Chapter 148: Book 2 - Chapter 54

Chapter 53 –The Scent of the Queen

Aero

I must say, Calaheim did me a favor. The area where the portal ended brought me inside a house that sickeningly smelled like Sofia. I was in a foyer in what I could reckon as the second floor, judging from the nearby stairs I spotted and the grand chandelier hanging on a beam just leveled with my line of sight. Below me, I could hear a woman talking—or more like complaining—together with a man groaning in pain.

I instantly recognized their voices. One was Dr. Rutherford or Hilda with a rougher tone now than before, and the second was from Viscount Daniel.

Slowly, I inched closer to the stone balustrade to spy on the situation. The viscount’s rough state made me clench my hands instantly.

He was shirtless and bloody, with his arms and chest wounded with a slicing cut of a blade. This blade was visible on Hilda’s hand. The edge was pointed to his throat while he sat helplessly on a couch with his wrists seemingly on an invisible rope. Hadon’s magic, perhaps.

He looked winded and tired, and I expected him to be. For a man such as his age and having that amount of wounds and blood loss, he should be fighting for his life by now.

“I’ll make you pay for betraying me!” Hilda lashed as she made another cut near his carotid area.

He groaned again, much louder this time, but he managed to reply: “I didn’t be—tray yo—u. I was ne—ver your believer to be—gin with! Yo—ur fam—ily are delu—sional! Gree—dy!”

“You fucking bastard!” Hilda sliced his skin again. I winced and decided to break the drama.

“I suggest you put the blade down, Hilda.”

At the sound of my voice, she immediately looked up. Her eyes transformed into full moons as she regarded me.

“King Aero!” she shouted, looking like she didn’t expect me in such a place.

What a mistake.

I ignored her. Instead, my attention transferred to the viscount as I made my way down the stairs.

“Viscount, how are you holding there?” I asked, showing a neutral face.

“Bare—ly, Yo—ur Maj—esty,” was his raspy reply. He flashed me a bloody grin. The kind that said he knew he was saved.

But Hilda didn’t think so, for she pointed the tip of the blade to his throat again.

“You move and I’ll end his life this instant,” she declared confidently.

I scoffed at her words. “You know very well you are no match for me, Hilda. I could crush your skull anytime if I really wanted to. I’m sure you know what a werewolf is capable of, how much more their alpha king?”

Her face blanched, but she still maintained her show of bravado.

“I know, King Aero. I am just stalling time. Hadon will find your wife and children and he will kill them all. You will be alone forever and I will have my revenge!”

My eyelids fluttered with this revelation. I stopped once my boots hit the base of the stairs and diced the information. “You mean to say she’s—”

“She es—caped, Yo—ur Maje—sty,” Viscount Daniel finished for me.

Huh. What a lovely surprise this is. Because of this barrier around the house, I couldn’t still feel her life essence or mind-link her. All the while I thought she was inside one of the rooms and that I was to save her and our children. It turned out, it wasn’t the case after all.

Serena had a knack for finding miracles in her life, and this time, she found it through the viscount. Clearly, with that bloody smug on his face, he was telling me he helped her escape.

“Good for her.” A slow stretch of a smile appeared on my face, feeling proud of my wife and grateful of the viscount. “I must be on my way then.” I stepped forward, not toward them, but toward the exit of the living room. I thought why dally here when I could follow my wife wherever she is right now.

“I said don’t move!” Hilda cried out again, making me pause and arch a brow. The tip of the blade now nicked the viscount’s skin. A few more inches forward and he would be a goner. “I can’t have you running to your wife now. You will not ruin my victory!”

“You can’t hold me here using him as your leverage, woman,” I stated, giving her a wry smile.

She flinched. “You don’t care for the viscount?”

“I do,” I answered straightaway while looking at him staying cleverly silent. “Especially now that he has proven his worth, but I care more for my wife and sons and I miss them badly. I don’t need to stay here any longer.”

Hilda’s grip on the blade handle tightened harder, and she scowled at me even more. Before she could say or do anything further, however, I stretched my palm in our front and added: “Besides, I am not alone.”

Once I balled it into a fist, one arrow flew across the room and directly hit Hilda’s neck. It went through, hitting her carotid artery and larynx, and exited to the other side.

“A—ck!” She gasped out blood automatically and her eyes registered surprise. “Wh—at...”

“Meet my sister, Aurora.” My eyes landed on my half-sister who was dangling upside down on a thick beam of the high ceiling, her arrows still pointed at Hilda. “You deal with her from now on.”

Hilda continued to cough up blood. The blade fell on the floor and not a second later, she followed, hitting the grossly blood-stained floor with a heavy thud. Her eyes landed on Aurora. She stretched her hands up, albeit slowly. I didn’t think it was threatening, but without my signal and acting on her own accord, Aurora released a second arrow, hitting the woman on the chest, then a third hit her on the forehead.

A bulls-eye and a lethal one.

I winced at the macabre sight.

“You’re not going easy on her, Aurora,” I remarked, slowly shaking my head as I watched Hilda’s life slowly dwindle away.

Aurora released herself from the beam, did a somersault down, and landed on her feet with ease.

“Calaheim taught me a lot, Aero,“—she adjusted her white Amazonian gown to position and lowered her bow—“and one of them is to kill the opponent immediately if I sense a conjurer blood in them. She has one. We can’t risk it and have her use her summoning spell.”

“How can you be sure she’s not using her summoning spell now or earlier?” I pointed out, knowing it was a valid question.

She simply shrugged and cast a look at her now-lifeless victim. “She hasn’t. She’s too complacent. She’s too confident things would turn in her favor, and that’s her biggest mistake.”

“Hmf. I would have wanted her to summon whatever monster she could afford with that frail human magic of hers. It would have entertained me more,” I answered, not really caring if she found it too arrogant to hear.

“I know, brother.” She just rolled her eyes and placed her arms akimbo. “You don’t need to brag your strength. I already got a taste of it earlier. Now, go and find Serena. She’s more important than this woman or her summons. I’ll take care of Viscount Daniel.”

I watched the one mentioned and luckily, he was still holding on. I tipped my head toward him and Aurora, and left the room on foot.

I could sense the house and its nearby surroundings get covered by a barrier spell. I couldn’t shift into my beast forms or even teleport to any location inside it, but my strength and senses were still with me, and this was what I used to track my escapee wife.

Once in the front garden of the house, I picked up her scent. It was faint, and got mixed up with the lingering smell of her dead beast friend, but it was enough. It was enough for me to find her. My leg muscles stretched when I sprang forward. I ran and ran, covering a kilometer in merely a minute with her scent guiding me.

Tree trunks split. Bushes got flattened. Rocks got pulverized as I passed them all. I felt like a madman in search of my fix. Serena was my fix, and I ached to finally hold her in my arms once again.

Then her scent stopped on a riverbank. I frowned. How could this be? My mind questioned. The answer came in the form of Hadon’s smell. It was everywhere and mixed with another smell of a few monsters which vaguely reminded me of Sattus.

Fucking hell, literally.

Reading the clues, it seemed the old man and whatever pets he has were tailing my wife. She was right to use the river to hide her scent. But why? Why would she hide her scent when she could just fight him?

Unless...

Fuck.

She was going in labor.

With that conclusion in mind, my feet sprang forward and ran along the shoreline. Ran like a madman even madder than before. The thoughts of her in labor, in pain while being hunted by a stupid senile fae gutted me. I knew I had to find her and stat.

I hadn’t covered two kilometers of run when I picked up her scent again, but this time, it was on a waterfall cliff. My hands clenched when I realized what she had done.

‘Fuck, Serena. I hope you are well.’ I whispered to myself.

Hadon’s smell and his monsters still lingered too. They were somewhere around the area, but I didn’t have the drive to entertain them yet. My priority was to find my wife and accompany her on this most joyous but dangerous occasion.

Standing on the same spot where she jumped, I stared at the waterfall below, exhaled through my nose, and that’s when I realized I could sense her finally. She was below me, inside a cave, and in pain, so much in pain.