Page 68 of Renegade Kingdom
The magic.
It should have been the first weapon I used. Months of training, of learning to call the Winter Court’s power, of feeling the ice respond to my will. And in the heat of the moment, I’d fallen back on steel like the soldier I used to be instead of the king I was supposed to become. Old habits. Old instincts. But I wasn’t just a soldier anymore.
Iwasa king. And kings had power.
So I reached for the cold.
It came to the surface the moment I turned my mind to it. An icy rush that flooded through my veins, turning my blood to frost, coating my skin in a thin layer of crystalline white. The sensation was overwhelming, intoxicating, like plunging into a frozen lake and discovering you could breathe underwater. My breath fogged in the air, thick and white, and I watched as the temperature around me plummeted so fast that the moisture in the air began to freeze into tiny crystals that hung suspended around me like a halo of ice.
The magic felt different than it had before. Stronger. More immediate. More mine. As if something had unlocked inside me during our journey through the forest, some barrier that had been holding the power back had finally crumbled. The Winter Court’s magic didn’t feel like a borrowed gift anymore. It felt like a birthright.
The ice spread down my arm, coating my sword blade in a sheath of frozen fury. The steel groaned at the cold, crystalline patterns spreading across its surface, but it held. And where the tip of the blade touched the ground, frost spread outward in a perfect circle, turning the fallen leaves to crackling sculptures of ice.
Without even thinking, I reached out and brushed my fingers against the nearest tree.
The ice followed my touch. It raced up the trunk, spreading from my fingertips like living frost, coating bark and branch and leaf in seconds. The wood groaned and cracked as the cold penetrated deep into its core, the sap freezing solid, the entire structure becoming brittle and crystalline. The tree went silent as the cold claimed it entirely.
And from above, I heard screams.
Two more anastids dropped from the branches, but they weren’t attacking. They were falling. Their bodies coated in ice, their limbs frozen mid-movement, their mouths open in silent shrieks of surprise and terror. They hit the ground and shattered like glass sculptures thrown from a great height, spraying fragments of frozen flesh across the forest floor in a gruesome explosion of ice and black blood.
“No!” The crawling anastid in front of me screamed, her voice ragged with pain and sudden, all-consuming terror. She was trying to drag herself away from me now, her remaining legs scrabbling desperately against the frozen ground, leaving a trail of black blood behind her. “No, this isn’t possible! Only the master can command the cold! Only he…”
I stalked forward.
The rustling in the trees had stopped. The chittering, the clicking of legs, the whispered threats. All of it had gone silent. I could feel them out there, dozens of anastids hidden in the fog,watching me with their too-many eyes. Waiting to see what I would do. Waiting to see if they should flee or fight.
As my feet touched the ground, frost spread. It flowed out from each step, a carpet of ice that crept toward the trees and began to climb their trunks. Slowly at first, then faster, until the nearest trees were encased in frozen armor and the ones beyond them were starting to whiten at their bases. The cold radiated outward in waves, turning the fog to ice crystals, turning the air itself into something sharp and deadly.
The anastid on the ground was looking around in panic now. Her sister-creatures in the trees weren’t coming to help her. They were fleeing. I could hear the frantic clicking of their legs as they retreated deeper into the forest, desperate to escape the cold that was spreading through their territory like a plague. The brave hunters who had planned to toy with us, to taste our fear, were running like frightened prey.
Good.
“Please,” she gasped, and the word was so unexpected that I almost laughed. Begging. The creature that had promised to taste my fear was begging. “Please, stop. Spare us. We were only following orders. We didn’t know what you were. We didn’t know you had the cold. We can serve you instead, we can be your hunters, we can…”
“You came here to hunt my pack,” I said, and my voice was different. Colder. Harder. The wolf and the ice and the darkness inside me all twisted together into something that didn’t feel entirely human anymore. Something ancient. Something that had been sleeping in my blood since the moment that first glimmer of winter magic had lit inside me, waiting for this moment to wake up. “You came here to taste our fear, to drink our blood, to kill the people I love.”
The air grew colder still. The fog was turning to snow now, tiny flakes drifting down to coat the ground in a thin layer ofwhite. Each snowflake that touched my skin seemed to turn a part of me colder and more unfeeling. It sank into that dark place inside of me, the place I’d always kept hidden, the part of my nature that scared even me. The part that didn’t care about mercy or justice or anything except the pure, primal satisfaction of destroying my enemies.
But now it wanted out to play. And standing here, surrounded by the frozen corpses of creatures that had tried to kill my pack, I couldn’t think of any reason not to let it.
I half-shifted.
It wasn’t a full transformation. I didn’t become the wolf entirely. But my fingers lengthened into claws, sharp and curved and tipped with ice. My teeth sharpened in my mouth, fangs descending until I could feel them pressing against my lower lip. The wolf surged forward, merging with my human form until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
We were one creature now. Wolf and man and winter king in waiting, united by rage and power and the primal joy of the hunt.
I smiled, and I felt the ice crack at the corners of my mouth. The expression felt wrong on my face. Too wide. Too hungry. Too much like the wolf.
“What was it you said about the taste of fear in blood?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Alyssa
The fog descended so quickly that I didn’t even have time to scream.
One moment I was walking through the forest with my mates around me,, the fae hounds circling in the shadows beyond our sight. The next moment, the world turned white. A wall of mist rolled over us like a living thing, thick and cold and utterly impenetrable. It swallowed the light, swallowed the sound, swallowed everything until I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face.
