Humanity 02 - Raven Flames Read Free Page B

glow.
    “ I will take my fate
gladly. You are needed more than I.”
    “ Beg!”
    The voice that spoke and
interrupted her father’s thoughts, God, she’d never heard such a
hate-imbued word.
    “ The blood that drips may
not be the same color as yours, human, but the pain is the same.”
Her father’s voice was amazingly sharp—devoid of the agony Mirage
could feel in the coiled mess of her aching heart. “One day my
people will see freedom. It’s been promised.”
    Gasoline hit him in
dousing streams as it was thrown, stinging in open wounds. Mirage
couldn’t help the involuntary whimper, but it was lost in the
humans’ cries of anticipation. Her father jerked against the rope
that bound him between the two trees, a hiss of incantations
spewing from his mouth.
    The human struck him, and
Mirage fell backward into the hollow, clutching her
cheek.
    “ Hush your mouth, Dark
Child.”
    Her father looked up, and
for a moment Mirage saw a flash of the cruel sky eyes that stared
back into his before their minds disconnected. There’d been a flash
of gold around the eyes—the Nordic golden mask of a stern king.
“I’ve been peaceful. I could have killed your son. I spared him,
though he would not have shown the same compassion. I’ve seen what
is to come; my ancestor wills this. I would have killed you and
your monstrous child if I hadn’t been promised that your fates are
sealed. I’ve seen what is to come. HUMANITY falls within
Darkcaster’s line.”
    “ We’ll see. Once I kill
your bitch and spawn that you’re hiding from us, you are the last
of her line.”
    The smell of gasoline grew
stronger and the flickers from the torches seemed to leap toward
her father. She stood again, but her mother’s hand on her wrist
stopped her from stepping out of the shadowed crevice. Her mother’s
hand, surprisingly strong, pulled her back down into an embrace
that pressed her face against her breasts.
    “ The pain will be over
soon, Mirage,” her father whispered in her mind. She was going to
feel her father die. She and her mother would be bound to him until
his death…burning, but alive.
    “ Daddy…”
    “ I love you and your
mother so much. Take care of her for me, Mirage. Promise me that
you’ll protect her and yourself.”
    Mirage nodded. She was the
only one strong enough now.
    The roar seemed something
alive as the flames followed the path that had been preordained. It
took an instant for them to reach her father.
    Mirage screamed, and her
mother muffled the sound against her chest, shuddering in her own
effort to keep from calling out. Her mother rocked, hugging Mirage
as tightly as she could against the silver silk that clothed her
pale, soft skin. It stopped Mirage from seeing, but there was
nothing that stopped the stench of burning flesh, the odor of her
father burning for another species’ sins…
    All the while, the cruel
sky gaze regarded the flickering death. Mirage saw them through her
father’s unmoving eyes. They never wavered as he died slowly. Then
the pain, the scouring agony that had chased her sanity away,
disappeared.
    “ Mirage,” her mother
whispered breathlessly. “Hide us, or he will have died for
nothing.”
    The shadows that crawled
from her softly glowing runes were angry tendrils. They cloaked her
and her mother tightly, constricting around them in a pulsating
blanket. Where the comforting presence of her father had been,
there was nothing but a hollow, raw hole.
    Gauthier, her father and
the Tribal Chief of the Children of the Dusk, was dead.
     
    Mirage woke sobbing, a hand clutched
over her heart. Her nails dug into her skin as her chest heaved. It
was the position she always woke in when she had the
nightmare.
    Well, almost.
    She was sitting up. The thing her back
leaned against was rough and hard. A wind, full of the salt of the
sea, blew her hair out of her face and tangled it in her horns.
Thunder rolled, horribly loud in her ears, reverberating through
her spine as the