Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Not that Maureen had been around then. She’d come to the Druids right after Saoirse’s death. The entire community had been in mourning for the loss of their queen.
Maureen’s parents had been on a mission for the few years before that, and they wanted to go back out into the field. So they had deposited her in New York City without a backward glance. She’d grown in the ranks, grown in her magic, grown to be at Lorcan’s side.
But it was that first winter after Saoirse’s death that she had met Graves.
A group of her young lot had decided that this Fae Killer must be their own personal bogeyman: Graves.
Wisps could kill warlocks. That uneasy truce was brittle in the wake of Saoirse’s death. It was so obvious to them then that it was Graves.
They didn’t ask for permission. They just began to hunt him. And he was not nor had he ever been an easy man to hunt.
Still, she had done it. Tracked him to the outskirts of town, to a cloud of smoky warehouses, pumping out black into the dingy winter sky. She waited hours for him to exit whatever his business was in those warehouses. But he never returned. She waited longer, wanting to prove herself.
Then she’d felt the knife at her throat.
“Hello, little Druid,” Graves had said into her ear.
She’d frozen like a rabbit caught in a snare. “Warlock.”
“Did he send you to follow me?”
“Who?” she squeaked.
“You know who.”
“No,” she said, lifting her chin and inching away from the knife blade that was digging into her skin. A trail of blood ran down her neck and pooled in the hollow of her throat. “It was…it was just me.”
“Just you? And why would just you decide to tail me?”
“I was going to kill you.”
Graves laughed then. A deep, throaty thing that made her feel so small standing there with her back to his chest. Not at all like the hunter she had been while stalking him.
“Well, at least I know that you’re not lying. Lorcan would never send you to kill me.”
“He wants you dead.”
“Assuredly,” Graves said, removing the knife and wiping it clean. “But not by your hand.”
Maureen scrambled away from him. “You’re not going to…kill me?”
Graves looked her up and down, a horribly detached look in his disturbingly colorless eyes. So light gray they may as well have been translucent in that moment. “Not today, little Druid.”
“You’ll never get another chance,” she said, going for bravado. All that Druid training. The years of working on her fighting and stealth and magic and he had snuck up on her as if it was easy. She needed bravado to stand before him without quaking in her boots.
“We’ll see,” he said. Then he flicked his knife in the opposite direction. “Now head home to your fairy tale summerlands and leave me to walk the shadows.”
She took a hesitant step back and then another, and before she knew it, she was running. She was nearly out of his line of sight when she heard the ting of a knife throw. The blade flew past her long, dark hair, sheared off a lock, and embedded in the wood of the train station entrance.
She whipped around in shock. Had he meant to kill her?
But he just took a few strides forward and picked up the hair that had fallen as she pressed herself closer to the train station. He held it up for her to see.
“For my promise.”
She swallowed. Graves was going to kill her. He had taken her hair to keep his promise to end her life. She shuddered with fear and dashed onto the approaching train.
As she’d gotten older, she’d realized that he’d simply been taunting her. Forcing her to abandon her latest fascination with him. It had worked. She was no longer interested in him. Nor did she think that he would one day kill her. Mostly.
Unfortunately for him, she had never gotten over her desire to thwart him. She had done her rounds to surveil Graves’s house. She had trained and trained and trained. She had taken Declan’s place as Lorcan’s second-in-command. And maybe she couldn’t kill him, but she would be a tool to help Lorcan do it.
Maureen pulled into Druid headquarters and parked the van. She wrapped a sheet around the stone, hauling it out of the back. The streets were quiet. Their infiltration back into the ranks must have been seamless. The dissension against Niamh’s rule had been loud over the last several months. Loud enough that she was surprised Niamh herself hadn’t heard it. Or maybe she had and she hadn’t known how to squash it.
Either way, it led to this moment.
Lorcan back on the throne.
Maureen entered the Oak Throne room. The moss was soft under her boots and the room a beautiful spring day in the heart of Samhain. Lorcan faced the throne like a deposed hero come to reclaim his title, the Sword of Truth at his hip as his hand ran along the grain of the illustrious symbol of their people.