Chapter 47 Nox
Nox
We moved through the night like wraiths. Tessa in her sleek black and tan jaguar form, Kieran in his brilliant white stag, and me. The dragon.
No longer hidden, but rising like a beacon in the midnight sky. A warning. A promise.
I’m coming for you.
There was no point in deception or concealment anymore. Not when Scarven knew I wasn’t his submissive little lapdog. I wanted him to see me coming. I wanted him to fear.
My navy wings spread out at my side as I glanced down to find Tessa and Kieran still sprinting along the forest floor beneath me, pushing the limits of their Shifter speed.
I’d expected them to tell me I was crazy, to try and convince me to play this smart or simply leave Devora behind for the greater good of the entire Keep.
But to my surprise, my second and third geared up without a single complaint, refusing to let anyone volunteer in their stead.
“Our place is beside you,” Kieran had said to me.
“Through flame and ash,” Tessa agreed.
A rumble shook the sky, right down to my very bones. I smelled a storm on the horizon—the clouds were laced with a sweet, metallic scent, and a spark of lightning struck to my far left. Within moments, the forest below me expanded into the outskirts of Scarven’s manor.
We gave the property a wide berth and circled around to the south side, where the servants’ quarters were. This was a fairly regular raid we’d made over the years. The tunnel system on this side of the land held his most commonly used cells. Usually, we broke in undetected, relying on stealth.
Not tonight.
I tucked my wings and dove, extending them at the last second as I breached the tops of the trees and landed with a resounding crash on the open grounds. The earth trembled beneath my feet, tree branches and limbs blowing backward from the force.
Tessa and Kieran bounded from the forest to stand at my side. A dozen guards came rushing out of the manor, some shifting into their animal forms while others wielded weapons of steel, shadow, and light. My rage and power twisted together in my core, rising through my chest.
When the guards charged, I opened my mouth and released my magic.
Dragon fire funneled up my throat and burst from me in a stream of white-hot flames, torching everything in my path. The blaze consumed the guards within a heartbeat. Their ashes scattered in the wind, still echoing with their final cries.
Kieran raced to the servants’ quarters and shifted into his human form.
Within minutes, the servants who had been inside fled the quarters, only stopping to take in the sight of me before Tessa snapped her teeth in warning.
When Kieran came back out, he shot me the “all clear” signal, then darted out of the way.
With a growl, I covered the ground in a single step, my foot landing with another boom. I stretched out a wing and swiped it through the servants’ quarters, bringing the entire building crumbling to the ground. Broken wood and stone scattered across the clearing, debris thick in the air.
Beneath the rubble rested a wooden door in the center of the ground. I elongated my sharp talons and shredded it from its hinges, exposing a set of stairs leading to the cells below.
A horde of arrows dipped in a green sludge shot from the underground opening. I batted them away with my wing before they could reach Tessa or Kieran, but one of the tips caught the very edge of my wing’s underside. I let out a snarl as the dark green substance burned momentarily. Fatesprig.
It hadn’t been enough to do damage, and my Shifter healing kicked in to banish it.
But the distraction allowed other guards to emerge.
They shot more of their weapons at me, which merely bounced off my scales.
With another roar, I summoned my dragon fire and aimed it at them, smoke rising from my nostrils with each heavy breath.
Their weapons clattered to the ground as their bodies burned to ash.
I turned my snout to Kieran and Tessa, then motioned to the tunnel entrance. Tessa shifted to her human form as the two of them disappeared underground. I took one last look at the mansion and pushed off from the ground with a powerful flap of my wings.
I dove straight for the opening, shifting midair and sliding through the trap door.
A myriad of bodies already littered the bottom of the rickety staircase, courtesy of Kieran and Tessa. I quickly adjusted to the darkness of the tunnel and saw the two of them at the end of the path.
I caught up to them and took the lead. We moved as one, years of conducting raids together allowing us to instinctively know one another’s patterns and habits.
I stayed on the alert as we stalked forward, my claws half-formed and gleaming, waiting for a sudden attack.
But we were met with only silence. No guards, no lion-masked lackeys, no traps.
It was too quiet.
Before long, we reached the start of the cells. The overwhelming scent of piss, sweat, and too many herbs to identify slammed into me, making me grit my teeth against the wave of memories.
I caught Tessa’s eye and lifted two fingers, pointing them straight down the hall. She nodded and immediately shifted into her smallest cat form, her lithe figure able to slip between cell bars with ease. While she worked on releasing Scarven’s captives, Kieran and I set off searching for Devora.
The halls were quiet, save for the occasional groan or screech of metal coming from behind us, indicating Tessa opening yet another cell.
My eyes slid over to Kieran, who was already looking at me with his lips set in a grim line. “This is far too easy,” he hissed.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, suspense snaking through me. If this was a trap, where was the catch?
We stuck close to the stone walls, listening for anything out of the ordinary.
As we drew nearer to the hallway with the row of cells I’d once been kept in, my muscles tensed.
Even after more than a decade, it was as if my body was preparing for the torment that once awaited me.
My Shifter healing made the scars vanish, but I’d never forget each dagger against my skin, each needle driven into my veins, each blow dealt to my flesh.
And now she had to endure it too. My Devora.
“Wait.” I threw an arm out to stop Kieran. “Do you smell that?”
His nostrils flared, surely smelling the same thing I did. Something…decaying. Riddled with sickly sweet herbs. But it didn’t smell human…
A scuttling came from further down the tunnel. Distant and quiet at first, and then louder, like several limbs skittering on a hard surface.
Red eyes appeared from the darkness. Tiny, beady little eyes, growing larger and larger by the second. The legs came next, followed by pincers, and—
Kieran cursed right as the first wave of spiders lunged at us.
They were twenty times faster, stronger, and larger than any spider I’d ever seen.
One of them latched onto my neck. Before its enormous pincer could pierce my skin, I shifted my hand to a claw and shredded through it with a single swipe.
Black blood and organs dripped from my talons.
More crawled toward my legs, and I kicked them with enough force to send them flying down the hall.
One grabbed on to Kieran’s back while another landed at his forearm.
As I clawed through the one on his arm, something dark and furry came flying at us from behind.
I nearly spun to knock it to the side when I realized it was Tessa.
Her teeth sank into the spider at Kieran’s back.
It immediately let go, its legs flailing as she flung it into the sidewall.
She shifted and gagged, spitting out a thick, black liquid. “That’s disgusting,” she said with a grimace.
“Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to eat them,” I drawled as I whipped a dagger from my belt and plunged it into another oncoming creature. “Did you get the prisoners out?”
“There weren’t many, but I did what I could,” Tessa said. I tossed her my dagger, and she sliced through two others before throwing it back to me. “Told them to get aboveground and to the village.”
A dozen more spiders came scurrying from the end of the hall, some of them even larger than the last. Behind us, Kieran let out a hurried, “Move!” followed by the sound of pounding hooves.
I flattened my back against the wall right as he charged forward in his white stag form, his long, thick antlers pointing straight ahead. He shook his head back and forth, impaling at least seven of the spiders at the ends of them.
“You know what they say about big antlers,” Tessa grunted as she speared one with her smallsword.
“That he’s overcompensating for something?” I offered.
Tessa flashed me a feline grin. Faster than I could blink, her arm shot out and grabbed a spider midair as it flew straight toward my chest.
I winked before glancing at Kieran down the hall, where the remaining two were crawling up his hindquarters. My smile faded as one reared its head back, pincers aimed at his flank.
“No!” I shouted. I didn’t think. I grabbed my dagger from its sheath and launched it.
It spun through the air, silver gleaming as it found its mark in the spider’s head. The creature fell from Kieran’s back with a crash.
“Nice throw, brother,” a voice called out. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
It wasn’t Kieran.
Chains rattled along stone, echoing around me as a torch ignited down the hall. A silhouette came into view. As Scarven stepped out of the shadows, he carried another with him.
“Devora,” I choked out, staggering forward. She was on her knees with black cuffs binding her wrists and one around her neck. The skin on her throat and hands was raw. One side of her shirt was shredded, with a thin line of blood trickling from an open wound.
Scarven jerked the chain in his hand, and her body lurched forward. “Looking for this?” he purred.
He was dragging her along on a leash.
My control snapped. Blood boiling, my dragon fire rumbled through my chest with blinding rage. But when Devora’s eyes caught mine, she frantically shook her head.
Scarven tsked. “Temper, Nox,” he chided. “It must run in the family.”
He stared straight behind me, a wicked smile curving on his features.
My stomach dropped as a scent wafted toward me. One I hadn’t smelled in years. Smoky amber and rose, so achingly familiar, it nearly stopped my heart. But there was something else woven into it now. Something rotten. Poisoned.
I slowly turned. A figure emerged from the shadows at the end of the hall. For a moment, I was a teenage boy again, listening to the sweet laughter of a baby girl as she smiled up at me.
Scarven’s voice rang out, “I told you it was time I arranged a visit. Say hello to your sister.”