Year of the Dragon (Changeling Sisters Book 3) (32 page)

Khyber had fallen strangely quiet at the name of Rafael’s sister, but now a growl built up in his chest. “Careful, dog,” the vampyre prince warned. “There is more to that story than you know.”

“I know how it ended,” Rafael whispered. Pain reared in my chest as I watched phantoms from the past cloud the warmth of his brown eyes. Taeyang crawled away from him, and I hurried to put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Who are you?” Taeyang demanded of Khyber in Korean, again and again, but the vampyre prince didn’t answer his soul. He circled Rafael like a shark until he could kneel safely beside us.

“It is better for you never to know,” he told his soul in low, melodiously smooth Korean, and I blinked. I had never heard him speak his original tongue before. Turning, Khyber placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Typical of your sister, to bring my soul here,” he muttered with a snort. “I shouldn’t have expected more from a dog. Raina, you must give Taeyang the bracelet only after I am gone.”

Rafael’s face lengthened into a snarl. Suddenly, the peal of a gong broke the tension.

“The dragon prince is straight ahead!” Bae called, shimmying down from the upper deck with a pair of binoculars. He and Rafael exchanged bows, and the older werewolf clasped Rafael’s upper arm briefly as he handed him the binoculars.

“It is good to fight beside you again.”

Rafael smiled faintly as he adjusted the lenses. “Don’t let Yu Li catch you saying that.”

“Don’t fool yourself. Bae would be polite even to his prey before ripping its head off,” Yu Li’s no-nonsense voice rang out. She emerged on deck with Citlalli, Heesu, and the other wolves.

The wind changed direction, and the werewolves caught a whiff of Khyber’s scent. Immediately, they turned on us, their eyes glowing various shades of oranges, hazels, and blues under the pale gleam of the fluorescent lights. Bae pointed a quivering finger. “V-V-Vampyre prince!”

I caught Citlalli’s eye. Slowly, deliberately, both of us rose to stand in front of Khyber. A low whimper emitted to my left. To my surprise, I realized it was Rafael. He regarded first my sister, and then me, with abject hurt flaring in his luminescent wolf eyes.

“Alpha Ahn,” Citlalli said, unable to look at Rafael either, “this undead creature is the infamous Crow Prince, it is true. However, Khyber also aided us during the Were War. We wouldn’t have defeated Maya without him.”

Yu Li arched an eyebrow. “Does that absolve him of past crimes?”

“No,” my sister replied quickly, and I was impressed with the amount of calm she exuded. The Citlalli I had known a year ago would speak whatever came into her head without thinking. This new one-eyed girl was a cool and calculating warrior, already strategizing for our inevitable clash with the vampyre princes. She knew the wolves alone wouldn’t be enough.

“However, I ask that we stay Prince Khyber’s sentence until a greater enemy can be defeated. Ankor believes the remaining vampyre princes are attempting to find an Imugi’s Pearl. I do not know if that is the artifact our enemy is searching for behind the green mist, but I do know what they intend to use if for.” Citlalli hesitated, glancing at Khyber. “The vampyre princes mean to release their masters…The Twelve.”

Khyber stepped in, making a cutting motion. Swiftly, he extended Yu Li a piece of parchment with a strange character etched on it. She scanned the page and then hissed as if it had turned into a poisonous snake.

“Burn it, quickly.”

Namkyu and Moon hurried to do as she bid. However, the character’s power expanded in our minds, suffocating our senses until all we could hear was its imminent approach:

XIBALBA.

Smoke fizzled as Namkyu threw the burning parchment into the ocean. We breathed a collective sigh of relief as the spell lifted. Several members of the pack hastily crossed themselves, while Bae murmured a Buddhist mantra and kissed his
hamsa
.

“I have heard of the Death Gods buried in the West, locked away by the Mayan Hero Twins.” Yu Li sighed and brushed hair from her face, revealing a sliver of her haggard eyes. Citlalli wasn’t the only one who was tired of fighting. “Foolish vampyres. The Twelve will not be content with reclaiming the East. They will only be satisfied with the end of the world itself. So be it, Crow Prince. Your sentence will be stayed in the face of our greater enemy. However, make no mistake. For the crimes you have committed, your death will be demanded.”

Khyber inclined his head gracefully, and Rafael snorted. “Oh, he knows. However, what he fails to mention is that his life force is currently bound to Citlalli’s. Neither can die while the other lives.”

Stunned, Yu Li and the others spun on Citlalli. She blew out a strand of her curly black hair with a sigh. “We were cursed by a Greater Dark Spirit named Xec at the end of the Were War. Add that to the list of things that is wrong with me, along with being a Triad.”

“So.” Bae cocked his head in confusion. “You cannot…die?”

Khyber’s lip curled. “Do not mistake our life bond for a gift. There are far worse things my brothers could do to curse us eternally. They will seek to destroy our minds so there will be no chance of either of us passing on peacefully. However, that is for us to worry about. If my brothers succeed in releasing The Twelve, then that is the fate that awaits us all.”

Rafael’s walkie-talkie blared to life. I heard Sun Bin’s voice, simultaneously excited and strained, crackle with static from the pilothouse.

“Ankor has made it to the Emerald Veil,” Rafael announced, and an eerie silence descended over our mismatched crew.

Without a word, we hurried to the bow.

I had seen the green mist countless times in my dreams. However, now wedged between ’Lalli and Heesu in the heart of the night, I realized how vast it extended. The southern islands were blurred shadows beyond the fog.

Also, I could hear it—the
whispers
. They circulated through the mist with varying strength and pitch, the stolen memories of passerby attempting to cross now hung suspended in space and time. Waves crashed with strength and might, but they, too, fell silent when they hit the Veil. Beyond the mist, the ocean waters lapped with strange calm, not a single white cap amongst them.

The fishing vessel called
Nautilus
approached the whispering wall. A tiny figure emerged on its bow—
Ankor
. At once, the green mist undulated out into tendrils like blind serpent heads seeking to devour any who dared trespass.

Ankor stared up at the mist, defiant. At the last second, he hefted a knife made out of the fang of some large unknown werebeast. Swiftly, Ankor raised it to his ear and sliced. I just had time to see his obsidian earring flash in the moonlight. Citlalli gasped, “The yeouiju shard!” Then there came a thunderclap of an explosion.

Heesu cried out for her brother as the blast threw Ankor against the wheelhouse. Neon-flecked streaks of black lightning rippled up the mist and then crackled outwards, ripping a hole in the green curtain.

“Hurry!” Rafael dashed to the pilothouse to take the wheel from Sun Bin. Ankor was slowly recovering, but the waves gathered up his fishing boat and sucked him through. Immediately, the green mist began to close after him.

Sun Bin emerged from the cabin in a flurry of snowflakes, her wings rippling from her back. “I’m going after him,” she announced, but Khyber caught her arm.

“Do not presume to touch me,
Crow
,” she spoke condescendingly, but the vampyre prince raised a hand.

“Wait.”

From behind us, thunder rumbled like the deep peal of mortars. My breath caught in my chest. Ankor’s lightning, sizzling with the energy of the yeouiju shard, danced amongst the clouds behind us and built an army of thickening thunderheads. Our hair waved in the wind as the surf began to pick up. Waves rose and tumbled before the imminent typhoon.

“Faster, Rafael!” Yu Li barked. “We need to make it through the hole! Wolves, bunker down!”

“With me, Raina and Heesu,” Sun Bin urged. I stepped up beside her and felt the ocean tide rise within my chest. Sun Bin’s strained smile told me she felt it, too. We nodded to each other. Then I raised my hands, reining the winds and channeling them. I sent waves as swift and unstoppable as arrows rippling toward the shrinking hole. Sun Bin seized the whitecaps from my hands and brought her palms together into fists. Despite the brooding humidity, the water crackled up into an archway of ice, preventing the mist from closing.

At our backs, Heesu fought against the impending storm. Her eyes were completely absorbed with the nut-brown hues of her inner Were as she attempted to steer the typhoon to the west. The unnatural black lightning flashed again within the brooding squall, and Heesu fell over as if zapped.

“It’s gaining strength,” she gritted between clenched teeth. “That lightning…it’s like a black hole. The winds, the waves, the clouds…they’re all drawn to it.”

Desperate, I called for the north, the west, and the east winds, but found none. They evaded my call, slipping over and under my fingers toward the intensifying typhoon, which had begun to swallow the starlight. All we had left was the dim glow of the boat’s fluorescent lights.

The first few patters of rain struck our faces, and I caught a glimpse of Citlalli’s face, strained with tension as the currents drew us enticingly closer to the hole.

I took a deep breath. The southern winds. The mist had reduced them to a mere murmur, but they would have to be enough. Funneling the rain toward the stern, I shaped them with all of the strength I could take from the south. The catamaran was slow to right itself on the wave, but Rafael aimed us true. Flinging my hands down, I released the wave. We barreled through the tear in the mist and into the southern islands.

An eerie calm fell as the hurricane’s resounding roar abruptly died. The moon emerged, tainted a dark shade of jade. Sun Bin recovered first. She scrambled to her knees and froze the wave behind us to preserve our way back through the mist.

We cautiously spread out across the deck, staring at the underbelly of the Emerald Veil. Specters of all shapes and sizes moaned and cried for help, their ghostly claws extending and then evaporating before they could reach us. I seized up in terror as I saw inky-black threads of hair—
Her
hair—snake out to bind their mouths and pull them kicking and screaming back into the mist.

More haunting still: bobbing all around us on the gray blanket of sea were candles—thousands of them. Their lights flickered with cursed green light between floating platters of offerings. I swallowed hard, realizing how the vampyres had attracted the ghosts before trapping them in the mist. Somehow, these imprisoned spirits were connected to the mist’s forgetful power, along with the vampyres holding Una, the Doorkeeper, in captivity. For now, all I could think was that we had floated into a funeral procession on the dark side of Eve.

I backed up, and the cold, undead arms of a vampyre wrapped around me. I shivered gratefully in Khyber’s embrace. His wings wrapped around to tickle my forearms. Suddenly I realized that they were not made out of black feathers, but a leathery, veiny skin.

I attempted to scream, but a hand as hard and pale as ivory wrapped around my mouth. Then Donovan pulled me close to his chest, eagerly inhaling my scent as he whispered in my ear: “My darling wife. Reunited at last.”

Chapter 39: Typhoon

~Citlalli~

It was Raina’s scream that broke the eerie stillness of the dead sea beyond the mist. The thousands of candles bobbing on the gray waters flickered. At that moment, I knew we had sailed into a trap.

Yu Li recovered first, barking at the pack to guard our starboard. I sprinted in the direction of Raina’s scream. My nose twitched in displeasure; the scent of rotting flesh, damp with sea salt, blew me back like a foul wind.

The first of the vampyres flipped over the side of the boat. Their pale arms were coated in what looked like shiny red paint up to their elbows, and seaweed tangled in their dark, horse-mane-thick hair. Salt water pooled from their rusty helmets as they straightened, staring me down the length of their lances: Santiago’s Compañia Rojo.

Khyber descended from the roof of the cabin like a malignant shadow. He snapped the first soldier’s lance in half and then staked him through the heart. The other half of the spear he tossed to me.

I ducked the second vampyre’s jab and then stabbed him in the throat. The undead thing grinned at me, laughing as the wood splinted up into the cave of his mouth. I returned his smile and then snarled, surging forward to sever his head from his neck.

We didn’t pause, didn’t rest, both of us falling together in stride as we rounded the starboard side.

“
Mon cherie
… At last…my blushing bride has returned to me… I knew they couldn’t keep us apart forever…”

The whispers drifted up to me from the stern deck. A sensuous, male voice pooled like honey over my sister’s pleas.

“Where are Amrit and Eva, then?” I heard Raina demand, her voice struggling not to break.

“You are the only wife I need,” was Donovan’s terse reply.

“Citlalli—” Khyber reached for me, but my mind had gone blank with pure, unadulterated rage. Wolf and Demon’s howls coursed through my skin, and then I exploded onto the stern deck in a frenzy of matted black fur and yellow fangs.

My vision tunneled on the glittering blond head bent over my sister’s neck, but then I heard the click of rifles. I barked, skidding to break my advance. Santiago’s arm cracked down like a whip.

Bullets peppered my retreat as Santiago’s Red Company trained their gun barrels on my fleeing shape. Khyber appeared, and I barked a warning. Too late. Santiago whipped out a pistol and fired with lightning swift speed, blasting a hole in Khyber’s wing. The eldest vampyre prince fell back a step, hissing.

A second pistol appeared in Santiago’s other hand. He didn’t blink as he relentlessly gunned down his older brother, twiddling the pistols and then firing another round in quick succession. We slammed our backs against the portside cabin, breathing heavily.