Hearts of Chaos

  THE RAVEN LORD

  Lucia tuned out the buzz of neighboring tables and stood, making sure her face didn’t reveal the tempest brewing beneath her skin. She gave her dining companions a tight nod and walked away, out of the conservatory and down the hall. The news was already spreading. Her feet slowly picked up speed. She would outrun the panic attack that clutched at her chest. Following nothing but the eddies of Aether, the wood-paneled walls blurred as she passed. Far and farther still, until she left the last passing stranger and found a door that wasn’t locked. She wasn’t going to lose it in front of people. She wasn’t going to lose it at all. Inside, a library. In her anger, the Aether sprung from her hand and slammed the door shut behind her, air thick with ink and old paper, leather and cloves, and blessed, blessed silence.

  “Who is chasing you?”

  “No one. I’m just starved for a good book.”

  “Help yourself.” He motioned to the stacked shelves. The flash of his smile drew her eyes down to his lips. Gods. He’d never even kissed her. Was she so undesirable? So untouchable that she inspired no lust, no passion? Well, fuck it. Rising on her tiptoes, she had the brief glimpse of his lips parting in surprise, his eyes widening before she took what she’d always wanted from him.

  Anger gave way to heat. Aether sparked where their lips met. If he hadn’t been holding so tightly to her arms, she would have fallen backward. He didn’t give her the chance. The Aether shocked down every nerve ending straight to her core, and suddenly she was wet and aroused and wound tighter than a spindle.

  He set her away from him.

  “What was that?” he asked, voice like uncut diamonds.

  She touched her lips with a shaking hand. “A kiss.” I think. Lady be, if that was what one kiss between them was like, maybe it was a good thing they’d never made it this far.

  Books by Kira Brady

  Hearts of Fire: A Deadglass Novella

  Hearts of Darkness

  Hearts of Shadow

  Hearts of Chaos

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  KIRA BRADY

  Hearts of Chaos

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  THE RAVEN LORD

  Books by Kira Brady

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  To Ryan, Juniper, and Hawthorne:

  God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you.

  To Sherida and Collin:

  For their unwavering belief in my writing,

  and for raising the best hero a girl could ask for.

  Thank you!

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Joy Adare, without whom this trilogy would never have been written. Thank you for talking me through the hurdles and for knowing exactly what I wanted to say when I couldn’t find the words. Thank you to Joy and Marni Folsom for plotting assistance.

  Thanks to Sherida Stewart for reading every draft for me, even on a tight deadline.

  Thank you again to my editor, Peter Senftleben, for believing in the Deadglass Trilogy. It’s been an awfully big adventure.

  Chapter One

  To the land of no return, the land of darkness,

  The place where dust is their nourishment, clay their food.

  They have no light, in darkness they dwell.

  Clothed like birds, with wings as garments.

  —From The Descent of the Goddess Ishtar into the Lower World

  Lucia knelt on the blood-soaked lawn of Kite Hill and let the shouts of victory wash over her like an acid rain. A stain of crimson crept up the skirt of her white gown. Strands of her snowy hair plastered across her vision as she held Johnny’s limp hand. A drop of rain splattered his high cheekbone, and she wiped it away with her white sleeve. Innocent, virtuous white. She should have pulled black Kivati battle gear from the Aether like he had, except it hadn’t protected him from the aptrgangr’s ax. His black battle shirt stuck to his lithe, muscled torso where the blade had entered. He lay on his back, limbs akimbo, just one of the sea of bodies scattered broken across the once-green parkland. His hair, ebony as a crow’s wing, was still in a sleek queue. Tears blurred her vision. They were all there—Kivati shape-shifters, Drekar dragon-shifters, human soldiers, and the demigod Kingu’s possessed bodies—united and equal in death as they’d never been in life.

  Not two feet away lay another body—aptrgangr, those who walked after death. Mud streaked the man’s thick gray overalls. Coal dust creased the worn edges of his face and decay ate the skin of his cheeks. He’d been dead a long time—since long before the battle that had turned this hill to a graveyard. But this death had finality to it. His body lay mercifully still, ax dropped an arm’s length away. The wraith that had possessed it until a few minutes ago had been banished beyond the Gate, where it belonged.

  All along the hillside and down past the still-burning cylindrical towers of the Gas Works, the Aether shimmered with the exodus of souls. It should be a shining, beautiful thing, but some of the mortal decay seeped up from the bodies to twist, as a foul taint, through the fabric of the universe. The Aether had been broken since the great Unraveling seven months ago. A rogue Kivati had brought down the Gates between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead, unleashing a legion of souls and the Babylonian demigod Kingu into the Living World, and collapsing civilization in a rain of skyscrapers and steel.

  Once freed, Kingu had gathered an army of the undead and marched on Seattle seeking Tiamat’s Heart, which would give him the Babylonian Goddess of Chaos’s god powers. If Lucia hadn’t disobeyed the Raven Lord, blackmailed Lord Kai, and led Kivati warriors to join the battle, Kingu might have won. If she hadn’t, Johnny might still be alive and it’d be only the soul-sucking Drekar and humans lying on the battlefield with their mouths open and their guts ripped out. The past and the present, the destruction of the Unraveling and the dead of the Gas Works, overlapped in her vision, and she felt the familiar beginnings of a panic attack squeeze her chest. Not again. Not here.

  “It was a good death,” a deep voice said above her.

  She wiped her eyes and glanced up, hoping to see a lean, dangerous face looking into hers, the proud nose and intense, violet-black stare of the Raven. But it was only Kai. She squeezed Johnny’s limp hand. “I killed him.”

  “Every warrior from the Western House who came knew what he was getting into. They fought for their honor and freedom. They died protecting the Kivati way. Don’t take that away from them.”

  She gave a hopeless little laugh. “When did blackmail become the Kivati way?”

  “Hey.” Kai pulled her to standing and pinned her with his Thunderbird gaze. The violet bands around his black irises that marked him as a Kivati shape-shifter expanded. “You’re all right, little warrior.” His broad frame blocked out the sight of the hill and his fingers sent trills of Aether to lick around her skin
. She heard nothing but the soft wind and his voice until her pulse slowed. “Shock is normal. This is your first battle, and you did your people proud.” He wrapped his leather jacket around her, and she clutched it to her chest. Tall, muscled, and imposing like all the Thunderbirds, Lord Kai had been the only one who would risk the Raven Lord’s wrath to come here. He might lead one of the four Kivati Houses, but he wasn’t decent. No tailored suit could mask all that wildness. His hair was a mane of black curls and a bandolier hung desperado style across his chest. He did forbidden things just to prove he wasn’t anyone’s pawn, including sleeping with one of their sworn enemies, the Drekar Astrid Zetian. But if the Raven Lord, Emory Corbette, found out about Zetian, he would probably kill Kai. So it had been easy for Lucia, once she’d known his secret, to blackmail Kai into risking his men in battle fighting Kingu. There was honor in dying for the Kivati. There was none in being killed for fucking a soul-sucker.

  Lucia knelt by Johnny, closed his eyes, and said a prayer to the Lady to guide him home. “He didn’t get much of a reprieve.”

  “Seven months can seem like a lifetime to a man with a second chance.”

  “Corbette was merciful.”

  “Only for you.”

  She glanced across Lake Union to where dusk backlit the ruined towers of downtown Seattle. The battle had taken place at the Gas Works, an old coal gasification plant that jutted out into the lake with an excellent view of Queen Anne Hill to the southwest. She could just see the yellow walls of the palatial Kivati Hall at the top of the hill hunkering down against the night. Crows from all over the city streaked the sky black as they returned to roost on the parapets and the surrounding hilltop trees. “You better pray he’ll be merciful again,” she told Kai.

  “You got balls of steel, Crane.” Kai loomed over her. He leaned down, his velvet voice a seductive purr only loud enough for her to hear. “But I’m not going to be the one on my knees. You’ll use every trick—and I mean every—to deflect Corbette from the truth. You better not wuss out on me when the Big Bad turns his screws in your sweet, little fingers. You take my secret to your grave.”

  She swallowed. Would Corbette hurt his fiancée? The prophesied Crane who was supposed to lead their people out of the darkness? She’d just undermined his rule by leading his warriors to battle against his orders. He couldn’t afford to be merciful. She felt the Aether, the shining water that filled the space between molecules of air and earth, wove the fabric of time and built the Gates, heat.

  Kai squeezed her arm as he flashed her a look beneath thick lashes. “Loose lips . . .”

  “Got it.” She straightened her spine and pulled the leather jacket around her shoulders like a shield. The jacket was permeated with the warmth of Kai’s body and the calming scent of fir. She lifted her chin as Kivati shape-shifters in their totem forms shot into the air above Kivati Hall and flew toward Kite Hill. The two Thunderbirds were magnificent. Giant birds with silvery wings the size of a pterodactyl, they ate whales and could pull fiery thunderbolts from the Aether with a twitch of their fingers. A reverent hush floated across the field as men caught sight of the two beautiful creatures. Behind them flew a dozen man-sized Crows with their majestic midnight wings and cruel beaks.

  But Lucia couldn’t tear her eyes away from the true danger—the Raven. Awesome. Terrible. Aether crackled over his feathers and pulsed out to warp the air around her. She watched his approach as if it were a steam train barreling down on her. He landed on the hillside, and torchlight glistened off his ebony feathers as he Changed. Aether shimmered over him like a blanket being shrugged off, and when it slipped away a man stood in the giant Raven’s place. Terrifyingly handsome, like a crack of lightning hurled from the Sky God’s staff, he was dark and brooding and altogether arrogant. The Thunderbirds had a height and muscle advantage on him, but every inch of his frame was sleek power. Everything about him was sharp: pitiless black eyes ringed by a violet band, a hooked nose, a severe line of a mouth. He was dark everywhere she was light, with skin the color of driftwood and hair blacker than coal. He’d pulled his clothing from the Aether when he’d Changed, his usual three-piece perfection of a midnight suit, silver studs in his cuff links, silver rings in his ears. But he’d forgotten to tie his necktie, and his shirt hung open to expose the vulnerable line of his neck. There his pulse beat steady, controlled. And why shouldn’t it? Impeccable, immovable Emory Corbette would never appear in public as anything less than perfect. He might have been an automaton, all robotic movement with no capacity for human error. No heart.

  Except the Aether crackled from his skin. All the Kivati shifters on the battlefield bowed their heads in the face of his dominance.

  “I did the right thing,” she blurted. “We won. The city is safe.”

  “Not here,” Corbette said.

  “I’m not sorry for it.” Her voice rose. “Don’t punish the others. They were under my orders.”

  “And since when do you give orders to my Thunderbirds?”

  She clutched Kai’s jacket to her. The thick leather was no shield for the Aether writhing from the Raven Lord. He took a step toward her. The noise of the soldiers and the cries of the wounded faded to static. How many times had she wished for him to lose his self-control? To come down to her level—mortal, imperfect, touchable? But here he was with his necktie undone and anger sparkling off him like a Death Valley sun. She was terrified. Her totem Crane beat inside her. Fly, it crooned. Fly!

  “Follow the Crane to destiny,” she recited.

  “Haven’t you left enough ruin in your wake?”

  A deep sob broke in her throat. The last line of the prophecy said, for behind her lies ruin, and Lucia had certainly caused destruction. Seven months ago her blood had brought down the Gate to the Land of the Dead. She pulled the jacket sleeves to hide her hands. Her scars had healed—she’d never scarred easily—but the memories still woke her screaming in the middle of the night. Would the image of this battle be the next one to wake her in the dark?

  “You are cruel, my lord.”

  Corbette’s eyes tightened. “That was uncalled for.” The violet band of his iris expanded, threatening to drown the black. “You make me forget myself.” He held out his hand, but she stepped back.

  “You expect me to be the Crane, don’t you?” Had he ever looked at her as Lucia and not the prophesied Harbinger? The panic attack threatened to come back full force. She beat it down. She’d wasted too many months feeling sorry for herself. Lifting her chin, she gave him her haughtiest glare. The look was ruined by a tear that slipped free, but she pushed on. “Well, no one can follow me if I don’t lead. Kingu marched on the city, and I made the call.”

  “I see.”

  “You chose to stay and guard Kivati Hall. I chose to join the Drekar and humans in the fight here. They needed us.”

  “You chose to join our ancient enemies instead of following my orders.”

  It sounded crazy when he said it.

  He took a step closer, and his voice dropped to grind like the rocks of the seabed. “Did you mean to replace me on the madrona throne, then? Should I call my second and meet you at dawn?”

  Her eyes widened. The transfer of power required a fight to the death, the animal way for dominance. Grace Mercer had taught her to throw a few punches, but there was no way she would survive two seconds in the ring with Corbette.

  “No?” He circled her, a predator playing with his prey. The hairs on the back of her neck rose as he took a breath at the base of her neck. “You smell like him.”

  “It’s not like that!”

  “I think you’d find the weight of the crown would ground your poor fragile wings, little bird.”

  She clenched her teeth. He’d never spoken to her like this. He’d always been unfailingly polite, if a trifle cold. This new Corbette was seductive, but even more dangerous. “Then why marry me if I’m so fragile?” she chewed out. “Maybe you should find someone better suited to kissing your ass.”

 
His nostrils flared. “You wish to end our engagement?”

  “Please.” With that cruel lie spilling off her tongue, the rest of the world snapped back to life. An all-too-real hush fell over the Kivati warriors surrounding her, silent as a catacomb.

  Corbette didn’t blink. His lips pulled back in polite smile. His anger dissipated, the cold searing his features again into the self-controlled alpha they knew all too well. He gave a sharp bow. “As you wish.” His shoulders relaxed. He turned to Lord Kai. “Please return Lady Lucia to her parents. They have been worried about her.”

  Kai nodded.

  Lucia watched the exchange while the Aether in her veins turned to ice. It was . . . over? Just like that? She hadn’t meant to challenge Corbette’s rule. She just wanted to be worthy of that stupid prophecy and mean something to her people. Something real, not an empty title. Corbette’s easy dismissal reinforced all her worst fears: he’d never really wanted her. He’d wanted a figurehead, a pretty, powerless poppet to sit at his side and agree with his every whim. The hope that he had seen something more in her—Lucia, not the Crane—fractured in a million pieces.

  She wished the ground would open and swallow her whole.

  Corbette turned away from Lucia before he lost control of his mask of emotions. She was no longer his responsibility. He might never see her again, never watch her Change to the graceful white Crane with the flash of red at her temple, never have to interrupt his work to go chasing after her. He was free of her upsetting influence. Free of her beguiling ways. Free of the fog that she laced through his brain like some fairy light leading weary travelers off course. He wouldn’t have to look at her every morning over the breakfast table and grit his teeth as she tossed his carefully laid plans on their head.