Madness of the Horde by Zoey Draven

Chapter Forty-Four

It had been nearly two days since Vienne left my horde and I was no closer to finding her.

The constant panic and worry made me want to bellow with rage. I felt like a feral beast, pacing in its cage, as I pushed Nillima harder, guiding her through the ancient groves that I had been searching endlessly since last night.

Nillima was reaching her breaking point. I knew that. I’d pushed her hard.

“Please,” I begged her, my rough voice filling the glen. Black trees surrounded us like guardians to this place. “Please, Nillima, we need to find her.”

Nillima’s pace quickened, as if she heard the desperation in my voice.

But another stretch of time passed and there was only more forest. Even with Lokkaru’s words ringing in my mind, even with what she’d told me about how to find the heartstone, we were lost. Completely lost.

It was as if the forest shifted around us, creating a new path for us to journey down, as if to lead us away. We went in circles and yet, no place seemed familiar. It was an eerie, spine-chilling place, an ever-changing place, and I’d purposefully not peered into the shadows too closely as we passed them because I knew what I would find.

Agony burst in my chest when we circled around again. The moon peeked through the canopy of vines and branches and silver light exploded in the clearing.

“Help me!” I roared. “Kakkari, help me!”

But Kakkari had no reason to help me.

Though I was a Vorakkar, a horde king of Dakkar, Kakkari had not listened to my prayers for some time.

Nillima’s breaths were ragged. My heart felt like it was close to bursting. I stilled Nillima and she took her brief reprieve gladly. Closing my eyes, I pieced back the fractured edges of my mind that had wandered as we had roved. I needed to be whole right now. I would never find Vienne if I wasn’t.

“Help me find her,” I whispered and then I felt the familiar prickling on the back of my neck. Something that had always happened when my sister was near. Once, it had been a comfort. Then it had become a fear.

But now?

I opened my gaze, seeking hers in the shadows once the moonlight disappeared.

“Devina,” I rasped, my heartbeat thudding in my throat. “Help me.”

I would try anything. Before, I had feared this. But now I needed to give into that fear, to accept what a part of me had perhaps always known, if I was to find Vienne again. If I was to ever see her again, hold her again.

“I have only ever wanted to help you, brother,” Devina’s voice came.

I saw her eyes glowing in the darkness. My own. Her mouth moved but I heard her words as if they had been whispered right into my ear.

As always, seeing her felt like a dagger plunged into my chest. That ache that would always be there throbbed like an open wound, one that had not closed with time, one that had rotted with time.

She was standing at the base of a tree. Nillima’s neck had raised, her head turning towards my sister, as if she sensed a presence there too.

Seeing Devina was a reminder that I had failed her. That I had not protected her. That I had not been there for my family as they were slaughtered in the darkness of the night while I’d been…elsewhere.

“The veil is thin now,” Devina said. “I do not have much time this night.Come. Hurry.”

The veil?

I didn’t hesitate. Devina didn’t walk or run. Her face and body flickered here and there, appearing again when I thought I’d lost her, turning me this way and that way through the endless forest.

“Through here,” she whispered, standing next to a stream that I had never heard nor remembered seeing before. Devina vanished and I urged Nillima to follow the stream down, scanning the darkness in front of us for a sign of my sister.

That was when I saw it. Up ahead, a steady blue glow had begun to lighten the trees.

“Vienne!” I bellowed.

My breathing went even more ragged. Nillima seemed to realize what I did and her pace sped.

The glow grew brighter and brighter the closer we came. And then we were there, bursting through a dark curtain of vines that shielded whatever lay beyond it and I held my hand up to block the flooding of light that made my eyes burn after I had been in darkness for so long.

“Vienne!”

I saw her lying at the base of a weathered tree, its leaves glowing blue. The pyroki that she had taken from the horde was lying at her side and its head popped up to regard us suspiciously when we entered the clearing.

Devina was standing over Vienne but her face seemed blurred. Unfocused. Her mouth moved but I heard no words. Her gaze was frustrated, sad. She touched her heart with two fingers, held them out towards me—a gesture that I knew conveyed her love, one she’d often done—and then she was gone.

“Vienne,” I rasped, jumping down off Nillima and running towards her. “Nik, nik, nik.”

When I dropped to my knees beside her, my heart simply froze in my chest. It went dead cold because my first thought was that I was too late.

But when I saw her eyes flicker behind her closed lids, relief swarmed me so heavily that I got dizzy with it.

“Leikavi,” I said, pressing my forehead to hers. “Wake up. Please. Let me see your eyes. I need to see them.”

Pulling away, I looked down at her. Her veins were darkened and black, making my brows draw together in panicked confusion. I remembered seeing the ones on her wrist, but I’d believed her when she told me they were an after-effect of her gift.

But this?

They traveled up her arms, over her neck, and were slowly building up over her face. When I pulled back her cloak, when I lifted her tunic, I saw they were trailing over her breasts, her abdomen, creeping downwards. I lifted one leg of the trews she’d stolen from my chest and saw those veins circling her ankles like shackles.

“What is this?” I growled to myself, my lungs tight, the air thin. This couldn’t be from her gift alone.

My gaze went to the tree. The tree that Lokkaru had told me grew from her father’s body. The tree that had a heartstone nourishing it, feeding it, making it more and more powerful. More and more dangerous too, I knew.

It couldn’t have done this. Her veins had begun to blacken long before this moment.

“Everything will be all right, leikavi,” I told her, though it also sounded like a reassurance to myself. “I will fix this. I swear it to you.”

I needed to get her back to my horde. And soon. The healer…he could help her. He would know what this was, though I had never seen anything like it. I had to believe—

The Ghertun.

I froze.

The Ghertun scout, from the pack we’d tracked and killed close to the horde, had said, “It will take her quickly once it sets in. You will watch her die.”

He’d died from his own wounds before he’d said anything more.

This…this was the Ghertun’s doing?

Everything suddenly pieced together in my mind. Vienne’s fear, her continued urgency in returning to the Dead Mountain before the black moon—a short amount of time that all the Vorakkars had thought strange. I had thought it was her family that she’d worried for. While that was certainly true—for I knew how deeply she loved and cared for them—perhaps what she had feared most was death taking her before she could help them.

Vok, I thought, disbelief and guilt and sorrow swarming me.

By keeping her away from the heartstone, by selfishly dragging out my time with her, I had unknowingly been pushing her closer and closer to this.

An anguished bellow tore from my throat, leaving my breath ragged and my voice hoarse. I heard that bellow echo around the clearing. I heard it boom up the trunk of the tree, thread through the glowing leaves, and drift up to the dark night sky.

“I am sorry, leikavi,” I whispered, pressing the words into her flesh, as if they would heal this. “I am so sorry. Forgive me.”

I would do whatever it took to fix this. I would do whatever it took to save her.

She stirred in my arms, waking with tears in her eyes as she blinked up at me.

“D-Davik?” she whispered, her voice strained and hoarse. Her lips were dry. Her face was so pale that it was almost translucent, all of her rosy color leeched from her cheeks.

“I’m here, Vienne,” I rasped quietly.

“Devina,” she whispered and I swallowed at the sound of my sister’s name on her lips. “Devina was here. She—”

Her words cut off when her eyes squeezed shut and her back bowed slightly. All the muscles in her body went tense in my arms as more tears leaked down her temples.

“Leikavi,” I growled. “Tell me how to help you!”

When her breath seemed to return to her, her words sounded rushed. “S-she wants you to let her go, Davik. Let her go.”

My brows drew together, her words striking something deep within me, something unyielding.

“We will speak of this later, reikassiri,” I told her. “I promise. I will tell you everything. But I will see you well first.”

I lifted her into my arms and she let out a small, sobbing cry, telling me she was in deep, deep pain. It made me want to kill something. It made that dangerous thing rise in my chest. That rage, that anger. Yet, I pushed it down. I let it burn and sizzle in my belly but I did not let it take control of me. I would be strong. I would be strong and present for her.

Because right now, she was all that mattered.

“It’s starting,” she whispered when she caught her breath. “Davik—”

Her muscles tensed in my arms again but then she went limp. I could only breathe again when I felt her heartbeat thud against me. She was alive. For now. But she was weak and in extreme pain.

Whatwas starting, exactly?

Looking up at the tree, I hesitated. Then I laid her gently back down on the moss, grateful that she was sleeping.

Something glinted in the blue light and I saw my dagger lying at the base of the trunk. I scooped it up, weighing it in my palm, and then with a grunt I plunged it into the tree.

Forgive me, Lokkaru, but I will do whatever it takes to save her, I thought, tearing through the bark, peeling back the layers of it until my claws were bloodied. I didn’t feel the pain, however. I felt determination rising.

Nothingwould stop me from seeing her well. And as I dug into the tree, as I tore at the grave of Lokkaru’s father, as I desecrated this living thing that Kakkari herself had blessed, I knew that if Vienne died…I might not be able to survive it. The loss of her.

I saw the glow of the heartstone before my fingers found it. I touched it and it was searing hot, pulsing in my hand, smaller than I’d anticipated. I tore it from the tree, my jaw gritted. I barely even looked at it before I shoved it into the waistband of my trews, securing it tightly in the pouch that rested against my skin…because it might be the only thing that could save her now.

My blood smeared her skin when I scooped her up carefully and led her over to Nillima. Her pyroki followed, staying close to her side. The heartstone burned into me, a constant reminder.

I needed it.

Because if all else failed, just like Lokkaru’s father had done, I would use it to save Vienne.

“I will see you well, leikavi,” I vowed to her quietly, in that sacred, frightening place. “I swear it.”