Chapter 40
40
Lyra
I couldn’t breathe. There was pressure over my mouth, my body.
Someone was on top of me.
My eyes snapped open and a muffled scream peeled from my chest. A gaze of copper and blood hovered above me. Darkness in the room shaded the cowl over his head, the mask covering his mouth, the pallid gray sheen of his skin, but I needed little light to know who pinned me to the furs on the ground.
Skul Drek raised a finger over his masked lips, mutely demanding I keep quiet.
A whimper sliced through his leather-wrapped fingers. His palm still covered my mouth, but I tried to nudge my face to the side.
The assassin merely added more pressure, holding me still.
He was oddly solid and heavy, a body of muscle and strength, but also cold shadows. He’d played me a fool, drawing me to a strange sort of ease near him, and now he found me in the night and would end me.
Outside light glowed like a bleary lantern through the open window. My head spun when the walls cracked and peeled with blackened rot. Cold washed over me in a roaring wave and all at once, the heat of my chamber faded into a dank, mirrored chamber.
Gods, all gods, Skul Drek could drag me away into the trance of his wretched mirror world without melding. What was he? A blood crafter? A demon from the hells?
I kicked and thrashed, desperate to scream, desperate for a hint of my voice to break through the trance. Roark was on watch; if he could but hear me, the Sentry would take the assassin’s head.
My insides twisted in sick knots—or Skul Drek would take Roark from me.
“We had to slip away. You can’t be heard.” A scorching heat boiled in my skull, and the gritty, thick rasp of Skul Drek’s voice.
I let out a scream all the same, muffled under his palm. Skul Drek hissed and stroked a finger down my cheek. “You needed to be warned.”
I blinked through the coils of his inky cloak, my body going still. With my other hand, I patted his arm until he eased the unnerving pressure of his weight off my mouth.
I rubbed my jaw, glaring at him. “Warned of what? How did you do this? How did you bring me here?”
Skul Drek leaned forward, drawing close enough I felt the scratch of frigid wool over his face, half-solid, half-dark. “The gates have cracked. Keep out of sight.”
He lifted slightly, letting me breathe.
“How am I here?”
“I called to you.” Skul Drek pointed to the place over my heart where the golden rope burned bright and heavy between us.
“Release me! I am not yours to summon or chain or—”
I cried out when the phantom reared over me as he’d done before, his flashing, cruel eyes a hairsbreadth from mine. “Soul to soul, I called you. If you desire to die, then do so.”
Soul to soul?
By the gods. My lips parted. “You are not a man?”
A cruel, thick, heavy laugh danced a shudder up my arms. “I am he, we are we.” Skul Drek placed an open palm over my heart. I shuddered beneath the frost of his touch. “But you brighten the dark.”
I swallowed, dropping my gaze to the hazy skeins of darkness billowing off his long fingers against my breast. “My soul…calls to you?”
“Yes.”
All gods. “That’s what happens? I speak to you, see you, in my soul?”
A low, haggard sort of hum was his only response. After a drawn-out pause, the assassin stepped back, dropping his hand. “I brought the warning. Stay away.”
For the first time, through the fissures breaking away bits of my own terror, I saw a flash of something in his eyes, something like his own worry. One breath, two, three, then I nodded briskly.
His palm slid away painfully slow. Skul Drek braced on his elbow, merely studying me from beneath his cowl.
I swallowed. “Why are you here?” How was he here?
Skul Drek’s head canted to one side, then back. He was studying me, absorbing me, as though trying to puzzle through a riddle. “You brighten the dark, and I do not want it to stop. No matter what you hear, do not chase it. Stay quiet. Stay back.”
The assassin touched my jaw. My skin hummed with a strange heat. He had me vulnerable, could apparently draw me into the mirror without my control, and still his touch stirred something like unbidden desire in my blood.
Gods, what was the matter with me? He was a trickster, a killer who’d nearly sent Prince Thane to Salur, and had caught me in his snare.
This close I could see the rage buried in the crimson of his eyes, the haunting flecks of black and copper. Otherwordly eyes.
I did not know what he was—a demon, a man, a dream.
Whatever he was, there was a disconcerting draw tethering me to a killer, and I did not know how to break it.
“You’ve come to attack,” I said, voice steady even when the realization struck. The only reason Skul Drek would be here was to draw blood, and he did not want me to be in the middle of it. “You don’t need to do this. We…we were working together, I thought. We were going to find the scattered bones of the Wanderer.”
“Not all is as it seems.” There was a bite to his tone, the cruel assassin was bleeding through the somber, curious creature he’d been.
“People I love are in these walls,” I bit back. “Good people. You take them from me, and I will never help you. I will not stop until Stonegate hunts you down.”
Skul Drek leaned closer until we were brow to brow. His skin was cold, like bathing in a frosted lake, but his breath was warm like the scent on his clothes—cloves and pine and dying embers. “I will say for a final time—stay out of sight.”
A rattle echoed in the room, like a pick worked against a lock. A fist pounded at the door.
Skul Drek reared back. At full height he was enormous, a looming shadow that drew in light until it blotted out.
The harrowing blare of a ram’s horn sounded from the distant towers. Sound was muffled at first, but with each breath grew clearer and clearer. The shadows of the mirror faded across the room, but for the first time, Skul Drek did not go with them. He remained, dark and harrowing, more solid than before.
How was he here if the dark realm faded?
In a rush, he made it to the window at the same moment the door crashed open.
Roark stumbled into the room, breathless and with a dark hate in his eyes when he saw the assassin. He cast a look at me, ensuring I was breathing, then swifter than a spark of a flame, Roark ripped one of two twin daggers from the sheaths on his thigh.
“Roark, no!” Strange as it was to feel drawn to the brutality and villainy of Skul Drek, I could not stomach the thought of Roark being harmed.
The dagger flew, drawing a shout of pain, a clack of snapping teeth. The blade buried into Skul Drek’s side to the hilt. In another breath, Roark rushed the assassin.
Skul Drek waved a hand and the dagger clattered to the floorboards when Roark met him with the second blade.
“No!” I snatched hold of the stoker near the inglenook.
My cry snapped Skul Drek from his haze. Like a haunt in the night, he slipped through the open window without a sound, fading into the darkness.
Roark stumbled toward the window, clutching his side, sweat on his brow. Gods, he’d been struck.
He remained there for only a moment, then spun back into the room. With a wince, he took five long strides and trapped my face in his palms. Hot, sticky blood coated one of his hands where he’d pressed it against his wound.
My hands trembled when I covered his palms. “You’re wounded. Roark, let me see it.”
He ignored me and scanned my features instead, searching for injury.
“Roark.” I patted his bloodied hand on my face. “I’m fine. You are not.”
He shook his head and waved one hand, a simple signal the wound was nothing.
More horns rose in the night. Shouts. They filtered through the window from outside. The call of an attack against the fortress.
Listen to me . Roark released me and the ferocity of his position took hold. Go to the washroom. Lock the door. Barricade it. Do not leave it until I return for you .
“No. You and Kael will be there, I’m not—”
Roark silenced me by gently covering my lips with his palm. He shook his head, a desperate plea in his eyes. Against my cheek he spoke, Stay out of sight, Lyra .
His plea mirrored the command of Skul Drek. Two deadly forces standing on either side of a battle, yet both shared the same demand of me.
Lyra . Roark touched my chin. Go now .
I hesitated. There was a sharp jab of painful fear knowing Roark would lead the units against Skul Drek and whatever ravagers had breached the walls. Roark would stand before them all. He would be the most at risk.
Roark lifted one of the slender daggers from the floor. The hilt was made of bone and carved into a flame. He placed it in my palm, curling my fingers around the hilt, then gave me a slow nod.
I squeezed his hand, memorizing the heat of his skin, the rough patches from blade calluses, and it was over too soon. He pulled away and rushed for the door, disappearing into the corridors. Only after he’d left did I take note of the trail of blood that followed behind his every step.
He was wounded and going against the Draven assassin.
I blinked back into focus, head spinning. I understood his desire to see me safe, but I shared the same desire. To leave was a risk. I was no Stav warrior, no Berserkir, but I could handle steel well enough. Perhaps Thane was tucked away with his arrows again and I could help. Truth be told, I felt compelled to do so, for I could not shake the feeling that this battle was caused by me. I never spoke of Skul Drek, yet now he’d found me within the walls of the fortress. Now he’d found those I loved.
The dagger Roark placed in my palm was stained with blood. Doubtless more would spill before the night’s end. I tightened my grip on the hilt and slipped out of my room to the sound of battles rising in the night.