Fall of Ruin and Wrath (Awakening, #1)

Fall of Ruin and Wrath (Awakening, #1)

JENNIFER L. ARMENTROUT



PROLOGUE


An eerie quiet descended upon the chamber of the foundling home, hushing the soft snores and wheezy breaths from those sleeping on the cots in the chamber. Missing the warm beds found at the Priory of Mercy, I tightened my aching fingers around the scratchy, worn blanket. I never slept well on the floor, where the mice and rats usually scurried all night.

But tonight, there were no glimpses of their thin, slick tails, nor did I hear the rap of their claws upon the stone. That should be a welcome discovery, but something didn’t feel right. Not about the floor beneath me or the air I breathed.

I’d woken with tiny goose bumps all over my skin and a bad feeling in the pit of my belly. The Prioress had taught me to always trust my second sight, the pull of my intuition, and the urge of my instinct. They were gifts, she’d told me over and over, given by the gods because I was born from the stars.

I didn’t understand what she’d meant by the whole star part, but right now, my intuition was telling me something was very wrong.

I eyed the damp stone walls lit by the gas lanterns, searching for a sign of what made my belly feel like I’d eaten spoiled meat. By the door, a light flickered and went out. The lantern by the window sputtered, then ceased as another did the same. Across the chamber, the last lamp went dead.

No fingers had cut off the light. I would’ve seen anyone who dared risk inciting the Mister’s ire by messing with the lanterns.

My gaze darted back to the fireplace. The flames from the coals still burned, doing a poor job of heating the chamber, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. The fire . . . it made no sound. Not a crackle or a hiss.

A shiver of dread stirred the tiny hairs along the nape of my neck and spider-walked its way down my spine.

Beside me, a lump shifted beneath the blanket and rolled. Tufts of curly, messy brown hair appeared as Grady peered over the edge of the blanket. He blinked sleep-heavy eyes. “Whatcha doing, Lis?” he murmured, his voice cracking halfway through. It had been doing that more and more of late, starting around the same time he’d begun to grow like the weeds in the yard behind the home.

“Lis?” Grady rose slightly, holding the blanket to his chin as the flames in the fireplace began to weaken. “Was the Mister bothering you again?”

I gave a quick shake of my head, having not seen the Mister even though my arms were lined with evidence of other nights and his mean, pinching fingers.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he frowned. “Did you have a bad dream or something?”

“No,” I whispered. “The air doesn’t feel right.”

“The air . . . ?”

“Is it ghosts?” I croaked.

He snorted. “Ghosts aren’t real.”

I squinted. “How do you know?”

“Because I . . .” Grady trailed off, looking over his shoulder as the flames of the fireplace collapsed, leaving the room lit by slivers of moonlight. His head turned slowly as he scanned the chamber, noticing the dead lanterns then. His wide gaze shot to mine. “They’re here.”

My entire body jerked as an icy wave of terror swept over me. They’re here could mean only one thing.

The Hyhborn.

The scions of the gods looked like us— well, most of them did, but those who ruled the Kingdom of Caelum weren’t like us lowborn. They weren’t mortal at all.

And they had no reason to be here.

It wasn’t the Feasts, when the Hyhborn interacted more openly with us lowborn, and this was the Rook. We weren’t in the pretty places with things and people of value. There was no pleasure in anything to be found here for them to feed upon.

“Why are they here?” I whispered.

Grady’s hand clamped down on my arm, the chill of his fingers bleeding through my sweater. “I don’t know, Lis.”

“Are they . . . Will they hurt us?”

“They have no reason to. We haven’t done a thing wrong.” He pulled us down so that our heads shared the same flat pillow. “Just close your eyes and pretend to be asleep. They’ll leave us be.”

I did what Grady said, like I’d done ever since he’d stopped shooing me away from him, but I couldn’t stay silent. I couldn’t stop the fear from building on top of itself, making me think the worst. “What if they . . . what if they are here for me?”

He tucked my head under his. “Why would they be?”

My lips quivered. “Because I . . . I’m not like you.”

“You got no good reason to worry about that,” he assured me, voice low so the others couldn’t hear us. “They aren’t going to care about that.”

But how could he be sure? Other people cared. Sometimes I made them nervous, because I couldn’t stop myself from saying something that I saw in my mind— an event yet to happen or a decision that hadn’t been made yet. Grady was used to it. The Mister? Others? Not so much. They looked at me like there was something wrong with me, and the Mister often stared like he thought I might be a conjurer and like he . . . he might be a little scared of me. Not scared enough to stop pinching me but scared enough to keep doing so.

“Maybe the Hyhborn will sense something off about me,” I rasped. “And maybe they won’t like it or think I’m— ”

“They won’t sense anything. I swear.” He pulled the blanket over us as if that could somehow protect us.

But a blanket wouldn’t shield us from the Hyhborn. They could do whatever they wanted to whoever, and if they were angered? They could bring entire cities to ruin.

“Shh,” Grady urged. “Don’t cry. Just close your eyes. It’ll be okay.”

Chamber doors creaked open. Between us, Grady squeezed my arm until I could feel the bones in his fingers. The air suddenly became thin and strained, and the walls groaned as if the stone couldn’t contain what had slipped inside. A tremor rocked me. I felt as sick as I had the last time the Prioress had taken my hand, like she’d often done without any concern for what I might see or know, but that day had been different. I’d seen death coming for her.

I didn’t take big breaths, but a scent still snaked under the blanket and in between us, crowding out the smell of stale ale and too many bodies crammed into a too-small place. A minty scent that reminded me of the . . . the candies the Prioress used to carry in the pockets of her habit. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound, I chanted over and over. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.

“How many are here?” a male asked in a low voice.

“The number ch-changes every night, Lord Samriel.” The Mister’s voice trembled, and I’d never heard him sound scared before. Usually, it was his voice scaring us, but there was a Hyhborn lord among us, one of the most powerful of Hyhborn. It would terrify even the meanest of bullies. “Usually th-there’s about thirty, but I don’t know any that have what you’re looking for.”

“We’ll see for ourselves,” Lord Samriel replied. “Check them all.”

The footfalls of the Hyhborn riders— the Rae— echoed in tandem with my heart. What felt like a thin layer of ice settled over us as the temperature of the chamber dropped.

The Rae were once great lowborn warriors who had fallen in battle to Hyhborn princes and princesses. Now they were little more than flesh and bone, their souls captured and held by the princes, the princesses, and King Euros. Did that mean one of them was here? I shuddered.

“Open your eyes,” Lord Samriel demanded from somewhere in the chamber.

Why were they making us open our eyes?

“Who are they?” Another spoke. A man. He did so quietly, but his voice bled shivery power into each word.

“Orphans. Castoffs, my lord,” the Mister croaked. “Some came from the Priory of Mercy,” he rambled on. “O-Others just show up. Don’t know where they come from or where they end up disappearing to. None of them is a seraph, I swear.”