Thorne (Random Romance) (7 page)

Jonah groaned in horror at the sight of the fingers on the floor. Penn started to sing, a warbling melody of sound. But it was at Thorne that I looked, because at the sight of the blood, his eyes had turned as red as the girl’s. Which was not possible.

My heart ratcheted out of control, pounding with painful speed. Pirenti eyes didn’t change colour. They couldn’t. Not unless …

The sound was seeping out of the world. All I could see and hear was the prince as he faded from his own face and started breathing with a kind of animal hunger. A low growl erupted in the back of his throat; a sense of otherness in the way he moved towards the writhing men.

The back of my neck prickled; Thorne was a berserker. And he was going to destroy the lot of us.

‘It’s the blood fever,’ I heard the ice girl breathe. ‘I can stop him.’

I glanced at her; it was obvious how she meant to stop him, standing there with her knives already dripping blood.

A mighty fist hammered into the fisherman, knocking him flying. Thorne then lifted the man who’d had half his ear cut off. With one hand around his neck, the man looked like a rag doll in the giant’s grip.

‘Your Majesty!’ Jonah shouted, but I doubted Thorne could hear.

He shook his toy, then flung him away. I watched as the huge man barrelled into several other patrons; the tavern was in a flurry of terror now. They were all scrambling to get out, but it was so crowded that people were getting trampled.

Thorne moved towards them.

And then he stopped. I watched,
knowing
. I watched him lift his face and take a deep breath, scenting the air.

I watched him turn and fix his red eyes on me.

He could smell the magic my skin was drenched in. He was berserker: of course he could smell it. Thorne moved towards me; a sick, broken part of me was excited. My trembling hands reached for his chest; it was burning hot and like a brand against my skin.

‘Finn!’ I heard Jonah yell.

I looked only at Thorne, up into his bloody eyes. He returned the gaze, but he didn’t recognise me.

‘Thorne,’ I said softly, almost a whisper. ‘Come back.’

He blinked and I got exactly what I’d wanted – his bare hand reaching out to take my neck. It felt, at first, like a lover’s caress. Then it tightened.

And within that skin to skin, I felt it. The weight of his heart. As was my gift, my curse. One I could not control, no matter how many warders forbade me from using it. Thorne bore the heaviest heart I’d ever encountered, a soul too much a burden for any man or woman to carry. There was an entire world crashing down on him, bending him, bending him so badly I didn’t
know how he had not yet snapped. I felt a howling echo in my ears; against my face there was snow falling and my breath was so cold I could see it. I was dizzy with the understanding of him, with the
intimacy
.

And I didn’t care, in that moment, if he squeezed the life out of me. I could feel chaos and destruction fry the air, and behind my eyes there were whispered screams; I wanted them gone from my head.

My air was cut off. But I held his eyes, and I didn’t blink.

That was when we heard it, both of us at the same time.

A soft, high voice, counting quickly. It was Penn, panicked and desperate. He counted to block out the fear. Counted every time he felt uncomfortable or nervous. And as he counted now, the sound of those numbers reached something inside Thorne and he blinked. Stopped squeezing my neck.

The counting continued and I saw him come back.

Red seeped away and became glorious blue; the violence in his hand grew tender.

‘I’m here,’ he whispered, voice scraping. ‘I’m here.’

Thorne

Shattered bones and torn muscles. Thoughts too fleeting to hold onto. A whirlwind of movement around me, of screams and shouts and the overwhelming scent of blood, but within it all, one thing that was still.

Her. Bright yellow eyes. Red welts around a long, slim neck. She led me through the chaos and up into a darkened room. I felt myself sink onto a bed and seep away.

Finn

I watched Thorne nose-dive onto the bed and pass out completely. My heart was hammering in my chest from the skin to skin. I couldn’t believe what I’d
felt in his heart – it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The kind of creature that was as far from human as I could imagine. Who
was
this man? Obviously the unease Jonah and I had both been feeling since meeting Thorne was because of his berserker blood, which we could have had no way to recognise, never having come into contact with one before.

Age-old enemies, warders and berserkers. It struck me as I watched him sleep that I‘d acquired more excitement than I’d bargained for when bringing the northern giant along. A slow smile curled my lips. Carefully I reached my bare hand out, daring myself to touch his arm. With astonishment, I saw that my fingers trembled ever so slightly as they drew closer –

‘Finn,’ Jonah snapped, and I jerked away.

We had rented two rooms and my brother hauled me into the second, where waited Penn, looking agitated.

‘Jone, I need to –’

‘Hush, Inney.’ He paced and we watched him like school children. ‘This will keep happening,’ he declared, as if it was a decision. ‘We should leave him to find his own path to Sancia.’

My mouth fell open. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Do I sound like I’m joking?’

‘You want us to leave a prince alone in a tavern after he’s been attacked?’

‘I don’t think he needs help protecting himself!’ Jonah snapped. ‘Am I the only one who witnessed that?’

‘I will stay with him,’ a soft voice said from the door. We all turned to see the snow creature with her red, red eyes. Her skin was such a pale shade that it was almost translucent – I could see the faint lines of blue veins from here, like feather-thin cracks in marble. The white hair hung cut straight over her eyes – eyes dusted with lashes of whitest white.

I sensed something in my brother and glanced at him to see that he wore an expression unlike any I’d witnessed on him before. I braced myself, terror striking. This was it then. He was going to bond, and leave me.

We were all expecting it, the three of us. But when she met his eyes for the first time, hers stayed bloody and his were the deep blue of an ocean floor.

A breath left me, one of extreme relief. I wasn’t ready to let Jonah go, nowhere near ready. He was mine.

‘Who are you?’ I asked her.

‘My name is Isadora.’

I crossed to shake her small, delicate hand and within that touch I felt an endless, glass-like sphere of water, so calm it belied reason. I stared at her, lost within the sensation of it, utterly enthralled by her.
No one
was naturally this calm.

She withdrew her hand and I regretted the absence of it immediately. Swallowing, I muttered, ‘Thank you for what you did.’

Isadora tilted her head, eyes searching me and deciding on something, though I knew not what. She turned without a word.

‘Wait. I have no idea who you are.’

‘I’m the reason you’re still alive.’

‘Penn is the reason I’m still alive.’

The girl gave me another one of those searching looks. She reminded me of a doll, her features so pretty and small it seemed as though she’d crack at the first touch. ‘I want only his safety,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘His safety means the safety of two nations.’

‘Do you work for the Emperor?’

‘I work for myself, and for Kaya.’ She disappeared without a sound.

I turned to Jonah and Penn. ‘Guess we’ll deal with the creepy death angel at another juncture. For now, we go nowhere without Thorne.’

My brother met my eyes and his turned yellow for love of me. ‘You’d let him be the death of us. Why?’

I drew a breath. I believed, and always had done, that there was a reason for everything. My fascination for dangerous things had led me to Thorne, and now he was going to lead us to the one thing I wanted most. ‘He’s the one who’s going to help us save Da. I know it.’

Thorne

I dreamt of walking along the beach with Finn, our hands entwined, and then of a man who looked like me turning to her and devouring her with violent, bloody hands and teeth. I woke with the image of her mangled body on the sand, and my father’s footprints leading away from it.

It was still dark and I was in another unfamiliar room. For the second time I found myself alone in a bedchamber with a woman I didn’t know. Not the same woman, not the wild one. It was the white and red one. The knife-wielder. She was perched on a stool, staring blankly at the door.

Feeling my regard, she turned her eyes to me.

‘Who are you?’

‘Isadora.’

‘What are you doing in my room?’

‘Watching.’

I rubbed my eyes, struggling to sit up. My body ached something fierce. ‘For what?’

‘Those who seek to kill you in your sleep.’

It came back to me in a rush – the tavern and the fishermen. Finn’s yellow eyes as I squeezed her neck, and a sweet counting voice reminding me of the boy I tried so hard to be.

‘Why did you help me?’ I asked, but Isadora said nothing. I took a breath to smell her and caught no hint of animosity. Nor did I smell fear, but
there was definitely a certain wariness that intensified as I sat up. Which meant I did not trust her, but for now I did not fear any malicious intent from her. ‘Where are the others?’

She gestured to the room next door.

‘They need a guard more than I.’

Nodding, Isadora cast me a look I couldn’t read. ‘You are a long way from home.’

‘I suppose I am. Though we often forget that Araan hugs this very same ocean.’

‘I speak of your true home.’ Then she added, ‘King of the Ice.’

I frowned, but couldn’t think of how to reply. Felt suddenly disoriented. Isadora rose silently; everything about her was like a wisp of smoke. The softness of her voice, the fluid grace of her movements, the way she was there and then gone.

I sat for a moment, then rose to pour myself a cup of wine to calm my nerves. Something was scratching at me, at all of my edges … I felt swelteringly hot and pulled my shirt off urgently, trying to get air onto my burning skin.

There was a soft knock on the door and I padded over to it. In the darkness of the hallway she looked small and young. But as she stepped past me and into the flickering candlelight, as soon as I saw the expression in her eyes, I knew: Finn of Limontae knew exactly what I was, and that made her very dangerous.

‘I didn’t tell them,’ she murmured. ‘But I could.’ There was something hard under her voice. An edge of granite.

Warders and berserkers. Born to kill each other.

I walked closer and took a deep breath, tasting her smells and allowing them to sink inside me. No intent to harm on her skin, but then again, what
powers had a warder in cloaking her scents? How could I possibly trust what I smelt upon her?

‘How did you know?’

She tilted her head, a slight smile playing at the edge of her lips. ‘Magic.’

‘How –’

‘Does it happen a lot?’

‘What?’

‘The blood fever.’

I licked my dry lips. ‘Who died in the Siren Nights?’

She blinked. ‘What’s that got to do with –’

‘Please, just tell me.’

‘Why would I do that?’ Finn ran her fingers idly over the windowsill. ‘Why don’t you tell me how many people the beast within has harmed.’

‘Did you read my mind?’ I pressed. ‘Is that part of your warder magic?’

Finn rolled her eyes, sighing. ‘No, Thorne. I didn’t read your mind. I can, if you’d like, but you’ll turn into a drooling pile of mush on the floor.’

My eyes narrowed. ‘But some warders can?’

‘Certainly.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s commonly known –’

‘How do you know what happens when you try to read a mind?’ My heart was beating a funny rhythm, because I knew. I knew what the answer had to be.

She turned her eyes to me, and they were black, abruptly. It was unnerving seeing such a gloriously bright gaze disappear to be filled with something that looked like it belonged in the darkest shadows of the earth.

‘His name was Sam. The boy who died during the Siren Nights. I know everything about him, every intimate secret he ever possessed, and I know because I tried to read his mind while he was swinging along that rope, and I killed him.’

A great chasm seemed to open up inside me, but there was nothing in Finn. No expression, no regret. Just that gaze of hers, the gaze that waited for my reaction, and craved it.

‘Will you laugh at the idea of such entertainment?’ I asked softly, unaccountably hurt by her, and angry with myself for being baited by a creature as broken as this one. ‘You do love to laugh.’

‘I do,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps if you laughed more you’d be less likely to cause a mass slaughter every time you lost your temper.’

I felt heat rush to my cheeks. We looked at each other in the candlelight. She was clever, but seemed so sheltered from the reality of the world. Did she really value human life so little that she would encourage its risk for fun? I wondered if she’d seen real death, real violence, if she’d ever truly lost anything – and if she hadn’t yet, I wondered if it would make a difference to her careless nature.

Finn’s eyes dropped to my chest and I became suddenly aware that I stood in only my breeches. ‘I’ve never seen one,’ she murmured, moving closer to peer at my skin. Her voice and scent had changed, dropped to something sweet, and I reeled at the disorienting shift in her mood.

‘One what?’

‘A tattoo.’

She moved right up close and I had to turn my face away from the sight of her. It caused something to hammer against my ribcage. Abruptly, desire clawed at me, and I was shocked by it, by its existence and voracity.

Her finger lifted to trace the shape, and I knew in the moment before our skin touched that I would let her this time, that some sick part of me
didn’t care if it woke the beast within and he destroyed us both. But a hair’s breadth before she connected, Finn changed her mind and dropped the hand. ‘It’s beautiful.’