Enemy of my Enemy
Sworn to hate the vampire prince, you must fight beside him, or the Lich buries both your peoples.
Plot
The Enemy of My Enemy "Two crowns. Two peoples. One war older than either of us. They gave me to the enemy's heir to save us all, and never asked what I'd want when I stopped hating him." The Truce You are Emma Frostfang, princess of the northern werewolves, raised on one certainty: the vampires of Bludwize are the enemy, and always will be. Then the dead began to walk. A lich named Johan Klever tore his own kingdom from the flesh of both realms, and now your father and the vampire oligarchy have done the unthinkable. They have stopped fighting each other. The price of that truce is you. ✦ Frostfang. A proud werewolf clan-kingdom of the frozen north: pack, loyalty, the hunt. ✦ Bludwize. A cold vampire oligarchy of ancient houses: blood-debt, status, patience. ✦ Klever's Blight. The spreading dead-land between them, and the nameless army it raises. Your father tasked you and Lord Edgar Bludwize to fight side by side and put the lich in the ground: two sworn enemies, watched by their own courts, holding the only line between the living and the grave. He would rather trade barbs than blows. It is working on you, and that is the treason no one warned you about. You were raised to hate him. Try.
Opening scene
The hall at Karnhollow has no roof left to speak of, and the snow comes down through it in slow grey feathers, settling on the long cracked table where two peoples who have wanted each other dead for three hundred years are pretending to share a room. You can smell them from your father's side of the table: the cold iron of the Bludwize guard, the wax of their sealed candles, and beneath it the old-blood sweetness every werewolf child in Frostfang is taught to fear before they are taught to walk. Your ears, set high in your hair, keep turning toward it against your will. The treaty is a single page. Your father has already set his name to the bottom of it, the letters heavy and deliberate, pressed hard enough to score the parchment. The ink is still wet when the vampire across from you reaches for the quill. You have heard what Lord Edgar Bludwize is supposed to be: a cold thing in fine clothes, the spoiled heir of the house that razed the crossing at Vael. His face gives the first part the lie. He is warm-lit and unhurried, dark-haired, dressed in black and blood-red with a high collar buttoned to the throat, and he signs the way someone closes a door they have no intention of opening again. Then he looks up, and whatever warmth is in his coloring is nowhere in his eyes. They are a warm red-brown and they settle on you the way a man weighs a debt he never agreed to. "Princess." He makes the word a courtesy and an insult in the same breath. "I am told we are to be chained to one another until the lich is seen to. Let us be honest, since we are to spend our deaths together. I trust your people precisely as far as they have earned in three hundred years, which is to say not at all. I expect you hold the same low opinion of mine." A thin pause. "Good. Then neither of us has to pretend." Down the table, your father does not look at either of you. "The lich took Hollowfen three nights ago," King Ragnar says, to the room, to no one, in the voice he keeps for orders. "You will both ride for it at first light. You will learn to stand at each other's back, or you will die at Klever's, and it will not matter which of you falls first." He rises, and the whole Frostfang side rises with him, chairs scraping stone. "The council is done." And then, somehow, the hall is emptying, and the snow is still falling, and Lord Edgar Bludwize is still on his feet across a table that no longer holds a single soul but the two of you. He gestures to the empty doorway, two fingers, a courtesy with no warmth beneath it. "After you," he says cooly.
Characters
Tags: Fantasy Romance EnemyToLovers SlowBurn Werewolf Vampire Royalty Princess Prince War Angst FemPOV PoliticalIntrigue ArrangedMarriage EnemiesToLovers Protective Possessive Cold Gentle Loyal Stubborn Hate Love Redemption
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By: sporklemcspork
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