First book in The Ever Spirits series.
A magic dagger. A beautiful boy. And me.
We were a match made to be destroyed.
*
The dagger lured me in with promises: I was meant to be an empress, not a simple, sequestered farm girl.
And I—feckless, heedless, daring to dream of power and love—picked the dagger up.
And I reached for him.
Avid and ardent, we were vicious in strength and feral at heart.
But he was trapped by the enemy and agonizingly tortured.
While in captivity, he tore a strip from his soul and hurled it across the kingdoms to find me.
It stayed with me, but this is all that remains of the reckless boy he was.
And I cannot embrace a spirit; he cannot kiss away my anguish.
I vow to find his physical self, but before I can, my country’s overlord kidnaps my family. He forces me into a charade. Because I resemble his daughter, the current heiress to the kingdom, I must become her decoy and train in secret in order to guard his queen.
While I struggle not to lose hope, the strip of spirit that remains of my beloved urges me to stay true, to trust the promises of the dagger.
But his real self has warped into an atrocity who goads me from afar, who dares me to defy him and taunts me with my downfall.
And the dagger?
It has promised only one thing from the start: for me to become an empress, I must use the dagger to kill someone I love.
NOTE: This is not a fluffy, written-for-tropes fantasy romance, but a fantasy (with a love story) where no one’s survival is guaranteed except the endgame couple. At the end of this book, one of her potential loves will die, one’s survival is debatable, and one will live to torment her.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Battlefield
Once, when he was innocent and I was stupid, he carved himself into my heart.
And then?
He carved himself into my fury.
I threw away the dagger he used, but still, our hearts beat beneath the same scars. Once, we both bled from the same wound.
And proximity to him now still robs me of my wits in ways I can’t stop. His body…
I don’t want to look, but even his darkness enchants me in sickening ways: how he lounges so beautifully in the shadows that embrace him.
His long legs, clad in leather, stretch out across the rock floor. His boots, crossed at the ankles, flicker faintly from moonlight that leaks in and reflects off the crystals in the cavern walls. And his voice… “Are you sure you want to do this, my tormented queen?”
His voice vibrates through me like the lax purr of a predator, making the spaces around me shiver.
I hunker inward, hugging my knees in a moonbeam that slants through a thin rift in the rock ceiling. My breath emerges visibly, like a rising wraith in the glacial darkness, a darkness that binds me inside the scents of ice-damp stone, leather, and my own sweat.
I school my features into nothingness—showing no reaction to him at all—because self-lies are the only defense against a man whose only ambition has always been shadows and deceit.
He shifts position, every motion indulgently relaxed. “Are you sure you want to relive when you were young and hopeful?”
A cracked laugh cuts out of me. “I? You were young and hopeful, too.”
A sneer twists his lips. “At the beginning of a story, everyone is young and hopeful. Bloated with heroic sentiment like a disease.”
I force my fingers to remain uncurled. “And at the end, there’s only survival.”
His low-edged chuckle rumbles through my flesh. “Is that what you call what you did with me? Surviving?”
“What else?”
His smile spreads palpably in the dark, because I know the answer. He doesn’t even have to speak it.
For shame, Alynah, he mocks directly in my mind, because after he stole part of my soul, he gained the key to get into me forever.
I lift my chin, defiant, and stab back. Should I be ashamed?
His face splits with malice. My poison queen.
Not yours.
Are you poison for anyone else?
I shouldn’t be poison at all.
Once, I was soul and beauty and hope.
Now, I am hope’s ugliest dregs.
At thirty-three years old, I should be—should fight—better.
But I am worn thin, worn down, my resistance worn away. I feel as knobbled and ancient as the souls soldered to the rock around us.
Those trapped spirits are listening now. I’ve been silent too long, and the fates of so many aboveground, both living and those about to be born, rely on me to fix this.
I have already lost myself in so many ways, but I can save the rest. If I can spin my tale just right, like a spider picking and flinging and shaping the right threads, I can snare these souls in my web and wrap them with my persuasion.
But that means reliving it all. Returning to the past, to when a magic dagger embroiled me in enchantment, and a beautiful boy ensnared me without even giving me his name.
The boy who was my kindred soul.
Avid and ardent, we had strained against the ribcages of our flesh as we sought to grasp impossible things.
Before our love became a battlefield and my life became a lie.
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