I’ve never refused a kill. Not for mercy, not for guilt. But the Queen of the Stygian Darkness has given me an impossible task: kill the second-in-command of the Shadow Court, and she will free my sister’s wasted soul from her dungeon. A life for a life. A simple transaction. Except nothing about him is simple. Stone is a warrior carved from rock and shadow, a creature of brutal power who sees too much. Every moment I spend hunting him, the vow in my blood screams for his death while some forgotten part of my soul screams louder for his life. In the darkness, there are no good choices, only survival. A Serpent in the Embers is the heart-wrenching first book in a dark fae romantasy series. If you like fated mates, tragic romance, and morally grey heroines, you’ll love Thea Atkinson’s gutting read. Open the cover and see what destiny has in store.A Serpent in the Embers
Some vows are written in blood. Ours was written in ruin.
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I’ve never refused to kill a man. Not for mercy. Not for guilt or love. Mortal, fae, shifter, troll. Whatever creed or creature I’m hired to kill, I do it without over-thinking because emotion was never good for business.
There have been demi-gods, vampires and more over my long career. An angel once, though that was for pleasure, not payment. I will never regret that kill. It brought me joy instead of barter.
But killing isn’t all I do. Sometimes, it’s simple larceny or surveillance, sometimes magic collection, the same as soldiers from the human mafia do for their bosses. Like them, I don’t quibble over the job I take.
It’s just that murder pays the best.
So three days and six hours into tailing the high fae male whose commission had pulled me from the shadows of the Nocturnes and into the rot of the Iron Kingdom—I found myself crouched in a thicket beside a stone and stucco stable, shivering beneath the hush of twilight and wondering why I hadn’t killed the bastard already.
The grass was slick with dew after a humid afternoon, and it tickled my forearm in ways that felt uncomfortably like fingers whispering over my skin. I had to shift my weight to avoid the long fronds.
I knew without counting that exactly five long fronds of weeds had laid beads of water on my bare arm. An odd, asymmetrical number that itched things in my psyche. I knew how far up my shin my leather breeks had gotten soaked from trampling through puddles and wet fields as I tried to keep out of sight during the trek. The clamminess of the material as it stuck to me in places near drove me mad.
I knew the distance between the stable where my mark sat and the place where I hid. I could notch back an arrow and hit him in the throat neatly with a single strike.
But I didn’t.
Too much was riding on this hit. He was the second in command of the Shadow Court, and Aiofe, Queen of the Stygian Darkness herself had called me forth to complete the job.
The seal of the vow between us swam in my blood with even greater intensity than it had when I’d first tracked him at father’s manse. It pulsed hard enough that I had to grit my teeth against the pressure as I sat in the thickets of brush around the stable.
The chill of the dew made my joints ache, the itching burn of the vow made me ansty. Envy wrinkled my brow at the way he conjured a fire to warm his hands while I hunkered deeper into my hiding place, tired and frustrated.
It had been an exhausting ordeal tailing him, mostly because he accompanied three mortal women. Since I’d not been commissioned to kill them, I wasn’t about to do so for free unless it benefited me in some way.
That foolish decision cost me dearly. In three and a half days, they’d never left him alone, and he rarely slept. And because he didn’t, I couldn’t. I was now feeling the effects of exhaustion and cursing my choice to wait for him to be alone.
His family owned the Velvet Boar Tavern nestled into the hillside beside the stable, I knew that from my research.
Stone shifted from one foot to the other, putting me in mind of the moment I’d first seen him at the manse. There had been females there too, who scattered feed to the chickens and gathered herbs and vegetables wearing their homespun flax shifts or sometimes nothing at all. Some carried wood for the fireplaces. All were human.
The Shadow Court’s possession of the Velvet Boar kept them as indentured prostitutes and servants until they wore out, which wasn’t long. Humans had a limited shelf-life. Even in the depths of the Stygian Darkness, rumors spilled into eager ears.
Many of those indentured didn’t even last a week.
I watched the firelight catch on the sharp angles of Stone’s jaw. Hard and brutal like the rest of his ilk. Like the rest of most fae from the Iron Kingdom, possessed of violent tendencies that took advantage of the human frailty for their own pleasure.
And if those upper realm fae of the Iron Court were violent, so much more so were those in its Shadow Court. Similar to the Nocturnes, I supposed. Not a friendly place for mortal creatures.
Movement from inside cast flickering shadows, reminding me of the women he’d ferried to this stable.
These three women were from that stable of indentured humans, and I found it curious that Stone brought them all the way from the manse, but did not deliver them to the barkeeper inside the tavern. He could have sauntered into the front door and deposited those women to the innkeeper’s care and found a room above the tavern and been done with it all.
Except he didn’t. He settled the women into beds of hay in the loft above the stabled horses before taking sentry below just inside the door. The horses shifted restlessly inside, hooves scuffing against the floorboards.
Occasionally, he let his gaze drift to the Velvet Boar as though he expected someone to relieve him of his burden, but then just as casually turned his eyes to the small fire he’d conjured in a circle of rocks beside the entryway.
I could have killed him then, notched an arrow from my quiver into my side-bow or slid through the shadows to slit his throat with my blade. I didn’t. I stayed right where I was in that cushion of itchy grass and cold dew.
And that worried me. Hesitation was more dangerous in my vocation than an ill-placed strike. Hesitation meant death.
Being above ground for the first time in decades was an overwhelm of sounds and sights and touch and taste that had begun to boil over, itching through my skin and prickling my scalp. I had far too much stimulus and I knew it.
The last time I’d seen the stars and moonlit sky, my sister was dying beneath the canopy of it. On a night fragrant with moon flowers and newly unfurled spring leaves, the tang of her blood and wasted magic coated my palate so thickly that I tasted it even now as I peered through the fronds of grass to the stable where Stone was carrying a bale of hay. He dropped it next to the maw of open door and settled onto it with feet outstretched.
Six feet of muscle in boiled leather. Blunt-fingered, square hands hardened by what I told myself was hours of sword play.
I ran my fingers along the blade on my thigh, just as he arched backward, stretching his arms out as if presenting himself to me like a fowl for carving. The motion exposed the vulnerable line of his throat, and my muscles tightened reflexively, the same way they always did when a target revealed a weakness.
But something in my chest hitched and for a moment, I gloried in the raw sense of power that movement revealed.
His broad shoulders were muscled with sinew. When he straightened, his entire body went rigid. The horse snorted. He paused for a long moment before he ran his hand over his hair, black in the deepest shades, cropped short in a bristling brush that most high fae would mock. Lazy decadence allowed them keep their hair long and natural, even lashed into ribbons pretty enough to rival the females they wooed.
Not Stone. His close-cropped style marked him as a male of action and violence, a warrior who couldn’t risk worrying about lush curls falling into his eyes during a heated battle. No prissy plaits for this massive creature, either.
I didn’t admire much, but I admired that about him. He wasn’t a follower. As an underworld shifter who made her living killing and stealing, I could appreciate another who walked their own walk even when the path took them to the shoal of roads best left deserted.
He’d smiled five times in three days. Four polite. One sharp enough to show the points of his teeth. That one had looked more like a grimace as he’d paid a toll to a farmer for a bit of hard cheese he’d broken into three pieces and given to the women.
Cataloging each expression whether it was a good-natured smile or a grin of fatigue mattered. The appearance of either meant he would be distracted enough for me to strike with the least risk. I needed to know what each of them looked like.
All those things told me a lot about the mark I tailed. At least that’s what I told myself as I watched him.
Despite myself, I wondered what the calloused pads of his fingers would feel like if they should brush against my hand in battle. Would I cringe? Flinch? Feel a blessed bit of nothing?
That would be the best, I decided. My skin always felt weird and electric when someone touched me. As though it could sense the vibrations of their thoughts when they first met me.
And I did not want to know what anyone thought of me. I’d heard enough in my lifetime to know exactly what those would sound like.
So I eyeballed him as he pulled a grey-ware pot from his pack and hung it from a triangle of fire irons in the center of the slow burning fire carved into a pit of dirt at the stable’s entrance. He tossed a few chunks of dried meat in with some shriveled root vegetables from his pack.
I caught a whiff of the meat on the stolid air and thanked the gods my stomach didn’t growl in response.
Reaching for the bow beside me, I watched without blinking. If he didn’t move, I could easily take him out, steal his stew and be gone before the women knew he was dead.
The feel of the yew wood, smooth in my grip after all these centuries, was a comfort. I rolled onto my side. Slow movements. Painstakingly, achingly deliberate. Brushing aside the foliage to notch the arrow point into enough space that I could aim slightly upward, keeping the bow out of range of the earth so it didn’t vibrate as I released and queer the release.
I had perfect view. I’d been quiet enough that he hadn’t even looked into the darkness to where I lay.
From this angle, I had the cleanest shot—straight through the throat, severing the artery and windpipe in one breath. No warning. No chance for him to call fire or steel. A perfect kill.
My fingers should have tingled with anticipation. Instead they trembled, a microscopic shift only I would notice. A hitch of some sort that rippled through me. Exhaustion, I told myself, though the rationalization scraped at my psyche.
I blew out a long breath, calming my nerves, then inhaled a second draft of air twice the length. Closed my eyes. Opened them again.
Then I caged that breath as I pulled back, letting the oxygen dance with the adrenaline. When I eased the air out again, it was in a soft sigh as I prepared to let the arrow fly.
The shot was perfectly aligned. My fingers thrummed, ready, against the bow string.
Stone’s head lifted, just slightly — as if he sensed the tension in the air.
And even before I’d let go, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake.