THIRTY-TWO
P holly found me as soon as I entered the foyer. “What took you so long?”
“I was in the forest.” I stopped to gather my breath. My heart sank. “Oh, skies. The eggs, Pholly.” I turned back. “They’re still there.”
She caught my arm before I could leave. “What would you do with them anyway?” I noticed she was also still wearing her tunic and pants. “Toss them into the river and hope it carries them far enough downstream?”
As if to punctuate her stern words, a screeched roar made us both tense.
“We can’t leave them there.”
Her features fell lax. “They’re not there anymore. Come.”
I was dragged upstairs before I could protest. “Where are they, then?” Remembering, I said, “We need to get everyone beneath ground. The dungeon.”
The roaring became thunder. A rumble that seemed to shake the earth and everything atop it.
Her steps quickened until we were almost running down the hall. “Already done. We’ll join them in a minute.”
We reached the third-floor balcony, and Pholly jerked to a halt when I stopped and demanded, “What are you doing?”
“I was told to tell you.” She released me and walked to the railing. “But it’s easier to show you rather than explain it all.”
Stepping forward, I gripped the wooden railing and searched the dark below until my eyes caught on glinting objects.
Pytherion eggs.
Every egg we’d found had been placed just beyond the castle gates. More than what we’d found. I counted ten before turning to Pholly. “Who put them there? We need—”
She hushed me and pointed at the drive right as a tall figure emerged from the darkness.
Atakan.
Unhurriedly, my mate and husband walked down the drive, stark naked.
No guards stood at the gates he opened and closed. I would have thought him mad, would have screamed his name, were it not for his casual pace and the way he stopped and appeared to stare up at the night sky.
And were it not for the mist coalescing around his legs in a whirlwind that spiraled higher until it had swallowed him from view entirely.
The mist proliferated like a storm cloud, widening and darkening until it blended into the giant scales and wings of the form revealed beneath.
A pytherion.
Larger than any I’d seen in The Bonelands, and coated in bronze-tipped scales of impenetrable black. Wings spread, each one wider than the castle gates. A long neck curled, giant head tipping back. Bronzed spikes glinted as the monster released a mighty roar.
My clammy hands clenched the railing.
“He’s summoned them,” Pholly said, breathless beside me.
I couldn’t spare her a glance as the dark mass covering the stars neared the castle, and answering roars rattled my bones.
“The warriors will try to make them fight it,” she said. “But by the time they realize what’s happened, it will be too late.”
Although I didn’t understand, she spoke as if she’d anticipated this moment.
Finally, I tore my attention from the beast I didn’t recognize. “He’s…” My throat constricted. “Atakan’s a shifter.”
“Not merely a shifter.” Pholly’s dreary blue eyes met mine, a wet sheen coating them. “His mother was the Unseelie queen, and her grandfather the last pytherion king to grace these lands.” She frowned. “You didn’t know about Kalista?”
“He told me she was his mother.” I shook my head. “ Is his mother, but…” I looked back down at the drive. “Nothing more.”
“He couldn’t.”
I begged to differ, but now was not the time to argue about it. Atakan nudged an egg with his snout, and it rolled downhill toward the river.
My stomach churned. My thoughts crystallized.
Atakan had known I’d find the eggs because I was mated to him. I was blood-bound to a pytherion.
“Besides Cordenya, I was the only one who knew,” Pholly said. “And that’s merely because I was drawing in the woods at the wrong time.” As if remembering vividly, she laughed. “He was naked and covered in blood, hunting for his clothes. He could feign taking his ruthlessness to a very bizarre level or admit the obvious—that he was a shifter.”
“Cordenya?” I questioned, disbelieving.
“Well, she did practically raise him.”
That stumped me, but only momentarily. “What about your brother? Does he know now?”
“He’ll find out when everyone else does. He’s always known something isn’t right about Atakan, but he never questioned him. Phineus is an observer who sticks his nose in other people’s business only when it suits him.”
She ceased talking when Atakan rose onto his legs. He spread his wings impossibly wide, and roared again—welcoming the advance of the pytherion army sent to destroy his home.
But it wasn’t his home.
Although younger than Vane, Atakan was a pytherion shifter—the true Unseelie heir who’d spent his whole life masquerading as a Seelie prince.
Part Seelie, part Unseelie. He didn’t have mortal blood, but he was still a halfling. Just like me.
Anger burned through my shock and awe, warming my cold blood.
As if sensing our attention, the beast turned. Smoke plumed from his snout, steaming the crisp spring air.
“We should head in,” Pholly said. “He’s a different evil entirely in that form, but he still knows we shouldn’t be here.”
Not a second after we entered the doors, a mighty whoosh caused them to slam. A screech, ear-piercing and sickening, followed. The castle walls shook as though part of it had collapsed over the drive.
It wasn’t the castle.
I turned back to the doors, reaching for the glass.
Dirt settled, revealing a brown-and-black pytherion twitching upon the drive. The warrior strapped to the beast’s back lay unmoving beneath the scaled bulk.
Atakan landed beside it.
A silver-scaled pytherion soared toward him. He dodged it. His serpentine body left the ground with ease, and he roared low and deep—as if warning it.
“Mildred,” Pholly called.
“Coming,” I said, but it was more of a whisper as my hand slid down the glass and my eyes refused to part with the swarm of deadly beasts colliding in the sky.
The silver-scaled pytherion descended to the ground, then lowered—seemed to bow its head. The warrior atop its back couldn’t be seen due to the distance, save for the glint of their weapon.
The floor became mush beneath my unfeeling feet as I drifted down the hall to the sound of endless screeches and growling. Portraits rattled upon the walls. One of the stained windows cracked.
Yet all I could hear were my racing thoughts.
Out of all the dangers awaiting you in my court, I’m the one you’ll need to be protected from.
Memories turned through my mind like a pinwheel, each more vivid than the last.
And here we all are, believing our united forces have herded the monsters into their spelled cage.
They missed one.
At the bottom of the stairs, I looked up at the portrait of the late king in the foyer.
You truly are a monster.
You have no idea.
Had Garran never known what his son was?
Reaching the back hall that led to the dungeon stairwell, I stopped. Tangled emotions sailed from me in a quaked exhale when I beheld the Unseelie king standing in the rear courtyard.
With my felynx in his arms.