From Alexandra Christo, the author of To Kill a Kingdom, comes The Night Hunt, a dark fantasy romance about a monstrous girl who feeds on fear and the Gods-cursed boy who falls in love with her.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Alexandra Christo’s The Night Hunt, which is out October 10th.
Atia is a monster who feeds on fear. As the last of her kind, she hides in the shadows of the world to escape the wrath of the unpredictable Gods. Silas is a Herald, carrying messages and ferrying the dead as punishment for a past he can’t remember. Stripped of his true name, he yearns to recover his identity.
Atia would never dream of allying with someone like him, but when she breaks a sacred law and the Gods send monsters to hunt her, Silas offers an irresistible deal: he’ll help avenge her family and take on the Gods who now hunt her, if she helps him break his curse and restore his humanity. All they need to do is kill three powerful creatures: a vampire, a banshee, and one of the very Gods who destroyed both their lives. Only together can they finally rewrite their destinies.
Chapter 7
Silas
The Nefas is a sight to behold.
I have seen many monsters in my time, but never miracles. And the sight of her feels oddly miraculous.
Her skin has taken on the hue of the ocean, blanketing her in ripples a deep, drowning blue. Her hair, silver as a new coin, looks like the crest of a wave washing over her shoulders. She has horns, but they are not jagged and pointed, or red as blood like some of the creatures who darken the night. They are the rays of the sun made solid, too intricately woven for me to find their end.
She truly looks like she was born from Gods.
And she isn’t happy to see me.
Quickly, she shakes the monster from her form and brings the illusion of humanity to her surface.
I feel a pang of disappointment.
“You,” the Nefas says, outraged. “Are there no other Heralds this side of Rosegarde?”
She eyes the linen of my suit and scoffs.
I think about explaining our system and how the Heralds have divided up the territories within the fi ve elemental kingdoms, but I don’t think she’d care.
I survey the dead man at her feet.
It’s as though all the blood in his body has dried up, leaving his face hollow and pale. His hair is the color of cobwebs and his fingernails are torn right to the beds.
I’ve never seen a body quite like it.
Or noticed this odd sensation in the pit of my stomach before.
Usually when someone dies in my territory, I feel the tingle of their souls like butterflies in my stomach. Then comes the ringing in my ears as they sing to me. As with everything in my life, it’s always unchanged.
This time was different.
Instead of a tingle, a cold chill skittered up my spine, and in place of the ringing, there was a guttural scream beckoning me forward, louder even than the melody of Atia’s magic.
For the first time in what feels like lifetimes, something new happened.
And despite there being a dead body involved, I get a thrill from it.
You’d think being a Herald would be exciting, caught between the mystical world and the human world, but it feels less like a sacred duty and more like a cage. I’m a prisoner in the mystical world, and in the human world I’m just a shadow.
I don’t belong anywhere, and no matter how much I try to obey and enforce the rules, relay the Gods’ curses and do their bidding, I feel like I must have been terrible in my past life to deserve being stuck this way.
So do something about it, Silas.
“Wh-what is going on? Who is that?”
For the first time I notice the human boy beside the Nefas, wide-eyed and pointing at me like he’s seen a ghost.
“That’s a Herald,” the Nefas says.
“A Herald,” the boy repeats. “They’re real?”
“Unfortunately.” She rolls her eyes.
I smirk.
The boy looks young, around the same age as I must’ve been when I first died, only I’m pretty sure I didn’t have the same baffled look on my face.
I’m not sure what I expected when I got here, but it definitely wasn’t to see him standing by my new monster’s side. Nor to see the girl in question looking so conflicted.
I thought she would be pleased with the chaos she’s caused, but there is a strange look in her, hidden behind the glare she shoots my way.
Her eyes are white from the kill, a hint of the creature that lies beneath her human facade. I can see the points of her teeth, sharpening as she lets the illusion slip, just a little.
She should look monstrous, but she doesn’t.
She looks awful and beautiful.
She looks sad.
“This is not what it seems,” she says.
I can’t help but scoff.
“It’s been a busy week for you.”
She sighs before me, irritated. “I didn’t kill that first man.”
“Oh?” I say, raising a brow. “I suppose you didn’t kill this one either?”
“This one was an accident.”
“Bit late to tell him that you’re sorry.”
Not that it would matter.
“I didn’t know humans could actually be scared to death,” the Nefas says.
“I’m glad that this was a learning experience for you.”
She glares and I can’t help but smile.
It’s said that her kind were the bane of the Gods before the war got them kicked out of Oksenya. I don’t know the exact details, but I know the Nefas killed the God of Eternity and the High Gods banished them from Oksenya because of it. They’re meant to be bloodthirsty creatures who delighted in torture.
Yet this girl won’t even look at her kill, her eyes flitting to the ground by his feet and then back to me again.
She chews on the corner of her lip.
“She was just trying to protect me,” the human boy says.
I turn and the Nefas steps quickly in front of him like a shield.
“Shut up, Tristan,” she hisses.
I eye the two of them.
What a strange pair they make.
“Look, I don’t know who you are or what’s going on here,” the boy—Tristan—says. “But whatever Atia did, she didn’t mean it.”
Atia.
So the monster does have a name.
I smile, tasting the word inside my mind, toying with saying it out loud.
“She’s a good person,” Tristan says.
“She’s not a person at all.”
And I must be the one to remind her of that.
“You have broken the most sacred of rules, the condition of a monster’s peaceful presence in the mortal realm,” I declare, ever the messenger. “For your sins, by the power of the High Gods and with their eternal blessing, I decree you doomed. I invoke their curse upon you.”
The words themselves are chiseled by magic, a drop of the Gods’ powers coating every syllable. Once I speak them, that power erupts from me in a fragment of light.
It shoots for Atia, puncturing clear through her heart.
She stumbles backward, a hand to her chest where it struck.
Her face contorts and she bends over, heaving like she could spew it back out.
The human rushes to her side.
Does it hurt? The look of anguish on her face takes me aback in a way it never has with other monsters.
Would I have felt something similar to her, when I was cursed to become a Herald?
Who would have decreed my punishment?
“What’s to come isn’t to be taken lightly,” I say. “The curse will soon cause you to wither.”
Atia’s teeth clench tightly together as she looks at me in loathing.
I wonder how it will work on her.
If the curse will start small, siphoning off a piece of her she might not even notice, before it starts slowly eating away at all that she is, causing the magic that lives inside her to turn against her.
“I warned you that your time would run out, Atia of the Nefas.”
She frowns at the use of her name, a quick pinch of the brow to show her surprise that I’d dare speak it.
“I can’t be cursed,” she says. She lifts her chin up high.
But for all her bravado, I see the sorrow in her eyes, and the new fear creeping alongside it. Is this the first time she has felt such a thing, after a lifetime of bringing it forth in others?
“I can’t be cursed,” Atia repeats. I’m not sure which of us she’s trying to convince. “This was an accident. It wasn’t . . . I didn’t—”
She cuts herself off before she can reason an excuse.
I almost feel sorry for her, before I remind myself that she’s a monster.
A killer, just like all the others.
I touch a hand to my blade, thinking back to the Keeper’s words. How only killing a God could unmake a Herald, if we were ever able to do such a thing without perishing ourselves.
A killer to do my killing for me.
Someone to wield my blade in a way I could never.
“Come on, Tristan,” Atia says. “We’re leaving. It isn’t safe with him here.”
I arch a brow. “Which one of us is a monster?”
Atia sneers.
She grabs the human boy by the arm and then waves her hand in the air, pulling the threads of reality open at the seams. The gateway she creates ripples like a blanket of water over the streets, alight in the same shade of blue that threatens to spill from her skin. The world molds and reshapes against it.
Atia steps forward, ready to make her escape. But running from the body won’t let her outrun the curse. She should know that. It is inside her now, and sooner or later it will overtake her. Then I’ll be the one collecting her body and throwing it into the rivers with all the other once-monsters who couldn’t control themselves.
There her soul will remain, drowning in eternity.
Unless . . .
“I’ll see you soon,” I promise.
And when I do, you’ll realize there’s only one way out of this, little monster. Only one bargain you can strike to undo your fate.
Atia casts one last look my way, alight in daring.
“You’ll have to catch me first.”
She jumps into her gateway, pulling the human through with her.
