Rite of the Beast by Amber Foy

Author:Amber Foy [Foy, Amber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creature Features
Published: 2019-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Fingers stroked back the wild and sweaty tangle of my hair and I jerked up under the strange touch. Who…?

“Peace, my princess.”

His voice. The Beast’s…but not as a voice in the wind or a brush against my mind. It was there, beside me. Real. As…as it had been when he found his own release.

My heart squeezed and I willed my head to turn.

A man knelt beside me in the dry earth, pale as moonlight, though his hair and eyes were as dark as the surrounding night. His perfect mouth quirked upwards and a gleam of eldritch light caught in the endless depths of his eyes. “I have searched for you, the one to break the curse.”

“Curse?”

Was I simply a…means to an end? The prophecy… A fist wrapped around my heart and squeezed. It wasn’t me that my father feared. It was the Beast. I’d…I’d freed the Beast and changed him to a man. Who was he? Who had he been…before the curse?

He looked away, out to the dark stretch of the forest and something moved through his black gaze. A memory of that place, the time when he’d first walked as a man? “This is my earth, my sky. Mine.” His gaze found me again, a dark fire flickering in its depths. “All of it.”

My belly hollowed. Gods… He…he was the original Lord of the Realm. Vadin Akis, King of the Dark Lands. The one my family, my Blood had overthrown centuries before. I closed my eyes and denied the burn of tears. I breathed. In and out. Would I bear his curse? I bit the inside of my cheek, that pain fighting the hard twist of horror in my chest. To be the hole for whoever was desperate enough to seek out a new Beast—

“Nissyen…”

I frowned. How did he know my name?

Vadin’s warm, rough palm cupped my cheek and a sob broke from me.

“The curse is broken. Shattered. It will not find you. You, like the earth and sky, are…mine. Always.”

I stared up at him and his thumb wiped away the fall of a tear. The bloom of relief caught me. Held me. His. Gods, I wanted that. Some long denied part of me always had. Still… I drew in a breath and lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a little…presumptive?”

A smile curled the corner of his perfect mouth and his eyes shone with black fire. “Should I prove my claim on your flesh again, my queen?”

Dawn light streaked the sky in the softest golds, the new day stretching out before me. Before us. Before the rise of the new dawn. “There was—is—a prophecy…”

His smile darkened. “One set to break the curse and free me. A Woman of the Forest. You, not your mother…and your father discovered that far too late.”

“Him.”

“He will find an end worthy of him.”

There was the Beast’s hot growl under that promise and my skin pricked. I sucked in a breath, the echoing darkness pushing through my own thoughts. I was a dark creature through my mother’s blood.

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