Chapter 1

  It’s an easy job, he said.

  You’ll be back before lunch, he said.

  Zai breathed in the last specks of life from the dying beast as it lay twitching at his feet. He wiped his daggers on its downy soft feathers and returned them to their sheaths.

  Shit.

  He hadn’t expected a giant griffin to attack him when he approached the people he was supposed to escort to Warden’s Keep. The damn thing had come out of nowhere. He regretted killing it—he’d always wanted a griffin. But it had been him or it.

  Liar, Lucian’s voice rang in his head.

  Maybe.

  Maybe he would’ve survived the beast tearing him to bits, but he’d rather not find out.

  Animals had always hated him. His curse reeked of something unnatural, marking him as a threat to anything with half-decent instincts. Normally, they fled. But corner a creature guarding its young—or its charges—and it’d fight like hell.

  This griffin hadn’t been hunting. It had been protecting them.

  Zai forced himself to look at the three people: a bald dwarf with a pair of goggles strapped to his forehead, a leather apron stained with various substances, and a huge pack hanging from his back, tools, rolled paper, and Deus knows what sprouting from the top like some bizarre plant. Next to him stood what Zai guessed were two elves, a male and a female.

  They might be humans for all he knew, wrapped in cloaks hiding all but their booted legs. But humans didn’t ride griffins.

  They stood, open-mouthed, staring at him in horror as his wounds, inflicted by the dead griffin, began to heal.

  Zai gritted his teeth as tendons slithered like worms beneath his skin, stitching muscle to bone with wet, sucking pops. He had to admit, the sound was disgusting.

  “Um...” Zai glanced up at the mountain that was home to the celestials, then at the forest of ancient trees encircling the mountain’s base, gnarled roots knuckling the earth like buried giants. “Nice forest?”

  The female screamed.

  Zai winced at the sound, then cursed as her eyes glowed a bright gold in the darkness of her hood. She was probably the rider of the dead griffin.

  Shit.

  Zai unconsciously reached for the short sword strapped to his back. The male grabbed at her as she charged him, but he only managed to rip her cloak off.

  Zai’s hand froze, his sword half out, as her four white-feathered wings were revealed.

  A Celestial.

  And royalty.

  Not the griffin’s rider, then.

  That didn’t stop her from trying to kill him, though. The Celestial thrust her hands at Zai as he wrapped his own cloak around himself and turned his back to her, head down. Lightning, crackling with the ozone stink of a storm, — raising every hair on his body — struck him, not with the force of an experienced magic user but enough to make him a smoking, blackened corpse — if not for the cloak made from the hide of some demon he’d killed. He couldn’t remember which one.

  “Thalia!” the male warned. “Stop!”

  “He killed Isis!” she snapped, gathering herself for another strike.

  Zai wasn’t about to stand here and let this Thalia use him for target practice. He whipped a vial from one of the pouches in his belt and threw it at her. It shattered against a barrier she threw up — well, more of an instinctive raise of her hand with her magic responding to it. Grey vapour hissed from the spilled contents — a mist, not much, but enough to obscure Thalia from his view, and him from hers. He moved, using the speed his curse gave him, snaked around the shield, grabbed the Celestial’s neck from behind, and slammed her face-first into the barrier. The spell — as well as Thalia’s nose — shattered.

  “Never hit a woman, son. I’d whip the skin off your arse if you ever do,” something his father had once told him. Funny, most days he had trouble remembering what his father looked like, what his voice sounded like. But whenever he had to hit a woman, those words came rushing back.

  Good thing he wasn’t around to see this. His well-behaved son attacking not just any female, but a Celestial.

  Sorry, Da.

  It was this or let her fry him into a crisp.

  He did not want to be fried.

  He let her drop, dazed, and turned just in time to be punched in the gut. A gust of wind blew him back into a tree. He fell to his knees, hands wrapped around his stomach.

  Since he had been forced to be an errand boy for the Wardens, Zai had been punched by all kinds of men — big men, small men, and the occasional woman or two — but none had hurt like this. A punch from a golem would have had a similar effect. He managed to lift his head and saw the male standing between Thalia and him, a miniature tornado whipping around him. His hood was down, his shoulder-length, iron-grey hair flapping with the wind, allowing Zai to see his pointed ears.

  “Touch my daughter again,” he said, his voice quiet but still audible despite the wind’s howl, “and I’ll kill you.”

  Zai coughed and staggered to his feet. Once, a few decades ago, he might have been intimidated, but he had killed things more dangerous than elves. At least, he thought they were — elves did not go around wiping out entire villages, at least.

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  “As long as she isn’t trying to kill me,” he said, his voice surprisingly steady, “I won’t be touching anybody.”

  “What’s going on, Aric?” the dwarf asked nervously, twisting a wire in his hands. “I thought he was here to help.”

  Aric, prince of the elves and husband to the newly deceased queen of the Celestials, Selene.

  Interesting.

  “I am,” Zai said, then threw a knife at the dwarf. It stopped, hovering in the air above the dwarf, then a Celestial with black wings materialized with the knife stuck in their face. They staggered back and fell. Zai hoped he hadn’t just killed an ally.

  “We have to go,” Aric muttered, his pale face going paler than the normal shade of elf.

  His companions needed no further encouragement. Prince Aric pulled his daughter to her feet and ran into the forest, the dwarf hot on their heels. Zai glanced back at the mountain. According to legend, the celestials had raised it themselves to build their home when they first descended upon the First Realm.

  “I guess no sightseeing then.” he sighed and followed them into the forest.

  Zai soon lost sight of the sun, but somehow, there was enough light to navigate the forest.

  Magic.

  He soon caught up with them. The dwarf was surprisingly fast. With his height and burden, Zai thought he’d be a problem, but he was right in front of the others.

  “Follow me,” Zai ordered as he ran past them. “Rebhol!” he called.

  The imp appeared on his head. His balance faltered at the sudden weight, and he quickly righted himself.

  “Nice of you to drop in,” he snapped.

  “Is bird gone?” asked the imp, hugging Zai’s head with his arms and legs, the one eye in the middle of his head darting around, wide with fear.

  Zai brushed away the imp’s tail — the end of it a blade shaped like half of a spearhead — from his neck. The last thing he needed was a slashed throat.

  “Yes, I killed it,” he said. Then the imp looked behind him, yelped, and lunged for a low-hanging branch as Zai ran past it. Rebhol feared anything with wings larger than him.

  “She’s on our side!” Zai yelled at the imp, who was jumping from tree to tree, keeping pace with the group.

  “What about him?”

  Zai stopped, and the others did too. Behind them, a winged figure was half-running, half-flying toward them.

  “Why are we stopping?” the dwarf nearly screeched as he stopped a few paces ahead of them.

  “I can’t let them know where the portal is,” Zai muttered to himself.

  “Portal?” the dwarf’s voice rose a pitch higher as he rummaged through his apron. More figures were dropping from the canopy of trees in front of them and behind them. They spread out, trying to pen them in. Celestials, eight of them, and very different from Thalia, with only a pair of wings but much larger and black as Thalia’s were white. Zai wondered how they got the strength to carry such mass, let alone fly, but then again, celestials were not humans. They wore sleek, black armor — light enough for speed.

  But probably hardened enough to deflect a blade.

  A normal one, at least.

  A few carried blades, but Zai was more concerned about the unarmed ones — three of them, inky darkness rising from their heads and shoulders like they were on fire.

  Magic users.

  Fighting a magic user exposed you to a million creative ways to get killed. All Celestials could use magic, so Zai wasn’t ruling out the other five.

  “The Tainted Ones,” Thalia breathed nervously, licking the blood that trailed from her no-longer-broken nose to her lips.

  Zai frowned. That was some fast healing, even for a Celestial. Almost as fast as his healing.

  The Tainted Ones — people captured and twisted into forces of darkness by the demon king, Ravan , during his attempt to conquer the First Realm. They were also fools who used dark magic and were corrupted by it. Zai had never seen Tainted — or normal Celestials, in fact — before today.

  The dwarf finally pulled out a metal ball the size of an apple with a string hanging from it. The elf and his daughter scrambled away from him like he’d just pulled out a contagious disease.

  “Brogan, put that thing away!” Aric hissed.

  “We might need it.”

  “I’d like to get out of this with all my limbs intact,” Aric said, trying to get away from the dwarf and, at the same time, keep his distance from the terrifying celestials, which was difficult as they started to close in on them.

  If he could get these three — who probably had never seen a real fight, let alone been in one — to Warden’s Keep with just a limb missing, he would be very grateful to Deus. He wanted to tell the dwarf to do whatever he wanted with the thing, but Brogan had that mad gleam in his eyes dwarves get right when they were about to test a new invention that probably wasn’t safe.

  “Don’t worry, it’s only a small amount. The explosion won’t be as large as the one at the Forge,” Brogan assured them.

  Zai didn’t like the sound of that. He had survived many wounds that would kill a normal person — a sword to the heart, an arrow in his head, and, just a few moments ago, his insides ripped out by sharp talons. But he had never been blown to pieces before, and he wasn’t in the mood to find out if he could come back from that.

  “Come quietly, half-breed,” the evilest-looking of the lot spoke, “and I’ll make it quick.” It was obvious that he was speaking to Thalia.

  “Which one of those bitches sent you?” Aric asked in his flat voice.

  Their leader continued like he hadn’t spoken. “We might even let the others go.”

  One life for three. That didn’t sound so bad.

  Might, Lucian warned.

  Zai ignored him but knew he was right. Even if this horror of a celestial had said he would let them go, he couldn’t just let them take Thalia — not that she was showing any sign of sacrificing herself for the others.

  “I’ll say this once,” Zai spoke as he drew his short sword and a dagger. “Leave or die.”

  “Little worm,” the leader sneered, spreading his black wings. “We are worshipped as gods. Do you think...”

  Rebhol dropped on his head and stabbed him through the neck with the sharp end of his tail.

  Everyone stared.

  The imp pulled his tail out, blood gushing from the Celestial’s throat like wine from a ripped wineskin.

  “I... kill... bird!!” Rebhol screeched with glee.

  Then everything went to shit.

  Balls of black fire, golden lightning, and gusts of wind flew about, clearly flung without any aiming done. A Tainted one, a magic user, fell with a hole in his chest courtesy of Thalia's lightning. Aric’s winds deflected black fire into the trees—splintering bark into shrapnel. Brogan’s metal ball arced through the chaos, its fuse hissing like a dying snake. A warrior caught it, dumbstruck, and lobbed it back. Zai snatched it from the air, the string sputtering in his grip.

  There was a loud boom that deafened him, then a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. His arm was gone, flesh peeled back from his skull in a grotesque half-grin.

  The stench hit first—vinegar and rotting eggs—as the acids and poisons from the shattered vials in the belt pouches across his chest gnawed at his skin, bubbling flesh into grotesque blisters.

  Maybe it was the explosion, or his nightmarish appearance, but the Tainted hesitated. Then the pain caught up with him, arriving in waves, each crest a white-hot brand searing along his nerves, until even his teeth ached with it.

  Zai threw his ruined head back and screamed.

  And the thing inside screamed with him.