A bloodstained tale of a girl torn between her vows and her heart, where falling in love may be the deepest sin of all…
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lyndall Clipstone’s Unholy Terrors, which is out October 17th.
Everline Blackthorn has devoted her life to the wardens—a sect of holy warriors who guard against monsters known as the vespertine.
When a series of strange omens occur, Everline disobeys orders to investigate, and uncovers a startling truth in the form of Ravel Severin: a rogue vespertine who reveals the monsters have secrets of their own.
Ravel promises the help she needs— for a price. Vespertine magic requires blood, and if Everline wants Ravel to guide across the dangerous moorland, she will have to allow him to feed from her.
It’s a sin for a warden to feed a vespertine— let alone love one— and as Everline and Ravel travel further across the moorland, she realizes the question isn’t whether she will survive the journey, but if she will return unchanged. Or if she wants to.
And then, as though I’ve summoned him, I catch sight of a figure at the very edge of the flooded riverbank. The vespertine, draped beside the tributary we crossed on our way to the chapel—now flooded and frantic—churning with a rapid, hungry current. He’s half-in, half-out of the water. He’s got ahold of a thick handful of reeds, clutching it like a tether line. His shirt is hitched up, and holy light glimmers from a lurid wound at the curve of his ribs where the bone shard is still pierced through his skin.
I stride toward him with my hand tight around the Vale Scythe. I put my mud-caked boot on his chest, feeling the buoyancy of the water beneath him. The eager river. “Twice now,” I tell him, holding up my fingers for emphasis. “Twice I’ve had your life in my hands.”
He glowers at me, his swollen lips still stained by dregs of poison. His hair swirls in the water, drawn into snarls by the current. “Damn you, Warden. Damn you.”
Even now, half-dead and pinned beneath my boot, he’s unyielding. “Do you still think I won’t kill you? After all, you’ve made it clear that you’ll be of no use to me alive.”
The water foams around him. His eyes are dark, his fangs bared—the picture of abject fury. “I’ve seen the mercy wardens give to monsters.”
I look down at him. The sin of what I’m about to do comes over me with a dizzying rush. Broken vows upon broken vows. But I need a way to keep this boy—this monster—safe from harm and loyal to me. And right now, chilled from the rain and fatigued from the events of the night—his capture, our struggle, this reckless chase—there’s only one solution I can think of.
“I’ll guarantee your safety if you come with me. I will—” The words catch, tasting bitter as incense smoke. “I will make you my vowsworn.”
Even to speak it aloud feels like the worst heresy. All wardens promise themselves to Saint Lenore. But some wardens will also swear a vow to another, sealing their lives together. It’s the deepest fealty, a binding and holy connection that can only be undone with powerful magic.
The vespertine gives me a scathing look, with all the helpless fury of a cornered wolf—ears flattened, teeth bared. “Why would I ever want your vow?”
“Because any other warden would have already cut your throat. If we’re sworn, you’ll be under my protection. You’ll not be able to harm me, or I you. If I’m to save your life, then I want that certainty.”
He turns his face away. As if in denial of what he’s about to do, the way I’d cover my eyes when I awoke after a nightmare and could still see haunting shapes against the dark. Then his lashes dip, fluttering blackly against his paint-smeared cheeks; he thrusts his hand toward me.
“What a delight it will be,” he says, words laced by disgust, “being bound to you.”
I clutch at his wrist, feeling the leather edge of his bracers. We’re both rain-slick, and I can’t keep hold of him; I twist my sodden sleeve over my hand and try again, leaning back to pull with all my strength to drag him free of the water. We teeter on the bank for a moment, then tumble to the ground. I land heavily, draped across his chest with my undone hair spilling around us. Our eyes meet, and we’re so close. His gasping breath burns like fever against my skin. I can feel the rapid beat of his heart.
His face, for a fleeting moment, is all unguarded shock. “You saved me.”
“I could push you back in if you’d prefer.”
He shoves me away and rolls to his side, starting to cough. His chest heaves as he struggles to gather himself. I feel just as ragged and ruined. I lie back on the ground as the wind whisks over us, staring up at the clouds. The rain falls onto my cheeks like icy tears.
The vespertine starts to laugh, his eyes scrunched closed in a grimace. “You do realize how these types of vows are made, don’t you?”
When I swore my vows to the wardens, it was at the ossuary in the chapel. I remember Fenn’s hand beneath my elbow as I approached the altar, where the centermost skull—the effigy of Saint Lenore—was wreathed in gold. How I stood on tiptoe and pressed my lips to unyielding bone, sealing my promise with a kiss.
“Of course I know.” Unbidden, my gaze traces the curve of the vespertine’s mouth. Heat crawls over me beneath the chill of the rain, a flush that prickles my nape where my warden mark lies hidden. “Do you?”
He sits up slowly, wincing as the shard beneath his skin gives another twinge of magic. He smiles, baring his fanged teeth. “Yes. I do. We have our own version of your holy vows.” The way he says it, the word holy sounds like a curse. “I don’t trust you—or your promises, Warden. If you want me to swear fealty to you, then you’ll take my vow as well. So our truce will be doubly bound.”
My stomach tightens with an endless knot of apprehension as I remember the feel of his magic, the way it writhed around me. But I need him. I need to be able to trust him. And if this is what it takes to secure his help, then so be it. “Fine.”
“Fine,” he echoes. “You can go first.”
I push myself onto my knees, narrowing the distance between us. Slowly, I raise my hand and place it flat against his chest. His breath catches, and his fingers clench. Then, with effort, he forces himself to relax, and he reaches to me. Lays his own hand against my chest in an echo of my gesture. His skin is warm, even after being draped in the river; I can feel the heat through all the wet layers of my clothes. We sit unmoving, listening to the rush of water beside us, the rising violence of the wind as it casts across the moorland beyond.
Then I start to speak. “I, Everline Blackthorn, swear on the catacombs of the enclave chapel, on the ashen heart of Saint Lenore, that you will have my trust. I will never harm you. You are mine and will be protected with all in my power.”
Until this moment, I tried not to think of it, what these words would mean. Now it travels over me in a bone-aching shudder. We are bound. We will belong to each other.
The vespertine swallows audibly, and his hand gives a small twitch before pressing firmly against my heart. “I, Ravel, swear by the blood and power of the Sanguine Saint that you’ll have my trust. I will never harm you. You are mine and will be protected with all in my power.”
My eyes snap open, and I look at him, shocked. The air shimmers with the weight of it, this secret shared. This creature is no longer just vespertine; he has given me his name. “Ravel?” I repeat, the taste of it strange and syrupy against my tongue.
He stares past my shoulder, features schooled into determined indifference. “Finish the vows, Warden.”
I shiver, cold from the wind and the horror of what I’m doing. Sin after sin after sin. But what does it matter, this unholy pact, if I can save Lux and secure our safe passage into the Thousandfold?
I edge closer to the vespertine—Ravel—and slide my hand up to cradle his jaw. I’m trembling. He touches my cheek, then drags his thumb across my lips. I bite back a gasp at his touch. I’m struck by the same feeling as when I first cut myself to mark my blade before a fight—the way I held my breath, the anticipation of pain that overlaid an undeniable thrill.
I’ve been kissed before: once, by a girl who’d accompanied her new-marked warden sister to the gathering, who hadn’t known me or my treasonous bloodline. As I slipped away with her, I’d thought it a harmless moment of sweetness I could steal, like licking the spoon after filling a vial with honey. But afterward, I’d felt only anger at myself for hoping it would be so easy. I was still Everline Blackthorn, magicless and baseborn. No fleeting kiss would transform me like a maiden in a fable.
Or so I’d thought. But now, as I lean toward Ravel, it feels as though I’m in the darkness, falling, falling, and I hope that whatever is beneath me when I land will be soft, not sharp.
I close my eyes and pull him toward me, fierceness surging through my veins like a rise of wildfire. His lips meet mine, and he makes a soft, peculiar sound. A shimmering current paints the air, and I open my mouth—a gasp finally escaping me—and his mouth opens, too. He clutches at my hip and drags me closer. His tongue sweeps mine, and I taste something bitter and dark, coffee left too long on the stove, the alluring decay of fruit beneath the clementine tree, the rust and ash flavor of his magic.
I clench my eyes tightly closed as images stream through my mind, one after another. But there’s no cathedral ruins bathed in crimson moonlight. No horned monster staring down at me from a pulpit, no treacle-haired woman in her stained gown. There’s only a boy atop a sweeping flight of stairs, the crumbled shape of an arched window behind him. A girl stands at his side, swathed in a woolen cloak that hides her face and hair. She holds his hand with desperate tenderness, her childish fingers laced through his in an unbreakable grip.
Ravel pulls back, his hands at my shoulders, forcing distance between us. He’s wide-eyed and shocked, the expression so incongruously human.
“I saw . . . ,” I begin, but his brows knit together, and he turns away, glaring at the river, the waves that lash the banks. I fall to silence, swallowing down my questions like a handful of poisoned berries.
Ravel licks at the edge of his thumb. There’s a wound there. That’s what he put on my lips. His blood. I scrub my mouth against the back of my hand, trying to wipe away the memory of our kiss.
He gives me a hard-edged smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Well, we’ve made our vows, Warden. Shall we call truce?”
