Thorne (Random Romance) (32 page)

I blinked, startled.

‘You think I didn’t know? That I couldn’t see everything you are?’ He smiled gently, and I realised I had never seen him this way – looking at me as though he liked me. I had never been the kind of creature that anyone could like before.

Closing my eyes, I nodded.

Because she had changed everything.

Sparrow’s wings unfurled in my chest as Osric swept me out of my palace.

Thorne

Your heart is in tatters. Your soul shredded.

I struggled against the manacles, struggled against her entry into my mind. The pain of it was scattering; I could hardly hold to a thought. I was in a sea of blood; I was trapped beneath the ice, cold freezing my organs; I stood before the corpses of dozens of men and women as Da butchered; I
was
the corpse as he took his blade and carved – and worst of all, I was the slaughterman doing the killing, one after the other until there were twenty-two bodies laid out before me. But always, through all the visions and the agony, there was Eanna’s voice, tethering me to this body of mine.

Did you know, Thorne, that each time you kill someone, you tear another piece of yourself away?

Of course I knew.

Then why don’t you stop?

Because.

Because I wanted to live.

I could feel her smile, the cold depths of it. Having it inside me was repulsion. My beast was so deeply asleep that I could not tell, anymore, if he was alive or not.

Do you know who else wanted to live at the cost of human lives?

Yes. I knew.

The slaughterman of the north.

And suddenly there he was. Standing in the cavern, gazing at me. He was bigger, even, than I’d imagined. More scarred. He wore the skin of a mighty wolf and his eyes cut inside me like knives.

‘Don’t,’ I whispered. ‘Eanna. Don’t make me –’

‘She has you begging,’ my da said, his low voice filled with disgust. ‘What a pitiful creature you have turned out to be.’

And even though I’d spent my life praying to be different, praying to be a better man, a gentler man, fearing his ghost with a bone-deep terror, his words hurt me as I’d never been hurt before. And I realised in that moment that all I’d ever really wanted, regardless of how monstrous he’d been, was a father who was proud of me.

Finn

‘Don’t listen,’ I shouted at him. ‘Don’t listen to whatever she’s telling you!’

But Thorne wasn’t even aware of me. He was lost in some nightmare he wasn’t strong enough to wake from.

So I was going to have to do it for him. This bitch was about to die.

A soul too big for my body.

Too big for any body.

Big enough to tear this whole mountain down, if I wanted her to.

I did.

I called to her and she rose up. She was darkness and guilt and regret, and she was the ghosts I held tight to my heart, the ones whose lives had distorted mine. She was all the parts of me I had feared and denied, all the ones I thought meant death and only death.

But maybe she also meant freedom.

I thought of the chains about my arms breaking and they broke. Steel clattered to the ground and I rose to my feet.

The wings of hundreds of moths brushed against my skin. I felt a thousand years old and connected to everything in the world, in the sky and the earth, in the hearts of every person in this mountain, every poor wretched half-walker. There they were, throbbing warm and strong. And open to me.
As though they’d been waiting a long time for me.

Each one whispered to me its wishes and each wish was for the death of this demon woman.

It will hurt
, I warned. I was a blunt hammer. But they remained willing, and so I took pieces of them, stole energy from every single one, and then I attacked the warder.

She screamed in shock. Spun to face me. Could not believe what she had felt, what she was witnessing.

‘Release your hold,’ I ordered softly. I was running out of time now. Energy was flowing through me, wearing me away. Soon there would be nothing left of me.

‘You think you can stop this? He’s so easy,’ she told me, trying to rattle me. ‘His mind is wide open to me – he hasn’t a single guard in place. And the anguish in his heart – it’s as though it’s been laid out for me to manipulate. As though he’s
begging
me to take it away. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it.’

‘He is the prince of a nation,’ I told her. ‘He endures his people’s pain as if it were his own. If you think that a flaw then you are looking at humanity the wrong way.’

‘It makes him weak,’ she sneered.

Slowly I smiled. ‘That’s why he has me.’

I sent my hammer at her, smashing through the hold she had on Thorne’s mind. The warder staggered, pain slicing through her head. I hit her again, more directly.

And again, and again, and again. I didn’t give her a moment’s respite, daring her to fight back, to deny the blunt force of my soul.

And that’s when she acted. I’d given her no choice. She sent a wave of pressure at me – a wave made up of every ounce of her power. Which was exactly what I’d been waiting for.

As it hit me, knocking me off my feet, it broke through the hold I’d had
on the other beating hearts, letting them free. I felt the poor half-walkers liberated from the warder’s bindings, liberated with a sigh of relief. Every one of them died in their cages and their souls drifted up and away as if on a breath of wind.

And so too did I feel the berserkers freed of their chains, a chilling howl ringing through all the tunnels of the mountain and echoing around the cavern.

They would be coming. For all three of us – the intruders. I understood now, with the stray thoughts drifting all about the place, that not even Thorne could be here uninvited. The hunt had begun. So I had to give him a chance to escape.

Closing my eyes, I summoned the worst part of me, the part that enjoyed my power and its control over people. I feared this part of me, but I let her reign. She made me strong – impossibly strong.

I took hold of the warder’s soul with an iron grip, and then I ripped it from her body.

She sagged, stripped bare. Her eyes blinked quickly. All the white left them and they returned to a deep brown shade, the same brown her hair turned.

‘Only human,’ I murmured. Corruption slithered through me and I felt the desire for cruelty, heady like a rush of adrenalin. I wanted to hurt her. Wanted to hear her screams.

‘Finn,’ a rough voice said, reaching beyond the terrifying malevolence I was drowning in. ‘Come back,’ Thorne said.

I met his weary, pain-filled eyes. There was blood pooling around him. I wanted to go to him, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t.

I had made my choice. I’d given the darkness dominion. And now there was no turning back.

Will I kill again?

Yes.

So let the blood on my hands be my own.

‘You once asked me how I do it. Win the Siren Nights and deny their call,’ I whispered. ‘The answer is simple: you don’t deny it. You give in to it.’

‘Finn –’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him, to my mate. ‘But I do not give you permission to die, Prince Thorne. The world has need of you yet.’

And then I let the darkness consume me, ravage its way through my body, my soul too big, too big. It stole everything.

I sank to the ground and felt myself die.

A last thought drifted to me through the shadows.
A miracle – that love found a place within the darkness to survive.

Thorne

She slumped to the ground just as Goran and his berserkers arrived. They were out for blood.

Goran went to Eanna, who now seemed unaware of the world after whatever Finn had done to her. Without any warning the berserker King smashed his fist through her chest and wrenched out her heart. Then he devoured it, blood swimming from his mouth and all over his hands.

The berserkers gave a chilling roar of approval, beastly and chaotic and never to be powerless again.

I was barely aware of it.

Because on the ground was Finn, and she was dead, and I could feel it.

It was
my
heart being ripped out and eaten. My soul that had been stripped and ravaged. I wanted to go with her, wanted it so much that I was consumed by the sudden yearning for death.

Please, Gods, let me die with her.

But.

I do not give you permission to die, Prince Thorne.

And so.

I had lost a great deal of blood, and I had had my soul flogged by a thousand lashes. A part of me was trying to die with her. I’d never been this weak in my whole life. But I gathered everything that was left in me and I ordered, ‘Let me down.’

Goran crossed to stand before me. He was euphoric in his newfound freedom. He exuded animal strength. ‘Why would I do that, boy?’ Blood dripped from his lips.

I had never –
never
– expected to be the one to speak this word. But times were changing. The world was falling. I had to set it right.

‘Challenge,’ I barked. And the cavern fell silent.

‘I accept,’ Goran said.

They let me down, and I had barely the strength to stand. Goran loomed over me, power in every one of his muscles.

Gods. I was going to die here, fighting an impossible foe.

My eyes rested on Finn’s body. The curve of her shoulder. The long, slender limbs. Her blonde, tangled hair. That mouth, the shape of it. The dark eyelashes resting on her freckled cheeks. All those places I had touched and kissed and loved.

A high keening was released from my broken heart. It stole up and up, right into the top of this mountain and beyond it, up into the sky, the infinite roof of the world. My soul bayed like a crippled animal.

But then I felt him. Deep inside, in his cage. He stirred from his slumber, scenting the air and stretching his muscles. Slowly he came alive, and slowly, as if by an interminable, inevitable will, I felt him fill with fury.

Rise
, I whispered to him.
Rise, brother.

He did. Oh, he did.

My eyes turned red and the bloodlust exploded in my veins. I was ravenous.

Goran and I ran at each other and collided with brutal impact. I was expecting his strength but even so it shocked me. We grappled and he slammed me to the ground. All the air left my lungs but I rolled him, landing a blow to his face, another, two more before –

He threw me off and hammered his shoulder into my ribs, cracking them. His left fist swung into my shoulder, crunching the bone there and sending my head blank for a second. But no time for blank. My limbs were trembling with pent-up adrenalin as I blocked his next blows and threw a
right into his gut. When he punched me in the side of the head I knew it was going to be too much. He was too strong, I too weak.

He was King of the Ice, a man who fought every day of his life to keep his throne in the harshest conditions known to man, and I was a boy who’d spent too long in the safe embrace of his mother’s hut and been terrified of any conflict at all.

I stopped being able to block his blows. Each one landed. My body was alight with pain, but I was too dazed to be aware of it. A fist in my ribs, cracking them, a fist in my cheekbone, cracking it. One in my chest, stealing my breath.

Impossible. How had I imagined this to go?

As I took blow after blow after blow, scrabbling to stay on my feet and lessen their impact, a strange thing drifted to me on a current of memory.

A story. Told to me by my uncle for the first few years of my life, told so often it became a truth, a mantra, until the day I couldn’t take it anymore and asked him never to speak it again.

We watched the boy in the snow as he fought an impossible fight. He was smaller, weaker, less skilled. He was just a boy.

A left hook clipped my jaw and I tripped backwards, ducking beneath another blow aimed at my nose.

But we all watched together as he wore down the older, bigger man. Wore him down with nothing but heartbreaking determination. He fought on for hours without a weapon, hours and hours, and then at long last he killed the King of the berserkers, a mighty beast of a man, cutting out his heart for all to see.

I took a jab to my chest, managed to block the second.

An impossible victory. And Thelle, the berserker King, happened to be Thorne’s father.

An impossible victory. But that wasn’t me. I didn’t have that kind of strength.

Goran hit me in the temple and I went down. Dropped to my knees, swayed there. He stood over me, enjoying the rabid cheers of his men.

So this was it. This was how I died. A relief, not to have to endure too long without her.

I thought of Ava and Ambrose, of Sadie and Ella. I heard their laughter, wished for them love and joy. I thought of Howl, who had been my best and only friend for so many years. Of Jonah and Penn and Isadora, thankful to have met them, thankful to have been touched by their friendship.

I thought of Ma. My beautiful, gentle, sweet mother. In my heart I bid her farewell. A last regret – that I didn’t know if she would survive losing us both.

But I could scent the violence coming off Goran in hot waves, and knew it was mere moments before he finished me.

And then it happened.

Time slowed. Paused around me. A hallucination, probably. Because there he was again. My da. Only a few paces away, watching me on my knees as I waited to be killed.

But there was no disgust in him this time. No cruelty. Instead I saw with my own eyes all the things people had feared and loved him for. I saw strength and courage and loyalty, and even – here at the end – a measure of sweetness.

‘Have courage, my boy,’ he said softly. His voice was rough like it had been shredded once. It was warmth. ‘You are far stronger than you think.’

I’m not. It’s over.

‘Do you wish to know the answer to it all?’ he asked me.

I nodded. Possibly I nodded. Wasn’t very aware of my body anymore.

Thorne, my father, moved closer and looked into my eyes. He smiled the smile of a wolf and I realised how I loved him. ‘Stop fighting him,’ Da said. ‘He’s you.’

And then he was gone, and I was awake, at long, long last.

A howl rent the air. My beast’s howl burst from my mouth. The long, dangerous sound of the hunt. You don’t deny it. You give in to it.

Goran and his men grew still. I saw a new awareness in his eyes. I saw excitement. These were men who loved to fight. And I was going to give him one worthy of remembering.

I rose to my feet.

My beast was loose. There was no cage. He filled every inch of me; he was me. And we were
strong
.

I flew at Goran, smashing him in the face once, twice. My iron fists went into his guts, his abdomen, his ribs and chest. I felt bones crack beneath my hands. Blood splattered from his nose and mouth as I hit him there again, then slammed him to the ground. My blows were too heavy – they’d debilitated him and he couldn’t get back up.

Power flowed through my muscles. It had taken no time at all.

I had him down, and I had my hands at his neck, and if I wanted to I could tear his head free. I did want to. But it wasn’t like the blood fever had been every other day of my life. This was strength without the mindlessness. This was me, every part of me, the violent and the gentle. I was in complete control.

I looked into Goran’s eyes and saw a deep well of respect and contentment. He had been beaten by the stronger man, and there was a balance to that. A
rightness
.

My hands dropped and I stood.

‘To the death,’ he managed.

I shook my head. ‘I do not kill kin of mine. I would have you live to fight beside me, brother.’

There was a long silence. This wasn’t how berserker law went.

But I was their King now, and they knew it.

Goran rose slowly, trembling with the pain of his injuries. ‘It would be my honour,’ he said, and with a last look into my eyes he sank to his knees and bowed low before me.

Every single berserker under the mountain did the same.

I looked around at my men, and then I lifted my fist high into the air and gave a roar of triumph. They roared with me, fists pounding on their chests, battle cries let loose to fill the entire cavern with an almighty burst of sound.

My beast and I grew larger than this whole mountain. And we wanted vengeance.

Later, when the battle-haze had faded somewhat, I was able to see that it was a victory, and a turning point. It was an ending to one life, the beginning of another.

But it was hollow, because without Finn life meant an absence of laughter. It meant grey and bleak and cold. It meant loneliness in its purest, most unbearable form.

Fitting, I supposed, for the King of the Ice.