Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor Read Free Book Online

hero of her people. The chimaera would follow him anywhere. “That’s a problem,” she told Akiva.
    “You know it as well as I do. Joram, too,” said Akiva.
    If possible, the emperor was even more bloody-minded than Thiago was. He also happened to be Akiva’s father. “Do you… do you think you can do it?” asked Madrigal.
    “Kill him? What am I for but killing?” His tone was bitter. “I am the monster he created.”
    “You’re not a monster,” she said, drawing him to her, stroking his brow, which was always hot as fever, and kissing the ink lines on his knuckles as if she could forgive him the lives they represented. They let talk of killing fall away and wished in silence that they could have the world they wanted without having to kill for it.
    Or, as it turned out instead,
die
for it.
    Outside, Thiago decided that he had heard enough, and he set fire to the temple.
    Even before they smelled smoke or saw the lick of fire, Madrigal and Akiva were jolted by the screams of the evangelines. They’d never even known that the creatures
could
scream. They leapt apart, spun instinctively for weapons that weren’t there. They’d left them on the moss outside, along with their shed clothes.
    “So careless” was the first thing Thiago said when they were drawn up short, rushing from the burning temple to find a company of soldiers waiting. The White Wolf, front and center, had Madrigal’s crescent-moon knives, one in each hand. He let them swing back and forth, hooked from his fingertips. Behind him, one of his wolf retinue held Akiva’s swords. He chinged the blades together in a taunt.
    One beat followed the sound, a single beat of stillness, and then chaos leapt in.
    Akiva raised his arms, summoning magic. What he intended to do, Madrigal never knew, because Thiago was ready for him, and four revenant soldiers had already thrown up their palms, hamsas outfaced to the angel. A fury of sickness hit him. He staggered, dropped to his knees, and they were on him with the butts of their swords, their heavy gloved fists and booted feet, and one whipping reptilian tail wrapped in chains.
    Madrigal tried to run to him but was caught by Thiago’s fist slamming into her belly so hard it lifted her off her feet. For a weightless, airless moment she didn’t know up from down, and then she hit the ground. Bones jarred. Blood rose up her throat, filled her mouth and nose.
    Choking, gasping, sick. Pain. Pain and blood. She coughed for breath. Naked, she curled around the pain. Overhead:smoke, trees catching fire, and then Thiago. He stared down at her, his lip curled in a snarl.
    “Foul thing,” he growled in a tone of deepest revulsion. “Traitor.” And then, the vilest thing of all:
“Angel-lover.”
    She saw murder in his eyes and thought she would die right there on the moss. In some deep place, Thiago was fractured. He was sometimes called the Berserker for his savage killing sprees in battle; his trademark was tearing out throats with his teeth. It was a very dangerous thing to make him angry, and Madrigal flinched from a blow that never came.
    Thiago turned away.
    Maybe he wanted her to have to watch. And maybe it was just base instinct—an alpha urge to destroy a challenger. To destroy Akiva.
    There was so much blood.
    The memory was lurid, mixed with choking smoke and the shrieks of serpent-birds roasting alive, and though it wasn’t Karou’s proper memory but Madrigal’s, it was still her own, arising from her deeper self. It was all her, and she remembered everything: Akiva on the ground, his blood running into the sacred stream, and Thiago, wild-eyed but eerily composed and utterly silent, laying into the angel’s body with blow after blow, his own face, his white hair shining with fine bloodspray.
    He would have killed Akiva then, but one of his more levelheaded followers stepped in and pulled him off, and so it hadn’t ended there. Madrigal had heard the awful, echoing screams of her lover for