Casteel slid his hand across my upper chest, curling his arm around me from behind as he bowed his head to mine. “Poppy,” he whispered.

No.

My chest tightened as sorrow sank its claws so deeply into me, I could taste the bitterness in my throat. I knew better. Casteel had told me that he believed Ian had Ascended. This shouldn’t be news to me, but a part of me had hoped…had prayed that Ian hadn’t. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it confirmed we either shared one parent—our nameless birth mother—or possibly none at all. I didn’t care about that because he was still my brother. I’d just wanted him to be like me, to have Ascended into something else. Or that he simply hadn’t become a vampry. Then I wouldn’t have to make that choice I’d just spoken to Queen Eloana about.

“I’m sorry,” Vonetta whispered.

The back of my throat burned as I closed my eyes. Images of Ian and me flashed rapidly behind my lids—us collecting shells along the glistening beaches of the Stroud Sea, him older and sitting with me in my bare room in Masadonia, telling me stories of tiny creatures with gossamer wings who lived in the trees. Ian hugging me goodbye before he left for the capital—

And all of that was gone now? Replaced by something that preyed upon others?

Anger and grief rushed through me like a river swelling over its banks. Off in the distance, I heard a wolven’s mournful howl—

Vonetta dropped my hands as another keening wail tore through the air, closer this time. The anger inside me grew. My skin began to hum. That cellular need from earlier, when I realized what could have been done to my birth parents, returned. I wanted to utterly and completely destroy something. I wanted to see those armies that Queen Eloana had spoken of unleashed. I wanted to watch them crest the Skotos Mountains and descend upon Solis, sweeping across the lands, burning everything down. I wanted to be there, beside them—

“Poppy.” Kieran’s voice sounded wrong, scratchy and full of rocks as he touched my arm and then my cheek.

Casteel’s arm tightened around me as he pressed his front to my back. “It’s okay.” He folded his other arm around my waist. “It’s all right. Just take a deep breath,” he ordered quietly. “You’re calling the wolven.” A pause. “And you’re starting to glow.”

It took a moment for Casteel’s voice to reach me, for his words to make sense. The wolven…they were reacting to me—to the rage seeping into my every pore. My heart tripped over itself as the need for retribution gnawed at my insides. That feeling—that power it invoked…it terrified me.

I did what Casteel had ordered, forcing myself to take a deep breath and breathe through the way it scalded my throat and lungs. I didn’t want that, to see anything burn. I just wanted my brother, and I wanted the Ascended unable to do this to another person.