Malice shooting through his veins, Henrik got right in his face. “Nei, I am being realistic.”
Jakob’s blue eyes flashed. “Fuck realistic. Warriors fight.” He jabbed his finger into Henrik’s chest. “You have given up.”
The king’s fist was in motion before he’d even thought to respond. His brother’s head snapped back as blood exploded from his lip. The sight further fueled the monster inside him, and Henrik struck again, unleashing a rib-snapping punch to Jakob’s side. The warrior staggered but just managed to regain his footing before he fell. And still he didn’t raise his hands in return.
“Fight back!” Henrik swung again, delivering an uppercut to the jaw that slammed his brother against the stone wall.
“Nei,” Jakob growled.
The next swing split open the warrior’s cheek just below his eye.
“Fight back, damn you!”
Jakob held still against the wall. “Not until you do.”
The words sank into Henrik’s rational consciousness and gave him pause. He stumbled backward, one step, two, until he crashed into one of the chairs at the large table. And then the battle was all in his head between the two diverging sides of himself. Between the monster and the man. The former was getting stronger every day, no matter how hard the latter fought to rein it in.
He dropped his forehead into his hands and curled his fingers into fists in his hair. He was so thirsty. Emptiness ached into the depths of his very soul. Every tissue in his body screamed for sustenance, but what was the use? Feeding brought him so little relief that the torment was greater after each failed attempt.
A hand gripped Henrik’s shoulder.
“Fight, brother,” Jakob said, his tone strained. “Stay with me and fight.”
The king mulled over the words for a long moment, their wisdom sinking deep. No matter how desperate things looked, he had to hold it together. He had to fight. If for no other reason than to prevent Jakob and the others from being distracted out in the field by their worry for him. “All right.”
“Yeah?”
Henrik nodded. “And I’m sorry.” He jutted his chin toward the wall. “I’ll fight. I’ll fight this as long as I can. But you have to promise me something in return.”
“Name it.”
Henrik hated asking this of Jakob, of all people, but his brother was one of the few physically matched enough to heed the request. “I’d rather be dead than a menace. When the day comes that I have lost all humanity, when all that remains is a monster in man’s clothing, I want you to be the one to finish it.”
Chapter 2
Kaira Sorensen stood in the gallery and stared at her photographs hanging on the wall. Her photographs. The thought made her stomach flip-flop and her grin go all goofy. So many of her dreams had gone unfulfilled, but not this one. She’d frozen her butt off for two weeks and scrimped and saved for almost two years. And now she got to see her own shots hanging in a public gallery and entered in a juried competition that could help launch her photography from hobby to career. For however long she had left.
Pressing the back of her hand to her forehead, Kaira hoped the low-grade fever she was running didn’t get worse. The wear and tear of traveling almost seventeen hundred miles from her home in Denmark to Tromsø, Norway, had taken it out of her. And even though she’d arrived two days early and slept for almost eighteen hours straight, exhaustion had left her a little ragged around the edges.
No matter. For the next four days, she wasn’t an orphan who had no memory of her parents. She wasn’t a cancer patient. And she wasn’t sick. She was a photographer. Dammit.
One of the nice things about getting away from everyone you knew was the freedom to be someone else. Even if for just a short while.
Kaira smoothed a hand over the periwinkle-blue gown she’d splurged on. No way did she want to appear down on her luck at the show’s opening night reception. Not with some of the biggest names in aurora photography in attendance.
A man fell in beside her. “Is this your first show?” he asked in Norwegian, similar enough to her native Danish that she could understand him plainly.
She stopped fidgeting and smiled up at him. “No,” she said, in English. “My third.” Oh, my God! Anders Lang! Kaira swallowed the squeak that threatened to escape. Lang was an American and one of the five judges in the juried competition. And he was one of a handful of renowned aurora chasers. He’d made a name for himself by, among other things, capturing an entire series of vivid blue auroras. That hue was the rarest of the rare. A photographer could camp out an entire season of nights and never see blue lights, let alone capture them on film. “My first time at Nordlysfestivalen, though. I’m Kaira Sorensen.” She extended her hand.
“Anders Lang,” he said, returning the shake. “Tell me about your work.”
She turned to the grouping of six photographs—all each entrant was allowed to showcase for the competition. “My series is called Cathedrals. I was inspired by the almost architectural features of high-altitude auroras. And their height allowed me to capture multiple colors.” Green was most common at the lower altitudes of an aurora, usually about sixty miles overheard, while red often dominated the higher altitudes, the colors created by solar energy interacting with atmospheric gases at different altitudes. Kaira stepped closer to her most prized image. “I took this one the second night in the field. The lights were super intense. Much lower than the whole rest of the trip.”
“And you captured yourself some nitrogen emissions, I see.” He leaned in to study the single violet aurora she’d ever committed to film.
The purple ribbon of light thrilled her every time she looked at it. “I did,” she said. “The lights were spectacular the rest of my time out there, but never quite as intense as that night.”
He stepped back from the photograph and tilted his head. “How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Given that the typical aurora chaser was a middle-aged man with a mile-wide streak for adventure, Kaira was prepared for the question. “I don’t mind. Twenty.”
His eyebrows reached for his receding hairline. “And why Cathedrals?”
Kaira’s gaze drifted to the most architectural of all the images. “My parents died when I was eight. A few months later, I was still having trouble sleeping. One night, I was just staring out my window. Suddenly, the sky exploded. I was terrified at first. I’d seen the lights before, but something about their intensity and their color... But then, it was like the sky was dancing—or speaking—just for me. It made me feel so much less alone. At the time, I wasn’t old enough to think of it this way. But now, looking back on it, it was almost an epiphany, a religious experience. I can’t really look at discrete aurora anymore without seeing great cathedrals in the sky.” She dragged her gaze back to Lang, nerves tossing her stomach. She shifted her stance to alleviate the pressure on her aching hip.
“That’s a big insight for a young woman. And it’s exactly the kind of passion and calling that leads to some damn fine aurora photography.” He extended his hand. “Pleasure meeting you, Miss Sorensen.”
She couldn’t help but grin. “An honor, Mr. Lang. Thank you.”
He nodded and made his way to chat up another of her competitors. She scanned her gaze over the gallery. When had all these people arrived? She’d been so deep into her conversation that she hadn’t even realized that the gallery had opened to the general public. Now, a steady stream of festival-goers perused the long, rectangular exhibit space. Music was the featured art of the annual celebration of the return of sunlight, with dozens of musicians, singers and bands performing a week’s worth of concerts, but, as with the photography exhibit and competition, there were a