We Hunt the Flame (Sands of Arawiya 1)

“Leave her be,” the Prince of Death said, a single level above a whisper, and the room froze.

She lifted her head, eyes darting in and out of focus. Gone was her iciness, her resolve. That wild gleam he had come to love. A sound—a shout—emanated from him and out of him at once.

His vision darkened as shadows swarmed around him.

Laa. As the shadows swarmed from him.

CHAPTER 71

A slow clap shattered the silence.

Nasir choked a breath and the shadows receded, the world spinning back into focus.

“Ah, Prince. Fitting for the boy accustomed to the darkness, no?” the man before him said.

His face spoke of aristocratic beauty and youth, but his eyes were ancient—and oddly familiar.

Nasir did not understand a word he’d said.

“What have you done?” he rasped. He was on his knees like a common peasant.

“I’ve done nothing.”

Nasir stared at his hands, at the wisps of black swirling out of and into his palms. Like the ones he knew existed around his benighted heart. Something rushed beneath his skin, surged through his veins. He quelled it.

He had been quelling it ever since he set foot on Sharr. He had just been too cowardly to admit it.

“Nasir!” Zafira shouted.

He lifted his head. Her first time addressing him by name and she wasn’t even looking at him.

Shackles of steel clamped around his wrists. He was lifted as if he were no more than a sack. Something told him he should struggle. Fight. Try to break free. But the darkness, the shadows. The very thing he feared.

He

had

become it.

This was his affinity. The reason for his vision darkening every time he lost control of himself. He could wield the dark as if it belonged to him. His arms were wrenched upward. The click of a lock echoed in his ears, and then he was hanging on the wall beside her, shadows dripping from him.

Darkness is my destiny. His father was right.

It leaked like smoke from his fingers, from his lips when he exhaled, from him.

His eyes fell to the ifrit on the ground, stunned he could see a face, a form. Almost as if the creature were wholly human. It was the Demenhune. Deen. His torso was riddled with her white arrows, and black blood oozed from the wounds, the only sign he was an ifrit. Nasir knew blood and torture as well as his own name, but as Zafira pulled at her chains and begged them to stop, he felt a helplessness bordering on insanity.

“There’s been a change of plan,” the man said as he studied Nasir. He gestured to the bloodied ifrit. “Clean him up. I may still have need of him.”

Against the backdrop of her screams and the creature’s moans, two other ifrit pulled him—it—away.

“Fear becomes you, Prince,” the man said.

Nasir stared numbly. He had failed. Failed like the mutt that he was. Failed like the brainless boy his father claimed him to be. His father, who might be controlled by the man before him but was right about many things.

Her dark crown was coming undone, a snake coiling around her. Her arms were chafed in red, and the ring swayed with her labored breathing.

“Huntress,” he said, and something cracked in that pit where his heart should be. “It’s not real.”