Chapter 29 Twenty Nine
Orin's POV
"Where'd all these rogues come from?" I screamed over the clashing of metal and dying-screams.
Kieran's head went flying from his neck and he sprang to the next target, unencumbered and as strangely fluid as before - precise and efficient. Someone's been gathering them. This is too organized to be random.
He was right. Rogues were typically lone animals gone mad in isolation, after the social bonds of the pack were broken. They didn’t collaborate, they didn’t have leaders, they didn’t coordinate attacks.
These, though, advanced in co-ordinated waves performing complex orders and tactics. Someone had taught them, which should not be possible.
I saw the leader of the rogues among the smoke and fire. The one Marcus said was named Damon Theron's twin, supposedly died brother.
For one, he was nearly the spitting image of Theron, but otherwise there was just something terribly off. Some sinister aspect, something more than physical appearance. If Theron's bore the ancient wisdom of age and guided power, Damon's held nothing but madness and fury.
"We have to get them back before they can reach inside," Kieran called, a cold and tactical reminder amid chaos. "Rhea's still inside."
Her name made my incomplete mate bond with her zing. I could feel her through it now, hear her emotions like far-off peals of thunder.
Her fear for all of us. How she’s too tired to help but keeps offering anyway. Her resistance mounting, gearing for something.
It was both distractive and grounding at once. Part of me wanted to give up the fight and run to her, confirm that she was unharmed. But the strategic side of my brain understood that the only way to keep her safe would be to end the rogues now.
“You’re thinking about her,” Kieran pointed out with every punch, knowing me as he always had. "I can tell."
"So are you." I deflected a rogue's claws with the hilt of my sword and plunged it into his throat. "Don't pretend you're not."
I'd even felt it when Rhea had touched him, just before the battle began. Ice under pressure, the wall Kieran had built around his emotions beginning to show cracks. The mate bond that's worked its path through two decades of deliberately buried emotions.
Kieran's face stayed as cold as winter, but I knew my brother better than anyone living. "The bond is inconvenient. I don’t like what I’m feeling. But I can't seem to stop it."
The admission was massive for him. Kieran never said he felt anything; Kieran never was vulnerable.
I smiled even through all the blood on my person, in no short part due to the bodies I kept pointing to piled up around us. "That's called caring, brother. Welcome back to the world of the living.”
"Shutup and fight," Kieran snarled, though I picked it up.
Ghost of a smile on his lips. The first real smile he’d had in twenty years.
For the first time since Elara died, since my brother closed himself off and turned into this cold machine, I could see him melting.
All because of one blue-eyed hybrid who wouldn’t stay where it was safe, who picked people to heal with silver flames, and defied ancient predictions.
The rogues just kept coming, wave after endless wave. Too many. Even with Theron's elite warriors and our seasoned fighters joining forces, decades of martial experience combined against us were simply too much.
The bodies stacked up on both sides. Our dead and theirs, commingling in the blood-soaked soil. The injured howled for help that did not arrive. The dying cried for mercy that would never come.
This wasn't a battle. It was a slaughter.
“We need to retreat,” Kieran said, all tactical thinker even as tumult and death surrounded them. "Regroup at the inner courtyard. Make them fight through the choke points where we have the defensive advantage and their numbers mean less.”
Every fiber of my being shouted in resistance to retreat. It was everything I had been taught, everything I believed in. We were alphas. We didn't run. We didn't give ground.
But my brother was right. He was, as usual, right in his tactics.
"Fall back!" "RAWR!" I screamed, it echoed to the end of the battlefield. "Inner courtyard! Organized retreat! Cover each other!"
Our men retired in good order, the veterans shielding those others who had not yet been hardened to war. We made the rogues pay heavily for each foot they advanced, their corpses littering the ground behind us.
I was assisting a wounded soldier in falling back when I sighted her.
Rhea, sexy warrior goddess of old time era standing at the cunt door. Her hands caught fire, silver flames bright enough to be seen even through the smoke billowing around them.
"What is she doing?" Kieran sucked in a breath beside me, his normal tolerance slipping to reveal real surprise.
We halted, both of us transfixed.
Rhea held her hands out to the sky. The flames over her fingers widened, became bigger and brighter with each passing second. The very air appeared to answer her; like the charged ion haze of a dry rainstorm.
A sheet of fire blossomed between the defenders and the rogues coming at them. But this wasn't normal fire. It didn’t even burn red or orange, much less blue.
It felt like pure silver: cold and hot all at once. Power that would tear the natural laws to pieces, power that shouldn't exist in this world.
The rogues slammed into it like waves against rock and howled, their skin sizzling where they came in contact with the obstruction. They couldn’t get through, they couldn’t make them break, only rage helplessly against a barrier that could not be breached.
“She’s stalling for us,” it struck me, in astonishment.
The show of force was overwhelming. It was more than she had ever done before, more than just small healing or a defensive barrier. More than any hybrid should be able to.
This was battlefield magic. The kind that shifted tides and won wars. The type that legends were made of.
Something primal rose in me. Pride. Possessiveness. Awe.
And this extraordinary woman was my consort. Mine.
I got to Rhea as she began to weaken after the great strain of maintaining the powerful defense. Her legs buckled from the lack of strength.
I caught her before she fell, the mate bond sparking to life between us like lightning. The bond that was developing suddenly surged stronger, deeper.
“You are amazing,” I said, reaching deeply into my heart and pulling it out for her to hear. "And also completely insane. You could have died doing that.”
Rhea forced a wan smile, but she was panting and the color had gone out of her skin. "But I didn't. The bonds make me stronger. Every one that existed or came into being enhanced my power, multiplied it in some mysterious manner.”
She went limp against me, her weight no trouble to bear in comparison with my own wounds. "I can feel it now. Theron's bond, complete and solid. Yours, forming and growing. It’s like … it’s like rivers of power pouring into my mind.”
Her gaze met Kieran’s and he had come more slowly, his face so painfully blank but his eyes gave a look of concern.
"I can feel you both," she said softly, her voice frail but determined. “The bond with Orin is already starting, it’s getting stronger each second. But you, Kieran … you're waging this war on it really painfully. It is as futile as trying to keep back a flood with your hands.”
Kieran’s fastidious facade cracked a little, revealing some of the turbulence beneath. “I’m not sure how to stop fighting. I have spent twenty years building walls, burying all of my emotions. If I wanted to destroy them, I wouldn’t know how.”
"Then listen,” Rhea whispered, her hand reaching for his with all the little strength she had remaining. “Because we don’t have a lot of time. The prophecy, the war, everything. We have to have all four bonds filled.”
When her fingers brushed Kieran’s, there was a change in the atmosphere between us.
I sensed it myself through my bond with Rhea, I felt the walls crumbling within my brother, brick by brick. The emotions come rushing back after two decades of censorship.
My twin gasped, his eyes widening with shock and hurt. All the emotions he’d buried since Elara’s death coming back to him in a rush.
Pain. Grief. Longing. Fear. And beneath it all, the dreadful knowledge that he was beginning to care about Rhea, that she was finding her way through his barriers.
“Elara,” he murmured, and I knew he was remembering his first mate. The woman whose dying had broken him in this way.
"That helps." Rhea squeezed his hand, her blue eyes brimming with empathy. "I know. And I know it, from you in my mind. The love you felt, the loss of her. But Kieran, she wouldn’t be content with you the rest of your life like this. Dead inside. Empty. Alone."
Kieran appeared to want to argue, wanted to build his walls back up and push her away. But the words wouldn't come. The bond wouldn't let him.
The moment was broken when a voice shouted from the other side of the wall of fire, thick with madness and venom.
"Theron! Brother! Come out and face me!"
On the opposite side of Rhea's shield hung Damon, the twin who was supposed to be dead. Unity's face was contorted with rage and madness, black reflection of Theron's perfect features.
"I see you, cowering behind your mate's skirts! he roared, his voice ringing out across the field of battle. “And I know you’ve got something valuable at the moment. A mate. How wonderfully convenient."
His smile was vicious, cruel. “You stole everything from me three centuries ago now I get to repay the favor. An eye for an eye, brother."
The barrier of fire stuttered, weakening. Rhea was fading, could not sustain so intense a magic much longer.
Theron leapt down, fighting past the defenders to come forward. His expression was one of astonishment and fury, his silver eyes burning with strength.
“You’re meant to be dead,” he muttered, his voice hoarse. "I killed you. Watched you die."
The laugh that came from Damon was bone-chillingly heartless. "So are you, theoretically. You should have been dead, cursed to die when that fell. But, at any rate, here we are both of us, alive and kicking.”
He paused, tilting his head. "Well, I'm well. You look like you been through frikkin’ hell, brother. Good. You are getting exactly what you deserve.”
His gaze landed on Rhea, and a tidal wave of protective rage roared through the mate bond so forcefully that it almost brought me to my knees. Every bone in my body was boiling to bury her, cover her up, kill the thing that would bring harm to her.
"Is this her?" Damon asked with mock curiosity. "That hybrid who broke your curse? The one in the prophecy? She is actually very pretty, I have to say.”
It spread into a predatory smile. "I'll take her when I off you. A certain amount of poetic justice, wouldn’t you say? To steal away everything you hold dear, to make her mine, just as you stole everything from me all those hundreds of years ago.”
He waved a hand at the rogue army just behind him. “I have been waiting for long to plan this and I gathered forces and held waiting for the right moment. And now, you’ve found something that really gets under your skin and you actually care about — worth fighting for, worth dying for, a cause so personal you can’t even stand the thought of losing it.”
The flame barrier wavered once more, and it dimmed perilously. Rhea was almost delirious in my arms, devoid of all strength.
“Come out and face me, brother,” Damon shouted. "Face me like you did before. Either I'll tear down all this and steal everything you have, beginning with your prized cunt."
The rage had started in Theron and was becoming dangerous through the bonding of us all. Felt the cold wash of his own desperate protectiveness toward Rhea warring with the guilt over his brother’s apparent resurrection.
We were walking into a trap, and I knew absolutely that we were.
But we had no choice. The barrier was failing. They could come pouring through any day.
We had to fight.