Runemaker, page 1
The end is here.
Tenn thought the spirits wanted him to find his fellow Hunter, Aidan, to win the war against the undead. But with Aidan on the brink of self-destruction and Tenn reeling from his lover’s spite, their fated convergence seems far from promising.
Especially because Aidan no longer appears to be fighting for the living.
With the Dark Lady whispering commands and Tomás guiding his hand, Aidan slips deeper into darkness. And while the world rallies for its final battle against the Dark Lady’s minions, Tenn finds himself torn between saving the boy who’s slipping away and fulfilling a prophecy he can’t understand—one that will require him to harness the most powerful magic the world has ever seen: the Sphere of Maya.
And depending on who unleashes its power, that magic could either save humanity...or erase it.
Praise for Runebinder:
“Smart and original, this devastating fantasy has irresistible characters and startling twists around every corner. And can I just say: Sexy. As. Hell.”
—New York Times bestselling author Andrea Cremer
“Dark, fascinating, and intense.”
—Cindy Pon, author of Want and Serpentine
“A roller coaster ride through a world of chaos and blood.”
—Carrie Ryan, New York Times bestselling author of the Forest of Hands and Teeth series and Daughter of Deep Silence
“Runebinder is what the dark side of magic looks like. Bloody and brilliant.”
—Erica Cameron, author of Island of Exiles
Praise for Runebreaker:
“The Runebinder universe continues to expand the scope of queer YA fiction, asserting that LGBTQ characters can assume any narrative role: hero, villain, partner, lover, traitor, and, in this case, anything but the traditional tragic victim.”
—Booklist
ALEX R. KAHLER is many things, but first and foremost, he’s a Sagittarius. He’s taught circus arts in Madrid, drummed with Norse shamans, studied writing in Scotland and watched the Northern Lights from a hot tub in Iceland...and that’s the abbreviated list. He writes fantasy for adults and teens, with a special focus on LGBTQ+ characters and immersive mythologies. Alex is a nomad at heart.
Visit Alex online at www.ARKahler.com.
RUNEMAKER
Alex R. Kahler
www.harlequinbooks.com.au
for those who wish to write a better future
Contents
Part 1
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
Part 2
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Part 3
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Part 4
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
“If we are to wait
for the gods to answer
we will die with our hands
cupped to our ears.
We must act.
We must speak as gods.
We must make Creation kneel.”
—Elizabeth’s Diary
(no date found)
PART 1
THE HEARTS OF MEN
CHAPTER ONE
TENN
Tenn thought he knew Hell.
He’d seen cities ravaged—men and women and children torn apart or devoured alive while their homes burned around them. He had watched his friends die because of his own mistakes. But as he stood surrounded by the flaming ruins of some unknown city, listening to the manic laughter of the guy he had traveled so far to find, he knew those visions had only been precursors. This was the start of something different. Something worse.
It wasn’t just the breadth of destruction that chilled him. Everything was smoke and charred buildings and melted glass, the sky itself a roiling mass of red clouds as if it, too, had been burned in the attack. No—sheer destruction was something he was used to.
It was the smell.
It settled deep within his nostrils, seeped through his blood. A great deal of magic had been channeled to level the city. More magic than even he had used, or—as the case had often been—had used him. But this wasn’t the same power. This felt tainted. Stained. This magic smelled like decay.
It reminded him of how the necromancer Matthias’s magic had felt: otherworldly in its power, a shadow to Tenn’s light. The same elements as those he himself harnessed, but pulled from a different place. A darker place. One stained with blood and grave dust.
And somehow, this boy, this naked, tattooed, laughing boy, was the one who had wielded it. He couldn’t have been much older than Tenn. Maybe nineteen or twenty, tops. And somehow, he had leveled what might have ben the largest city in Britain.
The spirits had said that the guy before him would help Tenn end the Dark Lady. So why was he wielding a power that seemed to be pulled right from her breast?
Tenn knelt at the boy’s side. He wanted to blush, to look away, but his gaze was snared. He’d seen his face in the visions, in the dreams that had followed, but he was more real, more beautiful, than Tenn had ever let himself imagine. He was naked as day, seemingly every inch of his dark skin covered in tattoos and wounds, and his body was as carved as the incubus Tomás’s. His sleek abs, his chiseled arms, the sharp planes of his hips and fuzzy abdomen... Tenn coughed and looked back to the guy’s face, to the slight scruff, the pierced lip, the sharp eyebrows and Fire-flecked eyes.
He was beautiful in a way that even Tomás and Jarrett could never emulate. Wild. Ferocious. Perhaps it was a gift of Fire—a physique to rouse passion in anyone looking. At least, that’s what Tenn tried to convince himself, what with Jarrett standing only a foot away.
The guy was stunning.
He was also clearly unhinged.
Tenn had already tried asking him who he was, where they were, what had happened here. Every time, he’d gotten a similar response—a laugh, a curse, a shiver. Every time, Tenn doubted the wisdom of the spirits more. They had told him to come here, to find his “other half,” and had given him the tools to do it. So why did it seem like everything had gone off course?
Tenn’s only certainty was that this was most definitely the one he was meant to find, and not because of the magic that had leveled the landscape, and not just because Water seemed to quiver in the guy’s presence, agitated like tides pulled toward another moon.
He knew, because no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t heal the boy with Earth.
Blood smeared his flesh. Blood and hundreds of wounds that made no sense for the scene—small serrations, bruises, brands, abrasions. Burns across his palm. The first digits of his pinkie and ring finger freshly snipped off. As if he had been tortured. Not as if he’d just fought a huge battle.
Tenn’s eyes shifted to the boy’s Hunter’s mark, the tattoo that bonded him to the Spheres, all concentric circles and runes. Another brand—larg
For some reason, the brand made Tenn’s gut clench and Water tremble in fear. He couldn’t stare at it for long.
Even though it repulsed him, he placed his hands gently over the mark, trying not to squirm when the boy groaned, his eyes fluttering without seeing. This was clearly the cause of whatever kept Tenn’s magic at bay. Maybe, if he tried healing this...
Tenn opened to the Sphere of Earth, that magical, heavy energy center deep within his pelvis, and spread that power up through his arms, into his fingertips. Into the boy.
And felt nothing.
Normally, there was a snap. A connection as power met flesh, as purpose met need. As wounds closed and bones mended and flesh smoothed.
But this...this was something he’d never experienced before. He could sense the boy’s body under his fingertips. Could sense the wounds with blinding, burning clarity—the boy was in so. Much. Pain. But no matter how much Tenn pressed, no matter how firmly he willed his magic into the wounds, his powers skirted over and around the boy’s cuts like fog on ice.
The boy was here. The boy was here.
Yet he was even farther away than when Tenn had been in America.
“What happened to you?” Tenn whispered.
“We need to get out of here,” Jarrett said. He knelt down at Tenn’s side, examining the boy with a strange look in his eyes. Jealousy? Fear? Tenn couldn’t place it. All he knew was, in the days leading up to this journey, Jarrett had grown distant. Moody. A trait Tenn knew all too well. “If this was a battle, we don’t want to be here when whoever did this returns.”
Tenn’s thoughts were slow.
“I don’t think this was a battle.” Tenn looked at his lover. “I think he was the one who did this.”
“Him?” Dreya said. She was perfectly poised even now, on the other side of the world, on a battlefield that was not a battlefield, by a savior who was not a savior. The Sphere of Air burned pale blue in her throat, keeping the smoke and embers away and—judging by the slight furrow of her eyebrows—scanning the surrounding area. Her twin brother, Devon, stood at her side, dark and unreadable as ever, his chin tilted back as though admiring the fire-rimmed sky.
“That is impossible,” she continued. “The destruction spreads for miles. No one could do that, not even—”
“Not even you.” The boy coughed. Giggled. “I’m more powerful than you, Tenn. Just like she promised.”
Instantly, the group quietened, focusing back on the boy. Tenn’s heart leaped—the boy’s voice lilted with the hint of a Scottish accent, but there was something familiar in it. Something almost comforting.
“You know my name,” Tenn whispered.
“I know everything about you.” His eyes rolled around, unfocused. “Everything. I know you’re here to kill me.”
“We’re not,” Tenn said. Gods, this felt like putting a puzzle together face-side down. He knew what this was supposed to look like, this meeting of the chosen ones, and yet no matter what he tried, he couldn’t make the pieces fit. Doubt seethed in his stomach, roiling with Water’s own depression. “We’re here to help you.” Somehow.
The boy laughed even louder.
At least, he started laughing. Then his laughter broke into a sob. For a brief moment, Tenn thought the guy was going to have a breakdown. Then he clenched his teeth and hissed in a breath.
“You can’t help me. No one can.” He closed his eyes and was lost once more.
Jarrett sighed.
“We aren’t getting anywhere. Come on. We need to get him somewhere safe.”
“How?” Tenn asked, snippier than he meant. He wasn’t angry at Jarrett—he was angry at this.
This didn’t feel right. Not at all. A strange magic hung thick in the air and this nameless guy was barely coherent and this was not how everything was supposed to go.
Then Water simmered in the back of his mind—of course this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Since when had anything in his life gone right?
“The runes—” Jarrett began, but Tenn cut him off.
“They don’t work like that. Only someone channeling magic through them gets transported.”
The runes that had allowed them to travel might have been more powerful than the world had seen—potentially ever—but that didn’t mean they were perfect. In order to use the runes he’d learned for travel, the traveler had to be attuned to Earth or Air. Judging from the destruction around them, Tenn doubted the boy was anything but a Fire mage.
“So we get him to snap out of it.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Tenn bit.
It was Devon who saved them from further discussion.
He stalked over to the boy’s other side and knelt down. Stared at the chuckling boy with narrowed, pale blue eyes, his expression serious behind the folds of his burgundy scarf. Then, without preamble, he reached across the boy’s body and grabbed the wounded Hunter’s mark. Hard.
Instantly, the boy’s laughter broke into a scream.
“Devon, what the—” Tenn said, but Devon’s eyes cut him off. As did the naked boy’s words.
“Stop! Stop!”
Devon released the boy’s arm and rocked back on his heels.
“Who are you?” he asked, words muffled by his ever-present burgundy scarf. “And where are we?”
“I’m Aidan, you arsehole!” the boy yelled. “And this is London. Was London.” He giggled again. “Was, was...”
“Fixed him,” Devon said. He stood and walked back over to his twin sister, who watched it all with absolutely no expression on her pale face. “Somewhat.”
“What do you mean, London?” Tenn asked.
Aidan. The boy’s name is Aidan. The name rolled through his thoughts, somehow right. Even if everything else seemed so wrong. Tenn looked around at the desolate landscape. This place was nothing like the London he’d imagined. Where was the Thames? The Eye? Parliament? Everything around them was flat and glassy, smoking and charred. “Did you...did you do this?”
Aidan nodded. The smile on his face, streaked with blood, was positively demonic.
“And I’ll burn the whole world down if I have to,” he whispered. “Just you to try to—”
But whatever he was about to say was lost to the violent shudder that tore through his body, his teeth clamping so tight Tenn could hear the snap of bone. Aidan convulsed on the ground, grunting hard in the back of his throat, and his whole back arched up in a rictus.
Tenn reached for Aidan, tried to pulse more power through him. But once more, he couldn’t. The power didn’t connect. The boy continued to spasm under Tenn’s grip.
“Tenn, do something,” Jarrett said. His voice was uneasy. Jarrett was rarely uneasy—Air allowed for nothing less than certainty. The only certainty was this: if this boy had leveled the largest city in Britain, he would have no trouble taking out a few measly Hunters.
“I’m trying!” Tenn said. “I can’t heal him!”
“And you won’t.”
The voice cut through Tenn’s thoughts. At the same moment, the twins and Jarrett snapped to attention. Jarrett drew his sword, and the twins pulled deep through their Spheres—Fire flickered around Devon’s fists, and Air swirled Dreya’s hair into a halo.
But when Tenn looked to the voice, he didn’t see a necromancer or Howl. He didn’t see Tomás.
Instead, the woman walking toward them was no older than himself. Black skin slicked with steaming water. Waterlogged dreadlocks tinted magenta. Torn pink T-shirt and ragged black jeans, enormous boots. A broken steel pipe held in one hand.
She stepped up to Aidan’s side as though there weren’t three Hunters ready to tear her apart. She looked only at him, and her face—chiseled from war and bloodshed—was soft.
Tenn looked to his comrades. He hadn’t felt her approaching, even though Earth should have alerted him to footfalls on the soil. Judging from the expression on Dreya’s face, she hadn’t felt the woman approaching either.
The only other person Tenn knew who could move like that was Tomás.
Was she one of the Kin?
“Who are you?” He didn’t move from Aidan’s side.
She didn’t answer at first. Just stared at Aidan. Reached out. Hovered a hand over his forehead.
