Bloodline Oath (Part IV)

Synopsis

The cavern had been waiting a long time to kill him, and Marcus Thorn knew it the moment he lit the last of the candles. He told no one he was going. That was the point. What he went down there to end has a name and a rhythm: the Eclipse, the periodic dark the old rite has always answered with a life. It took his grandfather’s mother. It was taking Elara, drop by drop, in a bed above the ground where no healer could say what was wrong with her. It would come in its turn for his daughter. He believed he had found another way, and he believed it was worth a coward’s death and better — and the thing his family had spent generations caging did not agree. Riley Thorn knows all of it now. She has read the six volumes he was too afraid to trust to anyone, and the maps laid out across the study floor stop being folklore the moment Lila recognizes the shapes in them from her grandmother’s songs — songs that were never about wolves at all, but about a jailer, a prisoner, and a bargain that went sour. The forest is the jailer. It always was. And the lock is partly made of Thorn blood. Now the veins in the trees are dimming toward that same periodic dark, on schedule, and Edgewood can feel it coming. Inside the pack an older voice is rising with it: Alaric, who remembers what the old ways cost his own family and wants the altar honored before the whole village pays instead. Outside it, a crimson-cloaked enemy the pack thought it had seen the last of is very much alive, better armed, and moving toward the same buried chamber. Her father’s answer was a single life freely given, carried alone, in the dark, by someone who told nobody. Riley is holding a different page of the same notebook — one that requires more hands than she is sure she can gather, and that only works if every one of them holds. Book Four of the Midnight Heiress series.