the sun is bleeding through. The wolves in front of us ignite where they stand. She turns with me, step for step, a perfect circle, and the night becomes a kiln. Screams shred, then thin, then go silent. When the last body falls, she pivots again, hands shaping air, and water pours out of nothing, dousing the charred ring until the ground hisses and the smoke thins to a damp, sickly fog. I face her. Her chest heaves, and I realize with a strangled shock that she’s doing all of this while wearing an ancient-looking mask that must be murder to breathe through.
The translator calls out, voice cracking, “Echo!”
Echo. The name lands in me with the weight of a bell toll. I open my mouth to answer, to claim, to thank, to demand but I am too slow. Echo sways, a brief, stubborn fight in her knees, and then collapses. The ground takes her with a thud that feels louder than the battle.
“Dude.” Jeremy’s elbow clips my arm, jolting me back into the world. The ring around us is a black halo of cooked earth and ash. My soldiers lift their faces, eyes wide, expressions flicking between terror and awe and the exhausted relief of not being dead.
“Move,” I say, voice steady again, crown back on. “We’re done here. Carry the girl.”
Jeremy scoops Echo up as if she weighs nothing; even with our strength, she would be painfully light. The translator hovers at his side, worry etched in every line of her face. My horde tightens around us and we push through the steam and smoke, leaving the smoldering circle behind, heading for the line that means home. I keep my gaze forward, but the decision crouches in my chest like a beast. I knew the moment I saw her, before, even, that Echo was mine. My bride. The seer’s object. The key. Yet what she just did… whatever she is… a king cannot chain his heart to a storm without weighing the cost. I cannot have her as my beloved, not with power like that, not without understanding it...but I cannot leave her either.
She is the axis of our survival. The end of the curse. The first chord of a future we lost two centuries ago.
“Move out,” Jeremy calls, voice swelling with the old confidence. My people fall into step, and we vanish into the night, carrying our miracle and our problem between us.