The Fae King's Captive - Wild Hunt Series I

Odesse

There is a man somewhere in India who has been standing for his faith for over fifty years. He hasn’t sat down once, and from what I understand, he has no intention of doing so until the day he dies. A woman who lived next door to me in one of the many cities I have called home over the years had a daughter, barely seven years old, who fought a brain tumor with more courage than most soldiers I have encountered throughout the centuries.

There are firefighters who run into burning buildings while everyone else is desperately trying to get out, doctors who spend their lives fighting diseases they cannot always cure, and ordinary people who wake up one morning and find themselves doing extraordinary things, often without understanding where that courage came from.

Humanity has always fascinated me that way.

Even after nearly a thousand years, I have yet to grow tired of watching what the human mind is capable of. I have watched empires rise and fall, witnessed wars fought over pieces of land that would eventually belong to entirely different nations, and seen men sacrifice everything for causes that history would barely remember.

And still, after all this time, I find myself wondering how much one person can reasonably be expected to give.

Perhaps that was why the thought of another complete Wild Hunt troubled me more than I cared to admit.

For centuries, I had watched mortals surrender their ordinary lives to something far greater than themselves. Men with wives, children, careers, and ambitions. Men who had been perfectly content worrying about their taxes, their failing marriages, or whether their favorite football team would finally win a championship, only to discover that the world contained monsters, magic, and an immortal woman who expected them to help keep both under control.

Of course, they were free to refuse. The Calling merely chose those worthy of an invitation, although very few declined the promise of immortality. Humans tended to think of eternity in terms of everything they might gain. They rarely considered everything they would eventually lose.

Twenty years had passed since the last time I had commanded a complete Hunt.

Twenty years since five men who had ridden beside me for more than five centuries had ceased to exist among the living.

I had made a rather admirable effort to avoid thinking about that particular evening ever since.

Some days, I even succeeded.

I stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of my Manhattan penthouse, a half-empty glass of red wine dangling between my fingers as I watched the city unfold beneath me. From forty-seven floors above the streets, New York looked almost peaceful. Thousands of lights glittered between the buildings, yellow taxis crawled along the avenues, and somewhere in the distance, a helicopter circled above the Hudson.

I had lived here for almost six years now, which was longer than I usually allowed myself to remain in one place. Humans had an unfortunate habit of noticing when their neighbors didn’t age, particularly when said neighbor looked exactly the same in photographs taken three decades apart.

Fortunately, money could resolve a remarkable number of inconveniences. And I had quite a lot of it. In my humble opinion, any immortal who hadn't figured out how to get rich, was doing it wrong.

I took another sip of wine and lifted my gaze beyond the skyline, toward the clouds gathering above the city.

And there it was.

Eryndor.

To human eyes, there was nothing beyond the clouds except the darkening sky and the occasional airplane descending toward one of the city’s airports, but I could see through the thin Veil separating our worlds, into the realm that had once been my home.

Two enormous moons hung above the distant mountains, one silver and the other a pale shade of violet, their light spilling across a landscape I had not set foot upon in centuries. Even from here, I could make out the northern forests and the distant rumbling of rivers winding toward the coast.

Aestra and Morwyn.

The two moons of Eryndor had watched over my childhood, my coronation, and eventually my downfall. I had spent so many centuries looking at them from the wrong side of the Veil that I sometimes wondered whether I would recognize their light if I ever stood beneath them again.

Would Canbor still stand? Would the great halls have survived the Fae wars, and would the gardens have been allowed to grow wild? Did anyone still remember the songs we used to sing beneath the summer moons, or had the ruling courts succeeded in erasing every trace of my people?

There were so many things I wanted to know about the world I had lost. And so many things I was afraid to discover.

I pressed my fingertips against the glass, tracing the outline of a kingdom that existed just beyond my reach.

But then again, the Fae had never been particularly merciful. Least of all to their own.

I was the last sovereign of the Dark Fae. The banished bloodline. The cursed daughter of a kingdom that had long since erased my name from its histories. To the remaining courts of Eryndor, I was an abomination, a creature whose very existence threatened the delicate balance they had spent centuries pretending to protect.

To the humans who had encountered me throughout the ages, I had been called many things. A witch, a demon, a goddess, a monster. Once, during a particularly unfortunate century in France, someone had even attempted to have me burned at the stake.

That had been an interesting afternoon, that one.

But there was one title that had survived the passing of centuries, whispered through human folklore long after the truth behind it had been forgotten.

The Fae King.

An amusing translation, considering I had never been a man at all.

In the ancient tongue of Eryndor, there was no distinction between a king and a queen. We had no need for separate titles based on something as trivial as sex. There was only the Kyn, the sovereign whose magic was bound to the lives beneath their protection.

The humans had decided that such a position could only belong to a king, and I had never bothered correcting them.

Let them imagine some terrifying man with a crown of thorns and an army of monsters at his back.

It made my work considerably easier.

My name was Odesse D’andelione, Kyn of the Banished, Sovereign of the Wild Hunt, and Keeper of the Veil.

And for the past twenty years, I had been doing a spectacularly poor job of fulfilling one of the responsibilities of my curse.

The Wild Hunt was supposed to ride every full moon, five immortal men at my side, mounted upon the Varkharyn that had served our order since before the realms were divided. Together, we were meant to patrol the fractures between worlds, hunt the creatures that slipped through the Riven, and ensure humanity could continue its blissfully ignorant existence.

I still had my Valkyries, of course. Three women who had sworn themselves into my service across three very different centuries, each bonded to her own Varkhar and possessed of a loyalty I had done very little to deserve.

Rhoska Volkov had joined me nearly three hundred years ago, a Russian woman with the temperament of a wounded bear. Isolde de Varenne had been rescued from the guillotine during the French Revolution, while Tamsin Whitlock had been snatched from a particularly questionable London nightclub in the sixties.

They were my warriors, my companions, and occasionally the greatest pains in my immortal arse.

Unlike the Five, the Valkyries were bound through a separate oath. When the sacrifice had claimed my men twenty years ago, the women and their Varkharyn had survived.

The Hunt had continued between the four of us, but it had never been whole.

We still rode beneath the moons, hunting whatever slipped through the Riven, but without the Five there were fractures we couldn’t seal and ancient protections we could no longer maintain...

Lately, however, our hunt had begun to weaken. I could feel the fractures growing beneath the city and the faint pull of a magic I had desperately tried to keep dormant.

I knew I could not continue forever. I simply hadn’t expected forever to end quite so soon.

A low rumble vibrated through the glass beneath my fingertips.

“Malachar,” I muttered.

My grumpy and old Kyn of the Varkhar was awake.

And judging by the metallic groan from the rooftop, he was either scratching himself against the ventilation equipment or attempting to devour another helicopter.

Neither possibility was particularly encouraging.

I set my wineglass down with a sigh and reached for my phone, already anticipating another complaint from the building manager.

That was when the first sharp pain struck beneath my collarbone.

I froze.

An ancient magic stirred beneath my skin, cold and burning at the same time, spreading outward from my Kyn mark.

It was time again.

A thin black line emerged beneath my skin, curling across my collarbone like ink spreading through water. Ancient runes formed along its edges, each glowing faintly violet before settling into a familiar pattern.

I knew that pattern.

The Calling.

Somewhere in the mortal world, a man had begun seeing things he wasn’t supposed to see. The Veil had recognized him, marked him, and declared him worthy of joining the Wild Hunt.

His name appeared beneath my skin in the ancient Fae language.

Anderson Brooks.

Then another mark began to burn. And another. By the time the fourth appeared, my wineglass had shattered on the floor, although I couldn’t remember knocking it over.

And then came the fifth.

Julian Mercer.

Oh, Moons spare me. That stubborn man had already refused me twice! Twice!

Five men. Five new riders.

And somewhere above Manhattan, the Veil trembled as the ancient magic of the Wild Hunt awakened again.

I closed my eyes, and behind me, a familiar voice broke the silence.

“Oh, Aestra preserve us, dear Saesae. It’s happening, isn’t it?”

I didn’t need to turn around to know who had spoken.

Cassian.

For once, the dead male and I were in complete agreement.