The Stars are Dying : (Nytefall: Book 1)

I awoke with a pounding headache. Slipping my eyes open, I found the fire before me sputtering its last embers, darkness falling around me. I lay against the unforgiving ground, my temple to the cold wood hardly a bother compared to the ache in my soul that kept me down.

“You’re getting too cold. You need to get up.” Nyte spoke gently.

I couldn’t move. Both from the drumming in my head and the helpless sorrow that had clouded over me in my pitiful state. Would I ever truly break free? I had tried to be brave and strong, but I was hiding from the frightened girl who still lived within me. The one who harbored regret for leaving, because while the rafters of Hektor’s manor were a lonely place, they were safe and warm, and a part of me still yearned to be there. I was a fool for ever thinking I could be something more. Something on my own. Hektor had been right.

And I’d killed him.

“Astraea.”

I pushed myself up when I knew it was dangerous to stay here. The cold would kill me if I gave in to the tiredness weighing me heavy, and as soon as I was sitting, I realized…

“I need my medicine.” I barely got the words out, but I was doused with dread when I looked out the small box window and spied the fleeting waves of the sun’s rapid descent. I had been too caught up in the trials to remember how much time had passed since I last took a dose, and now my body was punishing me. I hadn’t been this long without it, and I feared I wouldn’t make it through the night if I was locked out of the castle, unable to get to the pills my mouth had dried out for.

“Shit,” Nyte cursed, so close I tried to blink him into focus. I hadn’t seen such worry on his face since the lake. “Come on—you can make it if we go now, but we have to be fast.”

As my hand shifted, a chime of metal rang. My fingers curled over the item with a breath of relief in my dire situation. Then I noticed the other broken shard.

“Two key pieces,” I said, holding them up then patting my side to confirm I still had the first in my pocket.

“Greed and envy. You passed them both,” Nyte confirmed.

I pocketed the pieces, and it gave me the surge of triumph and hope I needed to push myself to stand.

Nyte’s expression became desolate as he watched me. He moved, trying to help me, but maybe my mind was too weak to allow it to be as believable as I wanted. I knew I was alone and there was nothing he could do.

Then I feared more than anything my condition would cast him away completely if I couldn’t reach back.

“I’m right here,” he soothed, so close I bit back my whimper, wanting it to be real. To lean into him.

“Please don’t leave,” I said pitifully.

“Never.”

I stumbled out of the hut and clung to every illusion that Nyte was right beside me. Helping me. Using walls and tripping over discarded crates and debris, I made my way through the streets. I couldn’t pull out my map for the way back, but I didn’t need to as Nyte was showing me the way.

Looking up, I shook my head at the growing twilight. “I’m not going to make it,” I breathed.

“Keep moving,” he commanded firmly.

I couldn’t disobey as he used the bond that tied us. I cried out, forcing my body forward against the need to collapse. “You’re a bastard,” I said.

“If it gets you past those damn gates in time, I can live with that.”

“I wish you were real so I could slap you.”

“I shouldn’t find your violence so attractive.”

If I had even a shred of energy to spare, I would have attempted a glare. It didn’t help that the temperature was dropping and the paths were becoming more dangerous, freezing over. Then a white flurry filtered into my vision, and I was sad I couldn’t enjoy the snowfall.

I saw the gates and could have fallen in relief, but the sun was gone, and I realized then I was too late.

They were closed.

I walked up to the guards anyway, hoping in my desperation I could plead with them.

“I need inside—please,” I panted as though I had run without pause to be here, but that was just the exertion my body felt.

The guards remained as still as stone, not even voicing a denial.

“I’m not well. I just need my handmaiden to fetch something for me,” I tried.

Still no response.

The throb of my head became too much. I didn’t want to fall in front of the emotionless vampires. I shuffled away in defeat, until I found an alley I could rest in just for a moment. I slumped onto a crate.

“You can’t rest here,” Nyte protested.

“Just for a few seconds.” All I needed was a moment to gather myself, then I could find somewhere warmer and hope my illness wouldn’t take me through the night.

“Astraea, you need to get up. Please.”

I didn’t think Nyte would plead for anything, but when I found the dawn he looked at me with, he seemed so at a loss for what to do that I couldn’t stand to be his burden.

“It’s okay,” I tried to say. I shivered with the snow melting over my face. I couldn’t feel my nose or cheeks or mouth. “I’ll be okay.”

“No, you won’t. Come—I can guide you somewhere you’ll have warmth and shelter at least.” Nyte reached for me, but he couldn’t really pull me up.

My head lolled against the building as his hand reached for my face. My lids fluttered closed. “I wish it were real,” I mumbled, nestling into his hollow palm anyway.

“You’re killing me.”

My lids lifted heavily. His beautiful face had become so sad, and I reached for it, but my hand didn’t make it before the weight became too much to bear.

Steps crunched beside me down the street. Nyte swore, shifting as though he could shield me with his body from the three forms—or were there four? Six? My vision kept tilting, so sometimes the figures doubled. Though it wasn’t the fact there were so many of them that brought doom to my inevitable fate.

It was their wings.

Nightcrawlers.

The only color to pierce the darkness was red. Near glowing sets of red eyes.

“Astraea.” One word of utter strained misery and desperation. “I can’t protect you here. You have to get up, love.”

His tender agony sliced through me. I had thought his main concern was to make sure I stayed alive to free him, but this…it was something more urgent and personal, and I had to try.

“You can’t fight them. Run.” The last word was a command striking through the bond.

I sobbed before my body reacted, turning and breaking into a stumbling jog.

It was helpless.

Tripping, my gloved hands slapped the snow-dusted ground. I breathed heavily, but I wasn’t afraid. Not of the creatures who stalked me. Lifting my eyes, I didn’t expect the only emotion to slither through my drowsiness and suffering would be for him. A gut-sinking sadness that I couldn’t make it out for Nyte.

I sat back on my knees, and Nyte crouched down with me.

“You’re so brave, Starlight,” he said, slipping a hand across my cheek.

I had never witnessed such a livid threat glow in his golden irises than when they flashed up.

“We found a prize,” one of the nightcrawlers said, so close behind me I turned to stone.

“We shouldn’t,” another interjected.

Nyte’s breaths were calculated. I studied his every flicker of rage to gauge the vultures who circled me, too cowardly to see them for myself.

“Just a taste wouldn’t hurt,” another said. This one was the closest as he eased around me. “We are granted a little playtime if they fail to make it back.”

“I’m going to kill them all,” Nyte said, so low and promising.

My hand rose to my cheek over his. The nightcrawlers couldn’t see him, but that didn’t matter.

Finally, I braved meeting the red eyes watching down over me behind Nyte. They weren’t just hungry…they were starving. His wings had hooked talons at the top, and over the leathery texture were various tears that added a savage edge.

“You don’t look so good,” the creature mocked. “I rather like it when my meal has a little fight in it.”

My stomach churned at the grim notion.

Nyte took my hand. “I wish there were any fucking person close by but him,” he muttered darkly.

I was about to ask what he meant when a new voice, a true voice, came toward me.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Drystan.

A sigh of relief left me. Even with everything I knew about him, Drystan was safer in this moment.

The nightcrawler’s irises flashed with fear. He didn’t get the chance to stand fully before the prince was upon him. I fell back in horror watching how fast he moved, then without hesitation, Drystan didn’t just snap the vampire’s neck, he tore it from his body that hit the ground before his head followed lazily from the prince’s hands.

I didn’t realize I’d shuffled back in my numb state until I gasped touching something solid. My heart choked in my throat peering up at blood-red irises of sinful amusement.

“We happened to find a little mouse,” the vampire behind me said.

“Get away from her before I make an example out of all of you,” Drystan snarled.

He dropped down to my level, tilting my head with a hand under my chin. “You look awful.”

“I need—” My speech faltered.

Witnessing the cold murder he was capable of exposed so much more of him I had refused to see. My sickness fogged my mind beyond being able to be anything but relieved I wasn’t at the mercy of these nightcrawlers anymore because of him.

Steps shuffled away, and as I swayed, an arm curled around me, and I was lifted.

“Tarran thinks you’re hiding something,” the same vampire said.

“Tarran had better watch his accusations before I come for him,” Drystan replied.

My head came to rest on his firm shoulder, and it was the first time I’d come close enough without a racing mind to notice his scent of leather and something earthy, maybe even faintly familiar. I managed to steal one last glance at the nightcrawler whose blood-red eyes lingered on me, narrowing before they returned to Drystan. Whatever he read on the prince’s face made him decide it wasn’t a confrontation worth provoking. I wasn’t sure of the control the king had on the nightcrawlers, but I could make out five of them and knew they could have challenged Drystan.

Until I remembered the sinister alter name that turned me stone-cold in his arms. Had now seen a glimpse of what could have attached such a reputation to him. Perhaps it wasn’t the prince they feared, nor the king, but Nightsdeath.

“This would all be rather anticlimactic if we lost you this way.”

“Are you locked out too?” I asked sleepily.

“Yes. Looks we have each other’s company for the night.”

“I need…” I couldn’t get the words out. They became lead on my tongue as I lost all sense of myself.

“Shh,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”