Wanted dead or alive by three warring Goddesses, Oriana must journey into the heart of the Thornwood to seek the aid of a legendary phoenix and right the wrongs of her bloody past.
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Hunter stepped from blinding daylight into suffocating night.
For a moment he thought he'd gotten himself killed; the water of the Moon Gate was black as ink, deeper than he was tall, and no matter how far he struck out his limbs, all he met was cold, slithering nothing.
Save for a splinter of light. Silver as the slice of moon struggling to shine through a faint gap in the clouds overhead. Hunter's soul flared in response, rendering the slimy rocks and frilled plants of the waterhole in eerie shades of grey. He propelled himself towards the embankment, fingers slipping and sending up salty clouds of algae. The last of the air in his lungs slipped past his lips, bursting against a ceiling too high for hope.
Deflated, his lungs refused to buoy him up. Dense muscle dragged him down. Hunter started to panic, kicking and clawing, chest burning, then palpitating. After all he'd been through, all he'd learned, to die like this...
Rubbery strands of lake weed wrapped around his wrists, pulling tight like manacles. He screamed, accidentally sucking in a lungful of water, only to realise they were tugging him up instead of down. In a matter of seconds he was breaching the surface and shooting through the air, landing heavily on the squelchy bank. His hands slapped the mud and it sprayed between his fingers, almost blinding him as he vomited foul water onto a pair of curl-toed slippers.
"Charming," came an imperious, mincing voice.
Hunter coughed, back arching with every spasm as he crawled up onto his knees. To his surprise, it wasn't a woman in her prime confidently snapping at him, but a woman well past it. The crone that glared down at him had a face like a knot of wood in an ancient tree, gnarled and misshapen, with a neck that sagged like the skin of a newborn pup. She huddled in a woollen cloak that did little to hide the stoop in her spine, but her eyes were sharp as a freshly minted blade, the same cold, eerie blue that tinged the parting clouds overhead.
She saw him looking and her mouth puckered. A smirk, he realised abruptly.
"You're lucky I opened the way for you," she said, cocking her head like a bird of prey. Her nose was certainly close enough to a beak. "Or you would have been trapped under the surface and drowned."
Hunter shuddered at the thought of dying in that in-between place, which he almost had. "I suppose I owe you my life," he said grudgingly, climbing gingerly to his feet.
"You think?"
Hunter almost flinched; her voice cracked like a whip.
Who are you to bully me? he thought abruptly, gathering his nerves. "Do you know who I am?"
I'm practically a prince. My father is Alpha of the Blood Moon Pack and the Night Goddess's Chosen Consort. My brother will rule the Kingdom of Eternal Night they are building together even now.
